Akira Ishimaru

In 1996, Ishimaru was elected as a member of National Academy of Engineering "for his contributions to the theory and application of wave propagation and scattering in random media." Ishimaru is also the recipient of IEEE Centennial Medal (1984), IEEE Heinrich Hertz Medal (1999) and IEEE Third Millennium Medal (2000). He is a fellow of IEEE, the Optical Society of America, the Acoustical Society of America, and the Institute of Physics. He was the editor of Radio Science from 1979 to 1983, as well as the founding editor of the journals Waves in Random Media and Waves in Random and Complex Media.

Ishimaru has also authored two textbooks on advanced electromagnetics: Wave Propagation and Scattering in Random Media (1978) and Electromagnetic Wave Propagation, Radiation, and Scattering (1991).

Akira Ishimaru (Japanese: アキラ 石丸; born March 16, 1928) is a Japanese-American electrical engineer and Professor Emeritus at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Washington. He is best known for his contributions to the theory of wave scattering in random media.

Akira Ishimaru was born on March 16, 1928 in Fukuoka, Japan. He received his bachelor’s degree from University of Tokyo and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of Washington, respectively in 1951 and 1958. During his doctoral studies, he was supervised by Gedaliah Held. From 1951 to 1952, he worked at Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tanashi, Tokyo. In 1956, he was employed at Bell Labs. In 1958, he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Washington, where he was also an adjunct professor of applied mathematics. He became a professor emeritus at the institution in 1999.