Steven R. Lerman received his SB in Civil Engineering in 1972 and his SM and PhD in Transportation Systems in 1973 and 1975, all from MIT. In 1975, he joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor of civil engineering and currently holds the Class of 1922 Professorship in Civil and Environmental Engineering.
In addition to serving as MIT's Dean for Graduate Education, Professor Lerman 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 chairs the Faculty Advisory Committee of the MIT OpenCourseWare 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.
He 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, in 1977 and 2005, as well as a Graduate Student Council Teaching Award, in 1978. Professor Lerman was chair of the MIT Faculty in 2006-2007 and from 2000 to 2002, serving as associate chair/chair elect during 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, as well as the acting co-director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance. This is MIT's largest distance learning initiative, involving five graduate degree programs and large scale, collaborative research with the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University.
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.