Richard G. Hoft - 2000 Distinguished Service Award Winner

Picture coming soon.

Professor Richard G. Hoft was born in Wall Lake, Iowa on December 4, 1926.  He grew up on a farm, attending a one-room country school for the first eight grades.  He graduated from high school in 1944, number two in a class of about forty.  He enlisted in the Navy V12 program and attended Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana and then Purdue University, where he majored in electrical engineering.

In 1946 he was discharged from the Navy and he enrolled in electrical engineering at Iowa State University.  In 1948, he received a BSEE degree from Iowa State and began working for General Electric in Schenectady, New York.  From 1949 to 1956, he was a Development Engineer in the General Engineering Laboratory, where he worked with a number of famous General Electric engineers-including B. D. Bedford and Herbert F. Storm.  During this time, he earned an MEE degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

He later took a leave of absence from General Electric to return to Iowa State University to enter a Ph.D. program.  He completed his studies in 1965 and then received an appointment as an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia.  He remained there, attained the rank of Professor and retired at the end of December 1993.

Professor Hoft was the first recipient of the PELS William E. Newell Award in 1977.  He was the second Editor of the PELS Transactions, serving in this position from the middle of 1990 until the end of 1999.