The Executive Committee has approved the promotion of 14 associate professors to the rank of full professor, effective July 1. Thirty-nine assistant professors were also promoted to associate professor without tenure (see accompanying article).
Those promoted to full professor are:
SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING
Dennis Adams of the Department of Architecture. Professor Adams, an internationally renowned artist whose work has been noted for pushing the boundaries of public art, received the BFA from Drake University in Des Moines in 1969 and the MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1971. After being a visiting artist at MIT in 1994-95, he joined the Institute as an associate professor in 1996. Over the past 27 years, Professor Adams, also noted for his teaching ability, has served as a visiting artist and visiting professor at many schools, including Parsons School of Design and Cooper Union in New York and ������cole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His commissioned work has been exhibited in major exhibitions of public art in this country as well as in Europe and Asia.
Dr. J. Mark Schuster of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Professor Schuster, a public policy analyst who has achieved international prominence in the field of cultural policy, received the AB in applied mathematics from Harvard in 1972 and the PhD in urban studies and planning from MIT in 1979. After serving as a postdoctoral fellow in the Research Division of the French Ministry of Culture in Paris in 1979-80, Professor Schuster joined MIT as a visiting assistant professor. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1984, associate professor in 1988 and associate professor with tenure in 1991. He spent the 1992-93 academic year as a visiting professor at the University of Barcelona, where he was affiliated with the Center for Planning Studies and the Center for Cultural Studies and Resources. He designed and has taught for many years the department's core course in quantitative reasoning. His teaching and research focus on the logic of public intervention and the analysis and design of institutional structures for fair and effective intervention.
SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
Dr. Mary C. Boyce of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Professor Boyce received the BS from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1981 and the SM and PhD from MIT in 1983 and 1987. Dr. Boyce was named assistant professor at MIT in 1987, an associate professor in 1992, and associate professor with tenure in 1993. She also held the position of associate engineer at Martin Marietta Denver Aerospace from 1981-82. Professor Boyce is an international expert on the mechanical behavior of polymers. Her emphasis has been on connecting microstructure to macroscopic behavior using experiments and computational modelling. She is also known for her innovative work on metal forming. She has received several awards for her research, including a Presidential Young Investigators Award in 1991 and the first ASME Special Achievement Award for Young Investigator in Applied Mechanics for her "outstanding published papers and potential for future work" in 1998. Dr. Boyce has been an exceptional mentor of graduate students and has received the Joel and Ruth Spira Teaching Award and the Keenan Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education.
Dr. Srinivas Devadas of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Professor Devadas received the BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1985, and the MS (1986) and PhD (1988) from the University of California at Berkeley. An expert in computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems, he joined MIT as an assistant professor in 1988. He was promoted to associate professor in 1992 and associate professor with tenure in 1995. He has made breakthroughs in testing, synthesis, low-power computing, hardware-software codesign, functional synthesis, and simulation and design of embedded systems. His work has provided circuit and system designers with tools for the design of circuits with high levels of quality assurance. Professor Devadas, whose advances have been incorporated into commercial VLSI CAD software, helped develop MIT's program in VLSI computer-aided design.
Dr. Leslie A. Kolodziejski of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Professor Kolodziejski, a world leader in the epitaxial growth of compound semiconductors for optoelectronics, received the BS (1983), MS (1984) and PhD (1986) from Purdue University. She joined MIT as an assistant professor in 1988 and was promoted to associate professor in 1992 and associate professor with tenure in 1996. In addition to being a dedicated and effective teacher of undergraduate and graduate electrical engineering students, she has been a strong mentor for graduate students. As part of an effort to create channel-dropping filters for fiber-optic communications, Professor Kolodziejski has shown how to preserve crucial grating structures during epitaxial overgrowth of the wavelength cladding layer. As part of her group's work on photonic bandgap microcavities, they have helped create the first photonic bandgap air-bridge resonator that operated at the 1.5mm communication wavelength.
Dr. Jaime Peraire of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Professor Peraire, who has had a significant worldwide impact on aircraft design by creating practical, fast and robust computational tools for aerodynamic analysis, received undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees from the University of Barcelona in 1983 and 1987, as well as the PhD and DSc from the University of Wales in 1986 and 1997. He joined MIT as an associate professor in 1993 and worked with colleagues from around the Institute to create a new integrated curriculum on computational engineering. His research interests include computational aerodynamics, simulation-based design and a posteriori error control in numerical simulations. In 1997, he received a NASA Exceptional Achievement Award, and in 1988, he received the Young Researcher Award in Computational Mechanics given by the International Association in Computational Mechanics.
SCHOOL OF SCIENCE
Dr. Richard P. Binzel of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Professor Binzel received the BA in physics and mathematics from Macalester College in 1980, and the MA (1982) and PhD (1986) in astronomy from the University of Texas. He joined MIT's faculty as an assistant professor in 1988, was promoted to associate professor in 1991 and awarded tenure in 1994. He was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow that same year. Professor Binzel is a planetary astronomer who is regarded as one of the world's leading investigators of the asteroid belt. He is credited with having established connections between Earth-impacting meteorites and asteroids by producing compelling observational evidence showing that certain meteorites have come from the asteroid Vesta. In addition to this and other recent discoveries, Professor Binzel has assembled a data set comprising spectra of more than 1,500 asteroids, which provides information for mapping the geology of the asteroid belt.
