The Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation has approved the awarding of tenure to the following faculty members (appointments are effective July 1, 1998 unless otherwise noted):
Dr. Cynthia Barnhart of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. She did undergraduate work at the University of Vermont and postgraduate work at MIT, where she received the PhD in 1988. Dr. Barnhart was an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (1988-92) before joining the MIT faculty as an assistant professor (1992-95). She was promoted to associate professor without tenure in 1995. Professor Barnhart is a specialist in the development of decision support systems for the transportation industry. She is an applied operations researcher who combines an in-depth understanding of transportation issues with a thorough knowledge of mathematical optimization techniques to solve otherwise intractable problems. She has been a planning and scheduling engineer for Bechtel, Inc., and a transportation consultant for the Cabot Corp.
Dr. James Buzard of the literature section has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Buzard joined the MIT faculty in 1994 as assistant professor of literature. Previously, he had been a lecturer and preceptor at Columbia University and an assistant professor of English at Fordham University (1993-94). He holds the BA from the University of Notre Dame and the MA, MPhil and PhD from Columbia. His area of specialization is 19th- and early 20th-century British literature and cultural history. His scholarly range is exceptional, including Romantic, Victorian and modern literature in English, and extends to the American novel and American modernism. His work explores the boundaries of literature, history and anthropology, while maintaining an emphasis on the close interpretation of individual texts. He has held the Junior Fellowship of the Society of Fellows at Harvard and a Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. He is the author of The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Travel and the ways to 'Culture,' 1800-1918 (Oxford University Press, 1993). His current project considers the nineteenth-century British novel as an "auth-ethnographic" genre.
Dr. Gerbrand Ceder of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Immediately after undergraduate studies at K.U. Leuven in Belgium and graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Ceder joined the MIT faculty in 1991 as an assistant professor. In 1992, he was appointed Alcoa Assistant Professor and in 1995 he was named Alcoa Associate Professor. Professor Ceder is a leader in applying quantum-mechanical and statistical-mechanical calculations to problems of significance in materials science and engineering. Advances in the speed of computation over the past decade have turned this area of materials science into a field of great predictive power.������������������
Dr. David G. Cory of the Department of Nuclear Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. He completed his undergraduate and postgraduate work at Case Western Reserve University before postdoctoral appointments at the University of Jijmegen in The Netherlands and at the Naval Research Laboratory. In addition, prior to joining MIT, he spent two years in industry with Bruker Instruments, Inc. Professor Cory's work focuses on the development of novel instrumentation, methods and applications of magnetic resonance. Recently, students in his lab have developed a high-resolution NMR microscope, new methods for studying large bio-molecules, a set of NMR-based scattering methods and an NMR implementation of quantum computing. The quantum computing and NMR scattering experiments are part of a larger program to explore quantum information processing by NMR, which they hope will lead to new ideas on the dynamics of multibody problems and the interactions of quantum systems with their environment.������������������
Dr. Peter C. Dedon of the Division of Toxicology has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Dedon joined the MIT faculty in 1991. He was named the first Samuel A. Goldblith Career Development in 1993 and was promoted to associate professor without tenure in 1996. After obtaining an undergraduate degree in toxicology at St. Olaf College, he earned the MD and PhD in pharmacology at the University of Rochester. Before coming to MIT, he did postdoctoral research in biology at the University of Rochester and in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Professor Dedon's research crosses the boundaries of cancer pharmacology and genetic toxicology. It has led to important discoveries that advance the understanding of the mechanisms by which drugs and carcinogens damage DNA and cause mutations. He is a world leader in demonstrating how experimental results on DNA in vitro apply to DNA in living cells. The model compounds he has used for this work are a class of antibiotics called enediynes and the surprising results he has obtained with these compounds may lead to the development of more potent anti-cancer drugs.������������������
Dr. Eugene A. Fitzgerald of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Fitz-gerald did his undergraduate work at MIT and his postgraduate work at Cornell University, where he earned a PhD in 1989. He began a six-year career with AT&T Bell Laboratories before joining the MIT faculty as an associate professor without tenure in 1994. Beginning with his doctoral thesis, Professor Fitzgerald has focused on the formation and control of dislocation defects and their effect on the properties and performance of semiconductor heterostructures. He has become a world expert in this field, which has important scientific and technological implications.������������������
