The 2005 Infinite Mile Award at MIT has been awarded to Ben Brophy to recognize the extraordinary leadership he has provided through his single-minded focus on improving the quality of the Stellar user experience: his advocacy and user interface design excellence have contributed significantly towards evolving Stellar into a reliable product that more and more users— faculty as well as students—are finding easy to use and relevant to their needs, and those numbers are growing. There are now 411 courses on Stellar for spring 2005—a quantum change from the spring 2004 semester when there were 290 Stellar courses. Stellar's high usage in SHASS (38%) reflects that its adoption is not limited only to environments and Schools that are predominantly technical, an aspect that was an important design parameter.

As an integral member of the Sakai project, Ben is participating in multi-institution meetings to plan the requirements for Sakai tools and functionality: Ben is also leading user interface design for the Sakai Gradebook tool that is being developed by the University of California, Berkeley and MIT.

Beneath Ben's quiet demeanor lies intense commitment and competence. He is a team player, and goes out of his way to help make it easier for faculty and students at MIT to use educational technology. His professional growth over the years exemplifies one of MIT's core values, that of being a true meritocracy.

Ben's studies in college focused on the anthropology of religion. Soon after leaving college, he and his future wife traveled around India and Nepal for an extended period of time. After returning to Boston in 1995, Ben took a job at MIT as an administrative assistant to pay the bills while dedicating himself to practicing meditation and establishing a meditation center. While working at MIT, Ben was able to take classes in HTML. The thrill of publishing online in 1995 was enormous, and Ben started putting together websites for friends and for the departments where he worked. He then enrolled in classes in graphic design at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, cut his hours at MIT, and began working as a freelance graphic designer.

Ben applied for a job as an administrative assistant at the Educational Media Creation Center (a precursor to AMPS) when it was created in 2000, and soon thereafter switched jobs to begin working full time as a web designer. Ben has been involved in many small and large web projects across the institute and beyond. Ben is currently adding depth to his knowledge of information architecture and user interface design by completing a Master of Science in Library and Information Science at Simmons College.

Tom White, AMPS Chief Videographer, also received the Infinite Mile Award for 2005.