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“Transportation@MIT has brought together faculty from across three Schools since its inception earlier this year, and it recently expanded its collaborative circle even further for the Future of Urban Mobility project.” —Subra Suresh Dean of Engineering, MIT
Concrete Sustainability Hub Transportation@MIT Future of Urban Mobility MIT-INL Gordon Leadership Program Support MIT Engineering |
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November 6, 2009 Dear School of Engineering Faculty Colleagues, I am sending this brief note to provide an update about some of the happenings in the School of Engineering. The global economic downturn continues to present MIT, and higher education in general, with serious challenges. Although the overall impact of the crisis on MIT could turn out to be somewhat less dire than was forecast last fall, we still must find room for significant reductions in what will hopefully be the last year of budget cuts. The School of Engineering will continue to make adjustments within the context of our core values and our mission to lead our disciplines and professions, while strategically leveraging the opportunities afforded by the economic crisis to strengthen our role in education, research, and innovation. The Institute’s research funding has increased by nearly 8% (a significant portion of which is through the efforts of the Engineering faculty) even before the stimulus packages were introduced earlier this year. There is much good news from the School in many areas. Let me begin with one of the key focus areas: faculty recruitment. During the past two years, we have hired 35 new faculty members in Engineering, almost 10% of the faculty in the entire School. One has joined us as a full professor, two as tenured associate professors, and the rest in junior tenure-track positions. New faculty members have been added to each department or division in the School, and we are making unprecedented advances in recruiting underrepresented minorities and women to the ranks of our faculty; in 2008-09, for the first time in the history of the School of Engineering, more than half of our new faculty hires were women—all of our top women candidates accepted our offer to come to MIT. I am delighted to see the School making such dramatic advances as we continue our strong commitment to enhance the diversity of our faculty from among an increasingly competitive and outstanding applicant pool. I am also pleased to report that four of our new faculty members are joining us as a result of last year’s School-wide searches in transportation, computational engineering, green technologies, and energy. These searches were a departure from customary practice and involved setting aside a small fraction of the available faculty slots to attract researchers with broad and interdisciplinary research interests, without the constraints imposed by the a priori choice of a home department. The process of their selection was correspondingly demanding. We were able to recruit our top candidates to all of our School-wide searches. The process also demonstrated how faculty members from different departments (and several Schools within MIT) can effectively work together to attract top talent in interdisciplinary fields. I would like to thank those of you who helped conduct last year’s faculty searches—they require complex, time-intensive decisions, and the time and effort required to make these decisions are not easy to come by. I would also like to thank EECS for their help in developing and running the online application system that is now in wide use across the School; this system was especially effective for the School-wide searches. Our commitment to faculty recruitment and support of students will continue next year as we carefully and deliberately navigate through the economic downturn and uncertainty. A number of this year’s faculty searches are already underway and are beginning to attract large numbers of applicants. The School’s interdisciplinary research engagements and partnerships continue to expand and reach new levels. In early October we announced the establishment of a new Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT to accelerate breakthroughs in concrete science and engineering and transferring that science into practice. The goal of this multi-departmental faculty effort, funded at MIT for a five-year period by industry and a private foundation, is to reduce the carbon footprint and climate-change implications of the production of cement and concrete, the world’s most widely used building material. Just last week, I was especially pleased to announce that the Transportation@MIT initiative, which since its inception earlier this year has brought together faculty from across the Schools of Engineering, MIT-Sloan, and Architecture and Planning, has expanded its collaborative circle even further to include researchers from three universities in Singapore on the Future of Urban Mobility project. This new project will engage 35 MIT researchers directly and help increase the scale and scope of research conducted by MIT faculty and students in the area of environmentally sustainable urban transportation. In addition, last spring, we entered a new collaboration with the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, based in Braga, Portugal. In these new programs, we have also built in mechanisms to provide research opportunities in international venues for our undergraduate and graduate students. We will continue to keep you updated on these and other important partnerships, sponsorships, and large research projects in the School. Our strong commitment to undergraduate education has included further expansion of project-based and context-based learning and leadership training through the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program during the past year. The first cohort of Gordon Leaders will graduate at the end of this academic year. I wish all of you the best in your endeavors during this academic year. Sincerely, Subra Suresh
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Engineering | engineering.mit.edu |
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