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Four awarded faculty distinctions

Appointments to a class-supported fellowship, to a named assistant professorship and to two career development professorships have been announced by Provost Mark S. Wrighton.

Andrew M. Scott of the Department of Architecture has been named the Class of 1960 Fellow.

Matthew A. Wilson of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Biology has been selected to hold the Edward J. Poitras Assistant Professorship.

Takashi Imai of the Department of Physics has been selected to be the next holder of the Mitsui Career Development Professorship.

Vien Nguyen of the Sloan School of Management has been named to one of the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professorships.

Professor Scott's appointment reflects his "distinguished contributions" to the Department of Architecture's instructional program and his leadership "in the innovative studio which just won a national award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture," Professor Wrighton said.

The newly selected Class of 1960 Fellow joined MIT two years ago from a background of architectural practice and education in the United Kingdom. He holds the bachelor of arts degree (1974) from the School of Architecture at the University of Manchester, England, and the bachelor of architecture (1976), also from the University of Manchester.

In addition to his record of achievement in architectural practice, he has taught at the University of Greenwich, the University of Manchester and the Technical University of Nova Scotia. He maintains a research focus upon sustainability and the integration of environmentally responsive technologies into bulging form assembly.

Professor Wilson, who joined MIT in 1994, holds the BS degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1983) and the MS from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1986), both in electrical engineering, and the PhD from the California Institute of Technology (1990) in computation and neural systems.

From 1992 until joining MIT last year, he was adjunct assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. His work there resulted in a paper published in Science magazine. The work demonstrated that certain cells in rats' brains which fired during an activity also fired later when the rats were asleep, lending support to the theory that memories are consolidated through that particular area of the brain during sleep.

Professor Imai, the first scientist to discover the nuclear quadrupole resonance in the parent compound of a high-temperature superconductor, holds the BS (1986), MS (1988) and PhD degrees (1991), all in physics and all from the University of Tokyo.

Before joining MIT last year, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in the Department of Physics and the Science and Technology Center for Superconductivity.

His research fields are experimental condensed matter physics and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), in particular, NMR experiments on high-temperature superconductors, strongly correlated electrons and low-dimensional magnetic systems. Earlier this year he became an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.

Professor Nguyen joined MIT in 1992 as assistant professor of management science. She holds the BA degree (1986) in applied math with a concentration in decision and control from Harvard-Radclife Colleges and the MS (1989) and PhD (1990), both in operations research and both from Stanford University.

Her research and teaching is in both the Sloan School and the Operations Research Center.

Professor Nguyen's principal fields of interest are performance analysis and scheduling of production-inventory systems, queueing network models and stochastic processes.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 17, 1995.

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