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23 faculty members awarded tenure

October 25, 2006

The Corporation's Executive Committee approved 23 faculty members for promotion to tenure in May. Here are their profiles:

Jonathan Rodden

Political Science
Education: B.A. 1993 (University of Michigan), Ph.D. 2000 (Yale)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Rodden is a scholar of comparative politics who has established himself as one of the leading students of federalism.

Junot Diaz

Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies
Education: B.A. 1992 (Rutgers University), M.F.A. 1995 (Cornell University)
Joined MIT faculty: 2003
Diaz, a writer of international renown, is one of the seminal Latino and American fiction writers of his generation.

Rahul Sarpeshkar

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Education: S.B. 1990 (MIT), Ph.D. 1997 (Caltech)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Sarpeshkar is a leader in the design of analog low power integrated circuits, particularly for cochlear implants and other biomedical applications.

Eytan H. Modiano

Aeronautics and Astronautics
Education: B.S. 1986 (University of Connecticut), M.S. 1989, Ph.D. 1992 (both from University of Maryland)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Modiano is a world leader in the design of architectures and protocols for satellite, optical and wireless networks.

Meg Jacobs

History
Education: B.A. 1990 (Cornell University), M.A. 1993, Ph.D. 1998 (both from University of Virginia)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Jacobs is a well-known historian of 20th-century America whose writings have had a broad impact among historians and political scientists.

Eric Klopfer

Urban Studies and Planning
Education: B.S. 1992 (Cornell University), Ph.D. 1997 (University of Wisconsin at Madison)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Klopfer administers MIT's Teacher Education Program and has developed and disseminated innovative educational technology to improve science teaching.

Sang-Gook Kim

Mechanical Engineering
Education: B.S. 1978 (Seoul National University, Korea), S.M. 1980 (Korea Institute of Science & Technology), Ph.D. 1985 (MIT)
Joined MIT faculty: 2000
Kim's research aims to establish a systematic framework for micro and nanoscale product development, including the development of new manufacturing processes and creating devices with new functionalities.

Christopher B. Burge

Biology
Education: B.S. 1990, Ph.D. 1997 (both from Stanford University)
Joined MIT faculty: 2002
Burge is a national and international leader in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics. His work has led to software applications that are the most widely used tools from mammalian gene identification.

Elly Nedivi

Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Education: B.S. 1982 (Hebrew University, Israel), Ph.D. 1991 (Stanford University)
Joined MIT faculty: 1998
Nedivi studies the mechanims that underlie activity-dependent plasticity - the adaptive response of the brain to changes in the environment - in the developing and adult brain.

Yoel Fink

Materials Science and Engineering
Education: B.Sc. 1994, B.A. 1995 (both from Technion, Israel), Ph.D. 2000 (MIT)
Joined MIT faculty: 2000
Fink's research interests are in the theory, design, process development and characterization of novel multimaterial integrated fibers with engineered electronic and photonic properties.

Jun Pan

Sloan School of Management
Education: B.S. 1990 (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), M.S. 1991 (Western Illinois University), Ph.D. 1995 (New York University), Ph.D. 2000 (Stanford University)
Joined MIT faculty: 2000
Pan is highly regarded as a leading young asset-pricing scholar with a special focus on options and derivatives.

Christine Ortiz

Materials Science and Engineering
Education: B.S. 1992 (Rensselaer), M.S. 1994, Ph.D. 1997 (both from Cornell University)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Ortiz's research centers on "nanomechanics" - the study of very small forces, motions and deformations. Her specialty is the nanomechanics of biological materials such as cartilage, bone, seashells and bone implant materials.

Raffaele Ferrari

Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Education: B.S. 1994, M.S. 1994 (both from Università di Torino, Italy), Ph.D. 1999 (Politecnico di Torino, Italy), Ph.D. 2000 (Scripps Institution of Oceanography)
Joined MIT faculty: 2002
Ferrari's research focuses on three main topics - the dynamics of the upper ocean and air-sea interactions; the role of mesoscale eddies in the ocean circulation; and the influence of small-scale mixing on the abyssal ocean circulation and climate.

Christine J. Walley

Anthropology
Education: B.A. 1987 (Pomona College), M.A. 1993, Ph.D. 1999 (both from New York University)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Walley's research deals with international economic and social development, focusing on marine conservation and ecotourism, the environmentalist movement, gender, social class and documentary film.

Pawan Sinha

Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Education: B.S. 1988 (Indian Institute of Technology), M.S. 1992, Ph.D. 1995 (MIT)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Sinha's work focuses on three lines of research - object recognition, including face perception; brightness perception; and motion and 3D shape perception.

Christoph Paus

Physics
Education: First Degree-Mechanical Engineering 1989, First Degree-Mathematics 1990, First Degree-Physics 1990, Diploma 1992 (all from RWTH Aachen, Germany), Ph.D. 1996 (III. Phys. Institute RWTH Aachen, Germany)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Paus' research focuses on the understanding of elementary particle physics from the experimental point of view.

Denis S. Auroux

Mathematics
Education: Maîtrise 1994, Licence 1995 (both from École Normale Supérieure), Diplôme 1995 (Université Paris-Sud), Ph.D. 1999 (École Polytechnique), Habilitation 2003 (Université Paris-Sud)
Joined MIT faculty: 2002
Auroux is a world leader in symplectic geometry, a field that lies at the crossroads of major parts of contemporary mathematics and physics.

Timothy F. Jamison

Chemistry
Education: B.S. 1990 (University of California at Berkeley), Ph.D. 1997 (Harvard)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Jamison's research focuses on the discovery and application of new reactions for organic synthesis.

George Barbastathis

Mechanical Engineering
Education: Dipl. 1993 (National Technical University of Athens, Greece), M.S. 1994, Ph.D. 1998 (both from Caltech)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Barbastathis has made pioneering contributions to the field of information photonics and is considered to be the leading optical engineer of his generation.

J. Phillip Thompson

Urban Studies and Planning
Education: B.A. 1977 (Harvard), Master of Urban Planning 1986 (Hunter College, CUNY), Ph.D. 1990 (CUNY)
Joined MIT faculty: 2000
Thompson, an urban planner and political scientist, has made important intellectual contributions on the themes of social capital, health and racial ideology.

Robert Morris

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Education: A.B. 1988, Ph.D. 1999 (both from Harvard)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Morris is making fundamental contributions to the areas of computer and wireless networking and operating systems.

Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou

Mechanical Engineering
Education: B.A. 1993 (University of Cambridge), S.M. 1995, S.M. 1998, Ph.D. 1998 (all from MIT)
Joined MIT faculty: 1999
Hadjiconstantinou works on developing new models and tools in the area of fluid mechanics at small scales, i.e., micro flows.

Stefan Helmreich

Anthropology
Education: B.A. 1989 (UCLA), M.A. 1992, Ph.D. 1995 (both from Stanford University)
Joined MIT faculty: 2003
Helmreich is an anthropologist of the life sciences, in particular the scientific, social and cultural transformation of the biological category of "life" in an age of genomics, informatics and biotechnology.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 25, 2006 (download PDF).