Dr. Linda G. Griffith of the Department of Chemical Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Griffith joined MIT as a postdoctoral associate (1988-90). She was appointed assistant professor of health sciences and technology and chemical engineering (1991-93), assistant professor of chemical engineering (1993-96), and associate professor of chemical engineering without tenure (1996). After undergraduate work at the Georgia Institute of Technology, she earned the PhD in chemical engineering at University of California at Berkeley in 1988. Professor Griffith is a leader and pioneer in the biomedical engineering area known as tissue engineering. She has developed a range of new biomaterials and approaches to constructing functional 3-D tissues for therapeutic and clinical diagnostic use. Her accomplishments have been recognized with numerous awards, appointment to the editorial boards of several major journals, and invitations to speak on biomaterials and tissue engineering at technical meetings and university seminars. At MIT she has been co-chair of the Committee on Curricula which developed the biomedical engineering minor, and is a founding member of the Center for Biomedical Engineering.������������������
Dr. Nesbitt W. Hagood IV of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Hagood holds the SB (1985), SM (1988) and PhD degrees (1991) from MIT. He was appointed to the Charles Stark Draper Career Development Professorship in 1991 and was named assistant professor in 1991 and was promoted to associate professor in 1995. Professor Hagood has helped to establish and define the field of active materials and structures (those with real-time controllable mechanical properties). He has advanced the understanding of this new and promising field that one day may find broad commercial and industrial applications as actuators, sensors and vibration/noise control devices.������������������
Dr. Evelynn M. Hammonds of the Program in Science, Technology and Society has been promoted to associate professor with tenure, retroactive to February 1, 1998. Dr. Hammonds joined the MIT faculty in 1992 as an assistant professor of the history of science and was promoted in 1997 to associate professor without tenure. Previously, she had been an instructor at Wellesley College in 1983, visiting assistant professor at Hampshire College (1990-91) and a graduate student and teaching fellow at Harvard University (1985-92). After undergraduate work in physics and electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Spelman College, she obtained the SM in physics at MIT and the PhD in the history of science from Harvard (1993). She was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton in 1994-95.
Professor Hammonds' first book, The Search for Perfect Control: Social History of Diphtheria, 1880-1890 (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press) surveys the history of bacteriological, medical and epidemiological knowledge applied to the control of diphtheria. That disease was one of the leading causes of deaths among children in the 19th-century United States. Her second book, The Logic of Difference: A History of Race in Science and Medicine in the United States (to be published by the University of North Carolina Press), presents a sustained examination of how racial categories have bedeviled modern medical and biological sciences. The book contributes to the creation of a truer and better-defined context for understanding the medical, biological and public health uses of the race concept in the twentieth century.������������������
Dr. Qing Hu of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Hu joined the MIT faculty in 1990 as an assistant professor, and in 1991 he was named KDD Career Development Assistant Professor. He was promoted to associate professor without tenure in 1995. He did his undergraduate work at Lanzhow University in China and subsequently earned the AM from Harvard University and the PhD (1987), also from Harvard. From 1987-89, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California. Professor Hu is an experimentalist deeply committed to developing practical source and detector technologies for millimeter-wave, terahertz and infrared frequencies. He has successfully competed with top-ranked physicists to elucidate and demonstrate photon-assisted quantum transport in this frequency range. He developed the first millimeter-wave focal-plane sensor arrays using Si micromachining. In very recent work, he became the first to obtain THz spontaneous emission from a multiple quantum well structure.������������������
Dr. M. Frans Kaashoek of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Kaashoek joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1993 after completing his PhD at the Vrije Universiteit in The Netherlands. He was appointed Jamieson Career Development Assistant Professor in 1995 and Jamieson Career Development Associate Professor without tenure in 1996. Professor Kaashoek is widely respected as a top young researcher and educator in the field of computer systems. He has done important and creative work on high performance operating systems, distributed shared memory, dynamic compilation, high-speed networking and mobile computing. In 1994, he received a National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Chris Kaiser of the Department of Biology has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Kaiser joined the MIT faculty in 1991 as an assistant professor of biology and in 1996 was promoted to associate professor without tenure. He took his undergraduate degree in biochemistry at Harvard University and his PhD in biology at MIT in 1987. Dr. Kaiser is a leader in using yeast as model organism to study cell biological processes. He has devised genetic and biochemical systems to dissect the molecular mechanisms for intracellular trafficking of proteins. Professor Kaiser's exceptional research program has been recognized with Markey Scholarship and Searle Scholarship awards. In addition, he is the current holder of the Whitehead Career Development Professorship.������������������
Dr. Michael Kremer of the Department of Economics has been promoted to full professor with tenure. After completing his undergraduate and postgraduate work at Harvard University, Professor Kremer joined the MIT faculty in 1992 as a postdoctoral fellow. After one term as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Chicago, he was awarded the Petti Kourin Career Development Chair at MIT in 1994 and promoted to associate professor without tenure in 1996.
