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School of Engineering
The School of Engineering has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on the world. Anchored on a tradition of accomplishment and yet forging novel initiatives in content and style, the School aspires to remain at the forefront of engineering innovation and sustain its research leadership.
Research in the School is broad and eclectic, ranging from engineering science to the creation of innovative products, and encompasses a wide variety of research themes and approaches, some pursued by individual investigators, others conducted through group projects or umbrella grants orchestrated by large research centers and laboratories. This blending of theory and applications and an openness to differing styles stand as hallmarks of the School's research and vision.
A Tradition of Accomplishment
Over the decades, the School, and more broadly the Institute, has:
Through its research, MIT has contributed to many twentieth century innovations that have profoundly changed our everyday lives and the very fabric of society. [To celebrate the new millennium, the National Academy of Engineering announced its list of top 20 engineering accomplishments of the twentieth century.] The following examples are illustrative:
MIT has not only been a pioneer in specific fields of engineering research, it has also created widely adopted research models. MIT arguably pioneered the modern research university as we know it today, having been chosen in 1940 as the site of the famous Radiation Laboratory ("RadLab"). Somewhat later, Dean Gordon Brown advocated the "research center" to encourage interdepartmental, interdisciplinary research. His concepts have helped reconfigure technical and engineering schools around the world. In 1973 the MIT Polymer Processing Program (PPP) became one of the first, if not the first, industrial sponsored research consortia at a university.
Looking Forward
The School continues to lead in creating and improving numerous technological systems and processes. It has embarked upon several initiatives aimed at sustaining its research leadership.
Partnerships
MIT's industrial and university partnerships, which foster and support significant interdisciplinary engineering research, have become an increasingly large component of the School's research portfolio. Either anchored in the School itself or often focusing largely on engineering content, these partnerships provide a broad funding base on topics that are of interest both to MIT faculty and to the Institute's industrial and university colleagues. The Dupont-MIT Alliance, for example, is creating new processes for novel biologically-based materials. Through the HP-MIT Alliance, faculty from several centers collaborate with HP researchers in the area of wireless communications. A major MIT-directed consortium to address global environmental challenges has emerged from the Ford-MIT Alliance; and the MIT-Microsoft Alliance has created new educational technologies and pedagogies. The Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) and Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) have brought together faculty from several departments to conduct research on such varied topics as advanced micro- and nano- materials, manufacturing, and high performance computing.
Recent Institutional Initiatives
The Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology (ISN) is a multi-year research partnership with the U.S. Army and several other external organizations (currently Raytheon, Dupont, and Massachusetts General/Brigham and Women's Hospital) to develop innovative, lightweight uniforms with novel functionality for the soldier of the future. It will draw upon approximately 35 core faculty and 80-100 graduate students to address, like the RadLab, an important national need.
Creating a new model for supporting research and interacting with industry, the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation aspires to foster research on new and emerging technologies and increase interactions among MIT, individual entrepreneurs, innovative companies, and the venture capital community.
New Content Areas
Engineering is undergoing a significant transformation. And so is the School as it positions itself to assume a leadership role in several exciting new fields of investigation.
Bioengineering
At MIT we are creating a new discipline of biological engineering that might eventually parallel other fields such as chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering. Building upon the molecular and genomic revolutions in biology, we seek applications in medicine and health care, pharmaceuticals, new materials, the environment, and other domains. For example, research in this area might create nano machines that identify and attack disease in the body, integrative systems that greatly accelerate the processes of drug discovery and development, or the means to grow new organs, blood vessels, and bones from a patient's own cells.
Engineering Systems
The creation of new technological systems and the social impact of technology have had an astounding impact on our lives. Today's research in engineering systems aims to better understand and subsequently improve large, complex systems. Two examples are reconciling the inevitable growth in world-wide demand for energy with potential environmental costs, and using modern information technologies to create products that are more timely, cheaper, and more responsive to consumer needs.
Information Engineering
Information, computation and communication in engineering – or information engineering - are driving forces underlying much of contemporary society and are becoming pervasive throughout engineering. For example, researchers are investigating instrumentation and the use of information systems and technology in biology. Other investigators are examining imbedded software in both satellite and airplane systems. And yet other researchers are studying the Internet, supply chain management, computational biology, computational materials, and simulation and optimization of complex systems.
Tiny Technologies
Research in tiny technologies includes both miniaturization – making technologies increasingly smaller – and nanotechnologies, the manipulation of atoms to create technologies measured in billionths of a meter. Over a tenth of our engineering faculty are currently creating such technologies as micro engines (turbines the size of shirt buttons), quantum-dot-based computation, carbon-nanotube transistors and interconnects, microphotonic devices, and molecular electronics.
Although these innovative arenas capture only a fraction of the School's forward-looking investigations, they establish significant new vectors for engineering education and research. Utilizing the tremendous talents of some of the world's most creative minds – our faculty, researchers, and students – we look to a future again significantly transformed and enriched by engineering innovations. The School of Engineering will certainly play a major role in shaping this exciting future.
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