The Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation has approved the awarding of tenure to the following faculty members, effective July 1, 2000 unless otherwise noted:
Dr. Akintunde I. Akinwande of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. With research interests in emissive flat panel displays and vacuum microelectronics, Professor Akinwande aims to build flat panel displays that are smarter, lighter, brighter, more energy efficient and more integrated with computing and communications and that have high information content. In addition to helping provide a strategic industrial asset to the United States in the display arena, he also is a leader in the international technical community. He was a research scientist at Honeywell Inc. and an assistant engineer at Pulse Telecommunications Ltd. before joining MIT as an associate professor in 1995. He has been the ITT Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering since 1997. Professor Akinwande earned a BS from the former University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) in Nigeria in 1978, and the MS and PhD from Stanford University in 1981 and 1986, respectively.������
Dr. Stephen P. Bell of the Department of Biology has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. He is a leader in studies of chromosome replication and cell-cycle control. He discovered and purified a complex of six proteins (ORC) that specifically recognizes origins of replication in the yeast S. cerevisiae and demonstrated that ORC is essential for chromosome duplication in this organism. His recent work on the role of ORC derived from the fruit fly D. melanogaster has provided a critical first step in determining the role of sequence-specific binding by ORC in higher eukaryotes. Dr. Bell was appointed an assistant professor at MIT in 1994 and was promoted to associate professor in 1998. He earned the BA from Northwestern University in 1985 and the PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1990. He received the Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate teaching in 1998, the first year he taught 7.28 (Molecular Biology).
Dr. Duane S. Boning of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Also associate director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, Professor Boning, who has been called an international leader in semiconductor manufacturing technology, specializes in spatial/temporal variation in manufacturing processes. He focuses primarily on chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) and plasma etching. He and his students developed test masks and models for CMP planarization widely used by the semiconductor industry. He works with the Leaders for Manufacturing Program to supervise internships and research in semiconductor, electronics and other areas of manufacturing. Before joining the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1992, he earned an SB in electrical engineering and in computer science in 1984, an MS in 1986 and PhD in 1991, all from MIT.������
Dr. John G. Brisson II of the Department of Mechanical Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Brisson earned the BE from Stevens Institute of Technology (1981), and the MS (1983) and PhD (1990) from Harvard University. He worked as a postdoctoral associate at Los Alamos Laboratories before joining the MIT faculty in 1993. He was promoted to associate professor in 1999 and was awarded the mechanical engineering department's Den Hartog Distinguished Educator Award that same year. Professor Brisson is known for his major contributions to the physics and technology of low-temperature engineering. His particular research interest is in cryogenics, especially sub-Kelvin refrigerators. Two of his designs have brought about a new class of high-efficiency, low-cost, small-size refrigerators that have made a major impact on industry. His current research is in microengines and small cryocoolers.������
Dr. Anantha P. Chandrakasan of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Chandrakasan's depth of understanding, breadth of knowledge, original thinking and creativity have been called unparalleled in the field of digital integrated circuits. He has focused on developing design methodologies and tools for energy efficient computing and implementing distributed wireless sensors and multimedia systems. Perhaps the best known of his achievements is the use of embedded power supplies where the supply voltage of a processor can be adapted on demand. Before joining MIT as an assistant professor in 1994, he earned a BS (1989), MS (1990) and PhD (1994) from the University of California at Berkeley.
Dr. Dora Costa of the Department of Economics has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. She earned the BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986 and the MA (1988) and PhD (1993) from the University of Chicago. She joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1993 and was promoted to untenured associate professor in 1997. Dr. Costa's research interests are in American economic history, labor economics and economic demography, with a focus on the economics of aging, retirement and labor force participation. She is the author of numerous research papers and a book, The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History, 1880-1990.
Dr. Julie O.B. Dorsey of the Department of Architecture has been promoted to associate professor with tenure, effective November 1, 1999. Professor Dorsey fills a position unique to MIT; she is associate professor of architecture and computer science and engineering. Trained as both an architect and a computer scientist, she specializes in computer graphics and focuses on developing algorithms for modeling and visualizing phenomena of interest to architects, lighting designers, visual artists and building scientists. She holds the BArch and BS in Architectural History (1987) and the MS (1990) and PhD (1993) in Computer Science, all from Cornell University. Her awards and fellowships include a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, and the MIT Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award. Professor Dorsey joined the MIT faculty in 1994 and was promoted to associate professor in 1997.������
Dr. Elfatih A.B. Eltahir of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Eltahir attained national and international preeminence through his work on the physical processes that drive the Earth's hydrologic cycle. His research interests revolve around the effects of large-scale land use change such as deforestation on local, regional and global climate. His latest work focuses on the dynamic nonlinear relationship between the biosphere and climate. His work coupling surface conditions with meteorology has been hailed as "precisely what was lacking in most prior work in this area." Professor Eltahir earned a BS in civil engineering from the University of Khartoum in 1985, an MS in hydrology from the National University of Ireland in 1988 and SM and SD degrees in meteorology and in hydroclimatology respectively, both from MIT in 1993. He has received the Presidential Early Career Award and is editor of a journal in his field.
