MIT
MIT Faculty Newsletter  
Vol. XXX No. 1
September / October 2017
contents
DACA Issues; Grad Housing Struggle;
Steve Lippard Retirement; Verghese Gift;
Call for Nominations
A Brief History of the MIT Faculty Newsletter
as it Marks 30th Anniversary
The Fundamental Challenge
Facing Higher Education Today
A Hole in the Flag
How Deeply Are Our Students Learning?
Thank You From the MIT Alumni Association
Nominate a Colleague
as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow
Request for Proposals for
Innovative Curricular Projects
Teaching this fall? You should know . . .
Postdoctoral Scholars By
International Status and Ethnicity
Citizenship of Postdoctoral Scholars
Printable Version

Thank You From the MIT Alumni Association

Joe L. McGonegal

The mission of the MIT Alumni Association is to connect MIT’s 137,000 living alumni with one another and with the Institute, a commitment we take seriously for alumni of all ages, academic degrees, and destinations after leaving Cambridge. We simply cannot fulfill this mission each year without the support and collaboration of countless campus partners.  
While our partnerships may be countless, we can count the MIT faculty and researchers who volunteer their time each year to share news of their research and teaching with alumni for whom an MIT education is a lifelong endeavor.

In our fiscal year ending June 30, 2017, we counted 99 MIT faculty who spoke at alumni gatherings, from our largest events at Tech Reunions, MIT Family Weekend, and the Alumni Leadership Conference, to talks over dinner or post-conference gatherings with alumni clubs and groups near and far. (See the list below.) Beyond speakers, we were also delighted to see over 250 MIT faculty among the attendees at our events this year.

To those in these sets, we say both thank you – and let’s do even more together.
 
Like our colleagues in Resource Development, Alumni Association staff focus on understanding and communicating MIT’s advances in research and education to alumni and friends. This focus is made sharper in the midst of the Campaign for a Better World, one with ambitious donor participation and event engagement goals.

In the alumni education office, we have doubled our efforts to maximize the connections among faculty, researchers, and alumni.  We track all faculty appearances worldwide that we know of on one central calendar, and we alert alumni when faculty are giving public talks or speaking at conferences in their areas. We stay current on research and liaise with organizers of major research conferences. We have doubled production of Faculty Forum Online Webcasts in which alumni can interact virtually with faculty. And we have piloted new kinds of events, both virtual and real-time, for alumni to connect with the research and people who make MIT great.

In this past year, over half of the 22,000 alumni who attended an MIT alumni event did so to engage directly with researchers. If we do our jobs right, this percentage will climb in the years ahead. So we are almost always willing to partner and collaborate with departments, labs, centers, and individual faculty, whether given a week’s notice or a year’s, if it means amplifying their message to our alumni.

Each summer the MIT Alumni Association offers faculty and research staff two ways to connect with us. Our annual Toast to Faculty event in August brings staff and faculty together to reflect on the year past and consider possibilities in the year ahead. Those who could not attend the August event can collaborate with us this year by completing a simple survey

Thank you to the following individuals who volunteered to speak at alumni events in the last year. Are we missing your name? Please let us know.

Eric Alm
Daniel Anderson
Robert Armstrong
William Aulet
Arnold Barnett
Martin K. Bazant
Angela Belcher
Adam Berinsky
Dimitris Bertsimas
Sangeeta Bhatia
Richard Binzel
Emilio Bizzi
Amanda Bosh
Lydia Bourouiba
Ed Boyden
Richard Braatz
Erik Brynjolfsson
Christopher Capozzola
Peter Diamond
Kevin Esvelt
Matthew Evans
John Fernandez
Peter Fisher
Woodie Flowers
John Gabrieli
Edward Gibson
Karen Gleason
Renee Gosline
Jeremy Gregory
Linda Griffith
Alan Grodzinsky
Alan Grossman
Philip Gschwend
Leigh Hafrey
John Hansman
John Harbison
Caleb Harper
Jeffrey Hoffman
Yasheng Huang
Darrell Irvine
Simon Johnson
Sertac Karaman
Christopher Knittel
Jesse Kroll
Robert Langer
Chappell Lawson
John J. Leonard
Donald Lessard
Andrew Lo
Tod Machover
Stuart Madnick
Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli
Nergis Mavalvala
Miho Mazereeuw
Andrew McAfee
Silvio Micali
Adam Miller
Fiona Murray
Jacquin Niles
Melissa Nobles
Elsa Olivetti
Scot Osterweil
Ignacio Perez-Arriaga
Rosalind Picard
Robert Pindyck
Emily Richmond Pollock
Kristala Jones Prather
Ramesh Raskar
Mitchell Resnick
Roberto Rigobon
Donald Sadoway
Sanjay Sarma
Rebecca Saxe
David Schmittlein
Laura Schulz
Sara Seager
Alex Shalek
Hazel Sive
Charles Sodini
Justin Solomon
Charles Stewart III
Emma Tang
J. Phillip Thompson
Li-Huei Tsai
Lily Tsai
Sherry Turkle
Kay Tye
Gediminas Urbonas
Robert van der Hilst
Ian Waitz
Ben Weiss
Ray Weiss
Ron Weiss
Dennis Whyte
Matt Wilson
Meejin Yoon
Feng Zhang
Shuguang Zhang
Maria Zuber

 

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