Spring 2005 Seminar Series

Prof. de Weck was born in Bern, Switzerland in 1968 and holds masters degrees in industrial engineering from ETH Zurich (1993), and in aerospace systems engineering from MIT (1999). His doctoral research at MIT developed the "Isoperformance" methodology for target-based system design (2001). Before joining MIT he was a liaison engineer and later engineering program manager on the F/A-18 aircraft project at McDonnell Douglas (1993-1997).

Prof. de Weck's current research in Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) and System Architecture (SA) focuses on large systems in the aerospace, automotive and telecommunications industries. Currently, many of these systems are conceptualized based on ad-hoc decision-making, or they evolve gradually without conforming to a strategic plan. A number of Prof. de Weck’s formulations and optimization algorithms are being incorporated in industrial practice (e.g. at General Motors) and in professional software packages. He places particular emphasis on resolving tradeoffs between short-term performance/cost criteria and lifecycle properties ("Illities") such as scalability and reconfigurability. Prof. de Weck is currently the Robert N. Noyce Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering. He is a senior member of AIAA, as well as a member of IEEE, INFORMS, ASEE, SPIE and Sigma Xi and serves on the AIAA MDO Technical Committee. He is the Technical Chair for the 1st AIAA MDO Specialist Conference in April 2005. He won two best paper awards at the 2004 Systems Engineering Conference of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), the world’s largest community of practitioners and academics in the field of Systems Engineering. He is an affiliate faculty member of the ORC.

http://web.mit.edu/deweck/www/