Dr. Edward Gibson of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. He was named an assistant professor in BCS in 1993 and associate professor in both the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy and BCS in 1997. Dr. Gibson is a psycholinguist who studies human sentence comprehension. His major contribution is a theory that sentence processing has two major components: an integration cost component and a memory cost component. This theory explains why sentences like the one that you are reading right now, whose dependencies between words are distant in some cases, are difficult to understand, and why sentences with closer dependencies are much easier to understand. He has also shown that key effects in sentence processing cut across languages and thus reflect basic properties of a universal language-processing system. Dr. Gibson holds the BA (1985) from Queen's University, the MPhil (1986) from Cambridge University and the PhD (1991) from Carnegie-Mellon University.
Dr. Hugh Gusterson of the Anthropology Program and the Program in Science, Technology and Society has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Gusterson's research focuses on the fields of science studies and peace and security studies. His first book, Nuclear Rites, considers the moral worlds of weapons scientists at the Livermore Laboratories and their opponents in the anti-nuclear movement. His second book will examine the evolution of nuclear weapons laboratories since the end of the Cold War. Professor Gusterson has been commended for excellent teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels; he teaches subjects on war, drugs, ethics and science, and technology and culture, among others. He received the BA from Cambridge University in 1980; the MSc from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, and the MA and PhD from Stanford University in 1986 and 1992, respectively. He came to MIT in 1992 as assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 1996.
Dr. Douglas P. Hart of the Department of Mechanical Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Hart, the d'Arbeloff Career Development Professor, works in the field of fluid mechanics, where he has made major contributions that have changed the productivity of industry and direction of research in both optical flow diagnostics and tribology. He is the inventor of long-wearing textured seals for industrial applications that have allowed equipment to operate significantly longer in abrasive environments. In optical flow diagnostics, the fast correlation algorithm he invented -- and a variation of it -- are now used extensively in both commercial systems and university-developed particle image velocimetry (PIV) systems and are the basis for a new type of video-rate three-dimensional imaging system. He received the Keenan Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education and the Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching. He earned the BSC from the University of Illinois (1983), the SM from MIT (1985) and the PhD from the California Institute of Technology (1992). He joined the faculty in 1993.
Dr. Amos Lapidoth of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Lapidoth, a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, is an expert on communications theory and information theory. His research has involved fundamental limits on reliable communication under channel uncertainty. His contributions include existence theorems and efficient algorithms for universal receivers; the theoretical importance of both have since been widely acknowledged. Professor Lapidoth received the BSc in electrical engineering and the BA in mathematics (both summa cum laude) in 1986, and the MSc in electrical engineering (1990) from Technion University in Israel. He received the PhD in 1995 from Stanford University. He joined the MIT faculty that same year.������
Dr. Steven B. Leeb of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Leeb, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor in Power Engineering, has created several innovative courses: a departmental course in mechatronics, an IAP course called "Make a Motor" and a freshman seminar on designing a go-cart. His research contributions in power electronics range from monitoring electrical loads in buildings to modulating the arc in fluorescent lamps to transmit information. He received the 1999 IEEE Outstanding Young Power Electronics Engineer Award, the 1999 TR100 Young Innovator Award and was a finalist for the 2000 Discover Magazine award. He has received three teaching awards: the EECS Spira Teaching Award, the School of Engineering's Bose Junior Faculty Teaching Award and the Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award. He holds the SB (1987), SM (1989), EE (1990) and PhD (1993) all from MIT. He joined the faculty in 1993.
Dr. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, the Karl van Tassel Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Mahadevan received the BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology (1986), MS degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (1987) and Stanford (1992), and the PhD from Stanford (1995). His research spans many areas in classical physics, including elasticity (crumpling, twisting and folding of filaments and membranes), fluid mechanics (buckling of fluid interfacial dynamics), nonlinear physics (dynamics of interacting pulses in excitable media, chaotic nucleation phenomena) and biophysics (geometry of and stress in DNA, molecular mechanisms of motility). He joined the MIT faculty in 1996 and was named to the van Tassel chair in 1998. At MIT, Dr. Mahadevan co-created a new undergraduate biophysics elective and is co-writing a textbook on the subject. In April 2000 he received the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award.������
Dr. Earl Miller of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences has been promoted to associate professor with tenure, effective July 1, 1999. Professor Miller has combined the theory and methodology of cognitive science with techniques used in neurobiology to advance cognitive neuroscience. Among his major discoveries are the significant role of the prefrontal cortex in integrating diverse information, controlling the allocation of attention, recalling long-term memories and in learning "the rules of the game" needed to guide complex behavior. Professor Miller received a BA in psychology from Kent State University in 1985 and an MA (1987) and PhD (1990) in psychology and neuroscience from Princeton University. He joined MIT's Center for Learning and Memory and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 1995. He is the recipient of several awards for his scientific work, including the Pew Scholar Award (1996), the McKnight Scholar Award (1996), the John Merck Scholar Award (1998), the National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award (2000) and the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award (2000).