Professor Kremer's primary fields are economic development, long-term economic growth and macro-economics. His writings have brought important new insights into a variety of wage, employment and worker education phenomena that had previously been poorly understood. He has also made important contributions to the understanding of the extinction of open-access natural resources, of patent policy, skill matching and the spread of AIDS. He has long-term experiments underway in Kenya, Colombia and India to examine the effects of small investments in education in developing countries. His work has been recognized by a number of prestigious awards including a National Science Foundation Faculty Fellowship (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers), a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Institute of Health Fellowship (National Bureau of Economic Research Health and Aging Fellowship) and a Hoover Institution National Fellowship.
Dr. Pattie Maes of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences in the School of Architecture and Planning has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Maes joined the MIT faculty in 1989 as a visiting professor and was promoted to assistant professor in 1991 and associate professor without tenure in 1995. She earned her undergraduate degree (1983) and the PhD in computer science (1987) at the University of Brussels. Professor Maes is internationally recognized as a founder and leading researcher in the new field of software agents. She is also recognized as a world leader in user interface design, interactive arts and networked communities. Among her awards, was an honorary faculty chair at the University of Brussels for 1997-98, and she was named a Distinguished Lecturer in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University (1997-98). She serves as a consultant to several companies including Apple Computer, and she founded and directed MIT spinoff Firefly Network, Inc., recently acquired by Microsoft.
Dr. Anne M. Mayes of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Dr. Mayes received the SB from MIT in 1986 and the PhD from Northwestern University in 1991. Following a two-year appointment as visiting scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center, she joined the MIT faculty in 1993 as an assistant professor. In 1995, she was named Class of 1948 Assistant Professor of Polymer Physics and in 1997 she was promoted to associate professor. At MIT, her research on macromolecules spans the range of basic theory, materials synthesis and characterization. Dr. Mayes was named the 1988 Materials Research Society Oustanding Young Investigator.������������������
Dr. Anne E.C. McCants of the Department of History has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor McCants joined the MIT faculty in 1991 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor without tenure in 1995. She was recipient of the Edgerton Faculty Alumni Award in 1996. She earned the AB in economics and European studies (1984) at Mt. Holyoke College, the MA in economics (1985) from the University of California at Los Angeles and the PhD in history (1991) from the University of California at Berkeley. While an assistant professor at MIT, she was a faculty instructor for the Graduate Consortium in Women Studies at Radcliffe College (1993). Her field of special interest is Dutch history, which she has pursued through a combination of cultural and economic analyses. She has published one book that has been acclaimed by peer reviewers--Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam. Through the prism of an orphanage, she reveals vital features of the first modern economy in Europe. Her current book project is a study of material culture in 17th- and 18th-century Netherlands, assessing the impact of consumer goods on the social structure.
Dr. Rosalind W. Picard of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Picard joined the MIT faculty in 1991 as an assistant professor of media technology. She was named NEC Career Development Professor in 1992 and in 1995 she was promoted to associate professor without tenure. She obtained a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering (1984) from the Georgia Institute of Technology and earned the SM (1986) and ScD (1991) in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Professor Picard is internationally recognized as a founder and world leader of content-based retrieval from video and image databases, as well as a world leader in image processing and computer vision. In addition, she is the founder of a new field called affective computing that holds much promise for industrial applications and already has had major impact on the fields of human-computer interaction, psychology and artificial intelligence. Among her awards, she was a National Science Foundation Fellow and received the Georgia Tech College of Engineering's Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni Award. She is the author of Affective Computing (MIT Press, 1997).
