The Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation has approved promotion for 17 faculty members to the rank of full professor. All appointments were effective July 1.
Mitchel J. Resnick
Media Arts and Sciences
Education: B.A. 1978 (Princeton), M.S. 1988, Ph.D. 1992 (both from MIT)
Joined MIT faculty: 1992
Tenured: 1999
Resnick's research focuses upon rethinking learning and education in the context of new computational technologies. He has concentrated particularly on development of new educational technologies that encouarge and support learning through designing and experimenting.
David W. Miller
Aeronautics and Astronautics
Education: S.B. 1982, S.M. 1985, Sc.D. 1988 (all from MIT)
Joined MIT faculty: 1997
Tenured: 2002
Miller is an internationally recognized leader in the development of technologies, processes and tools required to produce cost-effective designs of space telescope missions. His work has significantly increased the resolving power of telescopes and led to replacement of thrusters with electromagnets to control spacecraft.
Paula T. Hammond
Chemical Engineering
Education: S.B. 1984 (MIT), M.S. 1988 (Georgia Tech), Ph.D. 1993 (MIT)
Joined MIT faculty: 1995
Tenured: 2002
Hammond is a world-renowned expert in the synthesis of tailored, functional materials. Her work is characterized by interesting chemical synthesis, careful understanding of the fundamental secondary interactions that guide polymer self-assembly, development of novel processes and the choice of important problems.
Franz-Joseph Ulm
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Education: Dipl̫me-Ing̩nieur 1990 (TU Munich/ENPC), Docteur-Ing̩nieur 1994 (ENPC, Paris), Habilitation 1998 (ENS de Cachan)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Tenured: 2003
Ulm is the world leader of his generation in the research of cement-based materials. He has made important innovations in both theory and experiments, including developing the nano-indentation tests to provide basic information on the smallest scale, and extending the mathematical technique of multiple-scale homogenization to predict the behavior of concrete on the macro scale.
Hari Balakrishnan
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Education: B.Tech. 1993 (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras), M.S. 1995, Ph.D. 1998 (both from University of California at Berkeley)
Joined MIT faculty: 1998
Tenured: 2003
Balakrishnan is a world leader in three distinct areas: computer networking, mobile systems and databases. In computer networking his new contributions include verifiable Internet routing, and in mobile systems his contributions include energy-efficient wireless protocols. He has recently become a force in the database community due to his research in streaming databases.
Dennis Freeman
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Education: B.S. 1973 (Pennsylvania State University), S.M. 1976, Ph.D. 1986 (both from MIT)
Joined MIT faculty: 1995
Tenured: 2002
In his research, Freeman has overcome longstanding challenges in the hearing field, generating breakthrough understanding of the electrical, mechanical and biological workings of the inner ear. In particular, he has developed and applied new metrology techniques to study the motions of sensory receptor hair bundles, and to study properties of the tectorial membrane.
Alexandre Megretski
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Education: M.S. 1985, Ph.D. 1988 (both from Leningrad University)
Joined MIT faculty: 1996
Tenured: 2001
Megretski has established himself as one of the world's top researchers in systems and control theory. He is well known for his work on Integral Quadratic Constraints (IQC), a methodology for the analysis and design of feedback systems with nonlinearity, time-variation and uncertainty.
Martin Rinard
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Education: Sc.B. 1984 (Brown University), Ph.D. 1994 (Stanford University)
Joined MIT faculty: 1997
Tenured: 2002
Rinard is one of the top researchers in three areas: program analysis, compiler design and programming language design. In recent years, he has made significant intellectual contributions to formal analysis of programs, object-oriented programming and computer security. His recent work on failure-oblivious computing is a novel way of improving the reliability and security of computing systems.
Daniela Rus
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Education: B.S. 1985 (University of Iowa), M.S. 1990, Ph.D. 1992 (both from Cornell University)
Joined MIT faculty: 2004
Tenured: 2004
Rus is a world leader in the area of self-organizing systems, which may be comprised of mobile robots, mobile or stationary sensors and actuators. She has built novel hardware devices, invented new algorithms and developed many of the first reconfiguring robots.