Dr. Heidi M. Nepf of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. An environmental fluid dynamicist, she studies physical processes affecting the fate and transport of nutrients and contaminants in coastal and inland aquatic systems. Professor Nepf uses experiments, predictive theory and numerical tools to help analyze the behavior of water motion in wetlands, with the goal of improving the design of wetlands for water treatment and water quality assurance. She received an NSF Career Award for this work in 1996. She earned a BS from Bucknell University (1987), and MS (1988) and PhD (1992) from Stanford University. After a year as a postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, she joined the MIT faculty in 1993. Three-time winner of the department's teaching award and recipient of the School of Engineering's Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, Professor Nepf also produced a series of cable and public television shows on environmental issues for high school students.������
Dr. Dava Newman of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Dr. Newman, a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, is known as a dynamic and vibrant leader, teacher and scholar. Her research goals are to develop comprehensive anaytical models of the movement and performance of humans in low gravity and of adaptive human motor control. Such models will affect the understanding of astronaut performance and of human motor control disorders. She is an educational innovator and author of an undergraduate textbook with accompanying CD-ROM. Dr. Newman received the BS (1986) from the University of Notre Dame, the SM (1989) in aeronautics and astronautics, the SM (1989) in technology and policy, and the PhD (1992) in aerospace biomedical engineering, all from MIT. She was on the founding executive committee and helped to establish an international interdisciplinary program for graduate education at the International Space University.
Ms. Ann Pendleton-Jullian of the Department of Architecture has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Pendleton-Jullian received the BArch (1979) from Cornell University and the MArch (1983) from Princeton University. She was assistant professor of architecture at Cornell University from 1986-1993 and came to MIT as assistant professor of architecture in 1993. She was promoted to associate professor in 1996. Professor Pendleton-Jullian, who maintains an individual practice, has been recognized internationally for her design work and at MIT for her excellence in teaching. She is a sought-after studio teacher and thesis advisor here.
Dr. Timothy J. Riddiough, currently in his sixth year as the Edward J. and Joyce Linde Career Development Professor within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Riddiough received the BBA (1981) in quantitative analysis, the MS (1984) in finance and the PhD (1991) in Real Estate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Professor Riddiough has been central to the successful development of MIT's Center for Real Estate (CRE) and has created a curriculum in real estate finance with courses that are widely sought within DUSP and by MBA students at the Sloan School of Management. His scholarship is known to have given CRE a leading role in the field of real estate finance.
Dr. David Ben Schauer of the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Health and the Division of Comparative Medicine has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Dr. Schauer received the BS from the University of North Carolina in 1983, the DVM from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1987 and the PhD from Stanford in 1993. He was named an assistant professor at MIT in 1993 and promoted to associate professor without tenure in 1999. Since 1997 he has also been an adjunct assistant professor at the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. Using animal models, his research has furthered understanding of how bacterial infection may lead to inflammatory bowel disease and increased risk of colon cancer. He is also working with Parsons Laboratory researchers on detecting pathogenic organisms in water supplies, and with an interdisciplinary engineering group to develop tissue-based biosensors to detect chemical and biological toxins.
Mr. Andrew M. Scott of the Department of Architecture has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Scott's primary teaching focus is on design studio education within the graduate program in architecture. His own design work focuses on developing appropriate environmental technologies for buildings, natural ventilation techniques and generally making architecture environmentally responsible and accountable. Professor Scott received the BA (1974) and the BArch (1976) from the University of Manchester, UK. He has taught at the University of Manchester; Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia; and at the University of Greenwich, UK. Professor Scott came to MIT in 1993 as an associate professor.������
Dr. Madhu Sudan of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Sudan joined the MIT faculty in 1997 as an associate professor. Before that he worked at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center from 1992-97. He earned the BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi in 1987 and the PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. The research behind his doctoral thesis helped spawn a new era of research in theoretical computer science -- the systematic study of the complexity of finding approximate solutions to optimization problems. He has been called the leading complexity theorist of his generation, and also is known for his work on the design of algorithms. His recent research is in coding theory.
Dr. David L. Trumper of the Department of Mechanical Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. He came to MIT in 1993 as an assistant professor, was named to the Rockwell International Professorship in 1995, and was promoted to associate professor without tenure in 1996. Professor Trumper is a leader in the field of precision engineering, designing systems that require high resolution and extreme accuracy. His designs include the world's highest resolution magnetically suspended positioning stages for use in semiconductor fabrication and scanned probe microscopy, and a precision diamond turning machine for fabricating asymmetric optical parts. Holder of eight patents with three others pending, he received the American Society of Mechanical Engineering's Leonardo da Vinci Award in 1999. He holds three degrees from MIT: the SB (1980), SM (1984) and PhD (1990).
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 13, 2000.
