Community Building Committee Chair – David Engel

Welcome to the community building and outreach committee!

Goals:

- Encourage participation and involvement within the MIT community;
- Organize networking and social events that create a supportive peer group and integrate postdocs into the larger MIT community;

- Enlist the support of MIT postdoctoral trainees towards PDA efforts through committee participation and involvement;

- Organizing social events, mixers and networking events that bring together Postdocs from different schools all over Boston.

Since the past year we have been organizing social events approximately once every two months. These events are aimed at bringing together postdocs from all over MIT in a relaxed setting to foster community building and cooperation across departments and disciplines. With attendances of over 100 people, we are able to reach a considerable portion of the Postdocs at MIT.

We also helped to organize a mixer event for Postdocs from several schools in Boston, including Harvard and Charles MGH. Furthermore, we have an ongoing cooperation with the K12 initiative from the Khan Academy, helping them recruiting Postdocs as reviewers for science videos produced by students.

We are always looking for volunteers to help us plan, organize and run social events. Your involvement can be as little as helping to set up food at the socials or as much as suggesting, planning and running events that you think could improve the postdoctoral community.

Bio:
David Engel is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Sloan School of Management. He got his PhD in Computer Science at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.