Michael Greenstone
Economics
Education: B.A. 1991 (Swarthmore College), Ph.D. 1998 (Princeton University)
Joined MIT faculty: 2003
Tenured: 2003
Greenstone is a leader in the field of environmental economics. He is best known for his empirical research on topics related to air pollution policy, including the Clean Air Act, and he has made important contributions to the economic analysis of pollution policy, household risk tolerance and the health effects of varying pollution levels.
Anne E.C. McCants
History
Education: A.B. 1984 (Mount Holyoke College), M.A. 1985 (UCLA), Ph.D. 1991 (University of California at Berkeley)
Joined MIT faculty: 1991
Tenured: 1998
McCants is an early modern European economic historian. Her research, which focuses on consumption patterns, global trade, and the life of the poor in the early modern period, have established her as an internationally recognized contributor to the fields of economic history, world history, demography, and women's and family history.
Elizabeth A. Wood
History
Education: A.B. 1980 (Harvard), M.A. 1986, Ph.D. 1991 (both from University of Michigan)
Joined MIT faculty: 1990
Tenured: 1998
Wood is at the forefront of an emerging new generation in the field of Soviet history. She aims to go beyond sterile ideological debates and pursue intensive empirical research made possible by the recent opening of the Soviet archives. She also focuses on the experience of ordinary people and on how language shapes social identity.
Alexander Byrne
Linguistics and Philosophy
Education: B.A. 1988 (Birkbeck College, London University), M.A. 1989 (King's College, London University), M.A. 1991, Ph.D. 1994 (both from Princeton University)
Joined MIT faculty: 1994
Tenured: 2002
Byrne's main research interests are color, perception and self-knowledge. He has achieved influential status in these areas partly through having co-edited the canonical sourcebook on the philosophy of color, and partly through his defense of a scientifically informed realism about perceptual conciousness and its objects.
Diana E. Henderson
Literature
Education: B.A. 1979 (College of William and Mary), M.A. 1980, M.Phil. 1983, Ph.D. 1989 (Columbia University)
Joined MIT faculty: 1995
Tenured: 1999
Henderson, a scholar in Shakespeare and Renaissance studies, will soon publish a book considering reworkings of Shakespearean plays and situations in fiction and film from the early 19th century to contemporary times. Henderson also regularly edits and contributes to edited volumes, new editions of Shakespeare texts and encyclopedias.
Janet Sonenberg
Music and Theater Arts
Education: B.A. 1971 (Tufts University), M.F.A. 1978 (New York University)
Joined MIT faculty: 1992
Tenured: 1999
Sonenberg focuses on hands-on work in the theater. She has developed an original method that directly engages with the actor's imagination and offers a rich alternative to the necessity of drawing upon firsthand experience to convey character and emotional depth. Her method has since been adopted by the Royal Shakespeare Company in England.
Frank B. Gertler
Biology
Education: B.S. 1985, Ph.D. 1992 (both from University of Wisconsin at Madison)
Joined MIT faculty: 1997
Tenured: 2003
Gertler is a leader in the field of cell motility. His major contribution has been to decipher a fundamental new mechanism by which signaling pathways that control remodeling of actin cytoskeleton can have profound effects on cell motility and morphology.
Gigliola Staffilani
Mathematics
Education: B.S. 1989 (Universit�� di Bologna), S.M. 1991, Ph.D. 1995 (both from University of Chicago)
Joined MIT faculty: 2002
Tenured: 2002
Staffilani is among the leading young analysts in the study of dispersive nonlinear wave pde's, used for modeling wave phenomena. Two of her recent advances include proof of the symplectic non-squeezing of the Korteweg-de-Vries flow and proof of global well-posedness for the critical nonlinear Schr̦dinger equation in 3D.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 4, 2006 (download PDF).
