Steven R. Lerman received his BS in Civil Engineering from MIT in 1972 and his SM and PhD in Transportation Systems from MIT in 1973 and 1975 respectively. He joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering in 1975. Professor Lerman is currently the Dean for Graduate Education at MIT and holds the Class of 1922 Professorship in Civil and Environmental Engineering. He also directs the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives, an interdepartmental research center devoted to studying the application of computational and communication technologies in education.
Professor Lerman also serves as the acting co-director for the Singapore-MIT Alliance. This is MIT’s largest distance learning initiative that involves five graduate degree programs and large scale, collaborative research with the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University. Before becoming acting director of this program in 2006, he served for four years as deputy director.
He chairs the Faculty Advisory Committee of the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative and chaired the Interim Management Board during that program’s startup phase. He also chaired the Academic Media Productions Services Faculty Advisory Board from the time that unit was created until it moved to the MIT Libraries in spring 2007.
Professor Lerman is co-principal investigator (with Professor Jesus del Alamo) of the iLabs project that is developing open source software to enable the sharing of laboratory equipment throughout the world. Initially funded under the Microsoft iCampus program, this project now has funding from the Carnegie Corporation.
He won his department’s teaching award twice (1977, 2005) as well as a Graduate Student Council Teaching Award (1978). Currently, his primary teaching is an introductory subject on computational methods for undergraduate and graduate students.
Professor Lerman was chair of the MIT Faculty in 2006-07 and from 2000-02, serving as associate chair/chair elect for the two preceding years. Previously, he was the director of the Intelligent Systems Lab and head of the Transportation Systems Division in the Department of Civil Engineering.
From 1983 to 1988, Professor Lerman was the first director of MIT’s Project Athena, a campus-wide distributed system of advanced computer workstations that still serves as the basis for campus computing at MIT.
He and his wife Lori have been the housemasters for The Warehouse (aka NW30), one of MIT’s graduate residences since the building opened in 2000.