Dr. Samuel A. Bowring of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Professor Bowring is a geologist who applies high-precision U-Pb geochronology to determine the age of rocks, then uses that information to address major problems in geology and to determine rates of biological evolution. One of his most recent accomplishments was the redefinition of the nature of the greatest mass biological extinction in Earth's history, which occurred some 251 million years ago. By establishing that the extinction occurred in as little as 200,000 years, he was able to show that it was truly catastrophic in nature and thus limited the possible kill mechanisms. Professor Bowring earned the BS from the University of New Hampshire in 1976, the MS from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in 1980 and the PhD in 1985 from the University of Kansas. He was an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis before joining the MIT faculty as an associate professor in 1991. He was awarded tenure in 1996.
Dr. Alan D. Grossman of the Department of Biology. Dr. Grossman received the BS in biochemistry from Brown University in 1979 and the PhD in molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin in 1984. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cellular and Developmental Biology at Harvard University from 1985-88 and has held the positions of assistant professor (1988-92) and associate professor (1992-99) in MIT's Department of Biology. Dr. Gross-man has established himself as an international leader in the field of prokaryotic biology. Since joining the Institute faculty, he has made fundamental contributions in the area of cell-cell communication, intracellular signal transduction and development. Recently, Dr. Gross-man has made significant contributions on cellular control of DNA replication and partition. In 1997 he received the Eli Lilly and Co. Research Award, given by the American Society for Microbiology.
Dr. Richard Milner of the Department of Physics. Professor Milner earned the BSc (1978) and the MSc (1979) in physics from University College in Cork, Ireland, and the PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1984. He was a research fellow at Caltech from 1985-88, joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1988, was promoted to associate professor in 1993, and was awarded tenure in 1995. He is director of MIT's Bates Linear Accelerator Center in Middleton, MA. Professor Milner's work in quantum chromodynamics bridges the nuclear and particle physics communities. He is one of the originators of the HERMES experiment in Hamburg, a high-profile experiment to study the origin of the spin structure of the nucleon at the quark and gluon level.
Dr. Lisa Randall of the Department of Physics. Dr. Randall is a theoretical particle physicist who works in phenomenology, the subfield of particle physics in which predictions are made from complex calculations, and experimental results are analyzed to test and extend the fundamental theory of matter. Her work has placed strong constraints on several extensions to the standard model of particle physics. Recently her research interests have broadened to the physics of the early universe, including studies of dark matter, the matter-antimatter asymmetry, cosmic inflation and the production of density fluctuations. Professor Randall earned the BS (1983) and PhD (1987) in physics from Harvard University. Before coming to MIT she was a President's Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and a junior fellow at Harvard University. She joined the MIT faculty in 1991 as an assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor in 1995 and received tenure in 1997.
SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
Dr. Rebecca Henderson. Professor Henderson received the BS in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1981 and the PhD in business economics from Harvard University in 1988. At the Sloan School, she was an assistant professor of management from 1988-92, associate professor from 1993-95 and a tenured associate professor of management from 1995-99. Dr. Henderson was also a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University in 1992-93 and at the Harvard Business School in 1996-97. Dr. Henderson's principal fields of research include strategic management, corporate strategy and policy, management of technology and organizational change. She is particularly interested in the problems large firms encounter in responding to major shifts in technology. Dr. Henderson has developed new courses in strategy and economics and has been nominated seven times for a special mention in the Teacher of the Year awards.
Dr. Drezen Prelec. Professor Prelec received the BA in applied mathematics from Harvard College in 1978 and the PhD in experimental psychology from Harvard University in 1983. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1982-85 and assistant professor of managerial economics at Harvard Business School from 1985-91. Dr. Prelec was visiting assistant professor in the MIT Department of Economics in 1990 and associate professor of management science at the Sloan School from 1991-99. Dr. Prelec's research generally focuses on how people make decisions; his principal fields include consumer behavior, decision-making and expert judgement.
Dr. JoAnne Yates. Dr. Yates received the BA in English and mathematics from Texas Christian University in 1974 and the MA (1975) and PhD (1980) in English from the University of North Carolina. Her initial MIT appointment was as assistant professor of business communications in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies from 1980-84. Since then, in the Sloan School she has held positions as lecturer in management communication from 1984-86 and senior lecturer from 1986-91, associate professor in management communication and information studies from 1991-94, and associate professor with tenure from 1994-99. Dr. Yates has also served as a visiting faculty member at the Helsinki School of Economics for several short periods since 1989. Her research, which includes both historical and contemporary studies, examines how the use of communication and information within firms influences and is influenced over time by changing organizational, managerial and technological contexts. She has received many awards for her research, including the Williamson Medal recognizing her mid-career achievements in business history and the Alpha Kappa Psi Award for Distinguished Publication in Business Communication.
A version of this article appeared in the April 7, 1999 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 43, Number 25).
