The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has announced the appointment of six professors to career development chairs and four to other named professorships.
The appointments of Michael Collins, Sam Madden, Fredo Durand, Joel Dawson, Elfar Adalsteinsson and Manolis Kellis to the career development chairs were effective July 1.
Michael Collins, who has been at MIT since 2003, will hold the X Window Career Development Professorship. Collins' research involves machine learning and natural language processing. He received his B.A. in 1992 and M.Phil. in 1993 from Cambridge University and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.
Sam Madden will hold the ITT Career Development Professorship. His primary research focus is database systems. Madden received his B.S. and M.Eng. from MIT in 1999 and got his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley in 2003. He joined MIT's EECS department in 2004.
Fredo Durand, whose research focuses on computer graphics, will hold the Jamieson Career Development Professorship. Durand joined the department in 2002 after receiving a B.S. from École Normale Supérieure in 1994, an S.M. from Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble in 1995, and the Ph.D. from Université J. Fourier in 1999, all in France.
Joel Dawson was named to the Carl Richard Soderberg Career Development Professorship, a three-year appointment. The chair was established in 1975 to honor Soderberg's distinguished MIT career as an Institute Professor and dean of engineering.
Dawson's research involves analog circuits, nonlinear control and the engineering of large, highly integrated systems. Dawson received the S.B. and M.Eng. degrees from MIT in 1996 and 1997, respectively, and earned the Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2003.
Elfar Adalsteinsson's new chair is the Robert J. Shillman Career Development Professorship. Adalsteinsson received a B.S. in 1989 from the University of Iceland, Reykjavik, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering in 1991 and 1995 from Stanford University. He joined MIT in 2004 with a dual appointment in EECS and MIT's Division of Health Sciences and Technology.
Adalsteinsson, who worked at the Lucas Center at Stanford from 1995 to 2004, does research in medical imaging.
Manolis Kellis is the first person to hold the Class of '64 Distinguished Alumni Career Development Chair. Kellis received the B.S. in 1999, the S.M. in 2000 and the Ph.D. in 2003, all from MIT. He joined the faculty in 2004 and is a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Broad Institute. His research focuses on computational biology.
Two other members of EECS were named to faculty professorships effective July 1--Anantha Chandrakasan and Jacob White.
Chandrakasan will hold the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professorship in Electrical Engineering for a five-year term. The chair was initially created as a career development chair but became a senior faculty professorship in 1990.
Chandrakasan's primary research interests include low-power digital integrated circuit design, wireless microsensor systems, ultra-wideband radios and emerging technologies. He received B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, 1990 and 1994, respectively.
He joined the MIT faculty in 1994 and is currently an associate director of the MIT Microsystems Technology Labs.
White was appointed to the Cecil H. Green Professorship for a two-year term. Since its inception in 1970, the Green chair has been used by department faculty to explore research areas new to them.
White is known for his work in numerical methods for engineering applications. He received his S.B. degree in electrical engineering from MIT and his S.M. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently an associate director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics.
Two more EECS faculty members were appointed to named professorships in February.
Rodney Brooks was named the first recipient of a new chair of robotics, funded by the Matsushita Corp.
Brooks, who joined MIT's faculty in 1984 after earning a Ph.D. from Stanford University, is an international leader in the field of robotics. He is a co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot, and director of MIT's CSAIL.
His research focuses on engineering intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments and understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots. He held the Fujitsu chair from 1996 through February.
Madhu Sudan, who joined the department in 1997, is the new holder of the Fujitsu Professorship.
Sudan received a B.Tech. in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology at New Delhi in 1987 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. His research interests lie in algorithms, complexity, probabilistic proof verification, combinatorial optimization, coding theory and algebraic computation.
