Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
E.H. Land, UROP Benefactor Dr. Edwin H. Land, the inventor of instant photography whose vision and financial support led to the establishment of MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), died March 1 in Cambridge after a long illness. He was 80. Private services were scheduled to be held today, March 6. Dr. Land was a visiting Institute Professor at MIT, a position he had held since 1956. In noting the long relationship, President Emeritus Jerome B. Wiesner said, "I will always remember Din Land for his exquisite taste. He set the highest standard of excellence for everything that he did, be it an affair of state, his science, his inventions, the company he built, his reports to its stockholders, the students who were fortunate enough to have him as their mentor or his many friends who sought his advice." UROP, organized in 1969, provides undergraduates the opportunity to participate with MIT faculty and research staff in a variety of projects. Before UROP hands-on research experience was rarely a serious undertaking for undergraduates at MIT and elsewhere. It was in 1957, as he gave the Arthur D. Little Lecture at MIT, that Dr. Land first outlined his view of the importance of involving undergraduates in original scientific investigation with leading faculty and researchers. His concern was that institutions tended to drive the creative curiosity out of young people by focusing mostly on basic learning without providing ways to experiment with innovation. He saw such experiences as key to the early maturation of the student's "own special creative capacities." He visualized undergraduates as becoming members of research teams and thus creating a place of their own at MIT. Three years later, in another lecture at MIT, Dr. Land saw a need for new industrial institutions that would require scientist-engineers who had immersed themselves in the arts and sciences and who had lived "a life of intimate association with all sorts of people. . ." In 1968 Dr. Land established a trust fund and dedicated its income-- nearly $1.5 million over the folllowing three years--to educational development at MIT. Out of that combination of vision and financial support, UROP was born. Professor Margaret L.A. MacVicar, Dean for Undergraduate Education at MIT and director of UROP since its beginning, had this comment: "Edwin Land had extraordinary insight into the hearts of young people and knew well how to inspire the most talented of them to excellence and greatness. His encouragement and support to MIT led to the development in 1969 of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, which is now much imitated worldwide, has been cited for national excellence by the US Secretary of Education, and is a model embraced by the National Science Foundation and private foundations. "Since then some 20,000 MIT students, the cream of engineering and science undergraduates, have grown, bloomed and often patented and published as junior colleagues in partnership with faculty on projects of mutual interest. "MIT, its students and this nation are deeply indebted to Edwin Land for his insight and his inspiration. His was not just a passive interest. Mr. Land often participated with students as a supervisor of research and Polaroid was a frequent site for UROP activities." Dr. Land also developed the Retinex theory of color vision, starting in the mid 1950s. His work in that field led him to experiments that showed inconsistencies in the classical concept of how color is sensed. The Retinex theory of the comparative computations in the brain that produce color vision has had a wide impact in the brain sciences. In 1987 Dr. Land was asked to be the inaugural lecturer for the Sherman Fairchild Foundation Brain Sciences Lecture Series at MIT.