Dr. Gregory C. Rutledge of the Department of Chemical Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. After undergraduate work in chemical engineering at the University of Virginia, he earned the PhD from MIT in 1990. Following one year as a research fellow at the University of Leeds, he joined the MIT faculty in 1991 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor without tenure in 1995. Professor Rutledge is an internationally recognized expert in polymer physics. His work on computing the thermal and electrical properties of crystalline polymers in the solid state is widely acknowledged as groundbreaking. He has been a driving force in the development of computational chemistry in the curriculum of the Department of Chemical Engineering.������������������
Dr. Ian A. Waitz of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Waitz was named to Charles Stark Draper and Rockwell International Assistant Professorships sequentially in 1991. He held the latter chair for three years and was promoted to associate professor without tenure in July 1997. He received the BS in aerospace engineering (1986) from Pennsylvania State University, and the MS (1988) from George Washington University and the PhD (1991) from California Institute of Technology, both in aeronautics. Professor Waitz is an internationally recognized leader in the field of aeronautical propulsion. He has focused much of his research on environmental issues associated with aircraft design and operation. In particular, he has developed methods for making aircraft engines quieter, and has contributed to understanding processes in engines that lead to the emission of pollutants that impact ozone depletion and global change.������������������
Dr. Elizabeth A. Wood of the Department of History has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Wood joined the MIT faculty in 1990 as a history instructor and was promoted to assistant professor in 1991. In 1995, she was promoted to associate professor without tenure. After undergraduate work in Russian history and literature at Harvard-Radcliffe College (AB, 1980), she continued her study of Russian and Soviet history at the University of Michigan, where she earned the MA in 1986 and the PhD in 1991. Professor Wood is in the forefront of an emerging approach to Soviet history that goes beyond ideological debate to empirical research into the true impact of the Russian Revolution on ordinary people. This groundbreaking work has been made possible by the recent opening of the Soviet archives. Her first book, From Baba [grandmother] to Comrade, a study of the changing role of Russian women after the revolution, is considered a classic. The manuscript of her second book, Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Revolutionary Russia, a study of the dangers of trials used in theatrical and melodramatic ways, has also deeply impressed reviewers.������������������
Dr. Gregory W. Wornell of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. After completing his BASc degree at the University of British Columbia, he earned the PhD at MIT in 1991. He joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1991. Upon returning from a leave of absence at AT&T Laboratories, he was named ITT Career Development Assistant Professor in 1993. In 1996, he was promoted to associate professor without tenure, and was appointed to the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development chair. Professor Wornell is a leader in designing advanced signal processing algorithms for wireless communication systems, and he is a pioneer in bringing the new mathematics of chaos, fractals and wavelets into the realm of signal processing and communications.
Dr. Boleslaw Wyslouch of the Department of Physics has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. After completing his undergraduate work and MS in physics at the University of Warsaw in 1981, Professor Wyslouch began an uninterrupted association with MIT as a doctoral student, earning the PhD in physics in 1987. In the same year he became a postdoctoral fellow at European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. From 1990, he was a research associate with MIT's Laboratory of Nuclear Science stationed at CERN before being named an assistant professor in 1991. He was promoted to associate professor without tenure in 1997. Professor Wyslouch's work focuses in two areas of experimental physics: high-energy particle physics and relativistic heavy-ion physics. In high-energy physics, his work has led the way to the first significant measurement of b-quark coupling to the Z0 (zero) boson, a carrier of weak force. In relativistic heavy-ion physics, he has set the best constraints on the existence of a hypothetical new state of the vacuum known as the "disoriented choral condensate."
Dr. Jackie Y. Ying of the Department of Chemical Engineering has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Professor Ying did her undergraduate work at Cooper Union (BE, 1987) and earned the MA and PhD in chemical engineering at Prince-ton University. She joined MIT as an assistant professor of chemical engineering in 1992 and was promoted to associate professor without tenure in 1996. Professor Ying is an internationally recognized expert on the synthesis of inorganic nanostructured materials and the application of these materials as catalysts in various chemical processes for fine chemicals production and pollution prevention. In just over five years on the faculty, she has built an exceptional research program that has produced several significant new materials including a family of transition metal oxide molecular sieves and non-stoichiometric nanocrystalline oxide catalysts.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on June 3, 1998.
