Peter Delfyett was selected to receive the Outstanding Alumnus Achievement Award from the 2000 Black Engineer of the Year Awards Selection Committee. Each year these awards are given to candidates whose qualifications and performance place them in the ranks of the nation’s highest achievers in technology. This year, the award winners were recognized at the Fourteenth Annual Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conference, February 17-19, 2000, at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel, in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conference is held annually, and this year was hosted by the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the Council of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and US Black Engineer & Information Technology Magazine. Additional corporate sponsorship came from General Motors, Daimler Chrysler, Boeing, IBM, Texas Instruments, TRW, Hewlett Packard, Raytheon, along with the Navy and the US Army Corps of Engineers. Candidates for the awards are nominated by their employer, with candidates being represented from government agencies universities or non-profit research facilities, or for-profit corporations. This year, Dr. Delfyett was the only recipient from an academic institution.
Dr. Delfyett was recognized for his research contributions in the development of ultrafast semiconductor lasers for applications in ultrahigh speed optical telecommunication, computer and signal processing applications. It should be noted that in 1993, Dr.Delfyett received the Black Engineer of the Year Award as the Most Promising Engineer. The receipt of this year’s Outstanding Alumnus Achievement Award is recognition that he is living up to his promise.