“MIT must explore and implement bold new ideas that are innovative and transformational; we need not only to do what we have always done, we also need to do things differently.”

—Subra Suresh

Dean of Engineering, MIT

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May 5, 2009

Dear Alumni of the MIT School of Engineering,

As the end of another academic year approaches, much has changed at MIT. Like so many of our peer institutions, we are in the process of adjusting to a new economic reality. As we contemplate the necessary cuts and concessions, we must do so with a renewed commitment to our core values and principles. MIT’s bloodline of excellence is its faculty, who attract and educate excellent students and who, in their turn, use what they have learned to change the world. Keeping the School of Engineering a world leader in research and education means attracting the very best and brightest to the Institute this year and in the years ahead, and it means supporting our world class faculty and student body. Right now, this means offering competitive support to our graduate and undergraduate students because their need may be at its greatest.

Despite the economic climate, MIT must explore and implement bold new ideas that are innovative and transformational; we need not only to do what we have always done, we also need to do things differently. The impulse to redefine and reshape the work we do, and to improve the place we do it, is one of the defining features of the School. We are engineers – inveterate thinkers, creators, and problem solvers – and it is precisely these qualities that lead us to the best solutions.

In the current academic year, the School of Engineering has launched three initiatives – all of which originated from the School’s faculty-led planning process. First, in early March, and in collaboration with MIT-Sloan and the School of Architecture and Planning, we announced the new Transportation@MITinitiative. This initiative will give faculty new methods and means for collaborating on issues of common interest. A 2008 survey of 1,300 MIT faculty and senior researchers revealed that 338, or 26% of those surveyed, are doing work related to or applicable to transportation. A look at our existing sponsored research revealed that the School of Engineering alone attracts over $20 million in transportation-related grant funding every year. Through Transportation@MIT, we have laid the foundation for faculty with common interests to work on those transportation technologies and solutions that will have the largest, most immediate, and most direct benefits for the environment and for sustainable mobility. You will no doubt hear more about this in the coming months.

Second, last fall we announced the formation of the Center for Computational Engineering, which aims to expand educational and research opportunities for faculty and students who would benefit from the application of computational methodologies to their work in engineering and beyond. This effort, supported with gifts and endowment providing two graduate fellowships, has already brought together nearly 40 faculty members from across the spectrum of engineering and science disciplines.

And third, this year the School launched four faculty searches that will benefit from the widest range of faculty input. These “School-wide” searches are in broad areas – transportation, energy, green technologies, and computational engineering – and the faculty collaborating on the searches come from every academic department in the School. While faculty searches always make for interesting interactions among members of the hiring committees, these searches have also led to some of the most intriguing and exciting exchanges among our faculty this year.

Another crucial development in the School of Engineering this year was the successful launch of the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program. Faculty from around the institute are engaged in this program, which is aimed at providing improved context-based and project-based learning and hands-on design and leadership experience for our undergraduates. The inaugural cohort of Gordon Fellows was selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants. We look forward to bringing you the results of their experiences in this two-year program next spring.

Despite our many advances, challenges remain. The financial crisis, sometimes described as “a terrible thing to waste,” has focused the attention of people across the Institute and helped them ask new questions, among them: “Can we achieve beneficial efficiencies of scale by combining centers and cross-disciplinary research units?” Faculty members in different centers are identifying ways to rejuvenate and broaden their research portfolios through enhanced synergies and mergers.

The Schools of Science and Engineering have embarked on a coordinated planning process to provide new and necessary infrastructure to researchers who are working at the intersections of engineering, life sciences, and medicine and in the physical sciences. Our development of new, state-of-the-art central laboratory facilities remains behind those of several of our peer institutions. Our goal is to help create unique and centrally supported experimental capabilities that will enable faculty and students to pioneer the next wave of innovations in the coming decades. As a start to our efforts to address this issue, over the coming months we will see the creation of shared experimental facilities along one or more prominent corridors in the main group, thanks to the generosity of alumni donors.

The country is now in the process of re-examining and re-formulating its own plan for our collective future – one, we have been told, that will pay special attention to the cultivation and support of current and future engineers and scientists. Thus we are faced with challenges and opportunities of the kind that have always inspired engineers. Can the values that drive us provide the tools needed to solve today’s most complex and vexing problems? In a word: yes.

I wish all of you a peaceful and prosperous summer, and I look forward to connecting with you in the fall.

Sincerely,

Subra Suresh
Dean of Engineering
Ford Professor of Engineering
MIT