Dr. Sarma is a Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur with his B Tech in 1989 and received his Masters from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992. He earned his Ph. D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. Dr. Sarma began his career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996, after working for Schlumberger, Inc. and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories.

In 1999, along with Dr. David Brock and Professor Sunny Siu, he co-founded The Auto-ID Center at MIT, which developed many of the technical concepts and standards prevalent in the RFID industry today. The center has now grown to 5 labs worldwide, including the University of Cambridge, Adelaide University, Keio University and Fudan University.

Dr. Sarma currently serves on the Boards of Governors for EPCglobal. He is a board member for OATSystems, a software company he helped found during his leave of absence from MIT 2004-2006. Dr. Sarma is also a trustee of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council.

He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Initiation Grant, the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Chair at MIT, the Den Hartog Teaching Excellence Award, and the Joseph H. Keenan Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education.

Principal Fields of Interest:

• Computer Aided Design; Solid Modeling; Computational Geometry; Computer Aided Manufacturing; Machine Tool Automation; Machine Tool Design;
• Automatic Identification; Radio Frequency Identification; Integrated Circuit Packaging; Enterprise Software; Supply Chain Management

Phillip A. Sharp is an Institute Professor at MIT. Much of his scientific work has been conducted at MIT's Center for Cancer Research (now the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research), which he joined in 1974 and directed from 1985-1991. He subsequently led the Department of Biology from 1991-1999 before assuming the directorship of the McGovern Institute from 2000-2004.

Sharp has authored more than 350 scientific papers. He has received numerous awards and honorary degrees, and has served on many advisory boards for the government, academic institutions, scientific societies and companies. His awards include the Gairdner Foundation International Award, General Motors Research Foundation Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Prize for Cancer Research, the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the National Medal of Science and the inaugural Double Helix Medal from CSHL. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

A native of Kentucky, Sharp earned a BA degree from Union College, Kentucky in 1966, and a PhD in chemistry from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1969. He did his postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology, where he studied the molecular biology of plasmids from bacteria in Professor Norman Davidson's laboratory. Prior to joining MIT, he was senior scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In 1978, he co-founded Biogen (now Biogen Idec), and in 2002 he co-founded Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, an early-stage therapeutics company.

David Simchi-Levi is an expert in supply chain management. He has consulted and collaborated extensively with private and public organizations.

He has co-authored three books on supply-chain management. His book Designing and Managing the Supply Chain (McGraw-Hill, 3rd edition, 2007) was selected by Business 2.0 as the “best source for slashing time and cost and increasing productivity in the supply chain.”

David Staelin has been a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty and Research Laboratory of Electronics since 1965. He also was assistant director, MIT Lincoln Laboratory (1990-2001); co-founder, MIT Venture Mentoring Service (2000); chairman, MIT's EECS Graduate Area in Electronics, Computers and Systems (1976-1990); and a faculty member of MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing Program (1985-1998). He was a director of environmental research and technology (1969-1978), and co-founder and chairman of PictureTel Corp. (1984-87). He is a fellow of the IEEE and AAAS, and received the 1996 Distinguished Achievement Award from the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society.

Staelin was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (2003-05), chairman of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Radio Frequency Requirements for Research (1983-86), and a member of several NASA committees and working groups, including the Space Applications Advisory Committee; the Advanced Microwave Sounder Working Group; the Geostationary Platform-Earth Science Steering Committee; and the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Science Steering Group. He was principal investigator for the NASA Nimbus-E Microwave Spectrometer (launched 1972 on Nimbus 5), and the Scanning Microwave Spectrometer (launched 1975 on Nimbus 6). He was co-investigator of the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Spectrometer (1977 launch, Nimbus 7) and the Voyager Planetary Radio Astronomy Experiment (1977 launch, Voyagers 1 and 2). Additionally, he is a member of the NASA Atmospheric Infrared Sounder team (Aqua launch 2002), the NPP Science Team, the NOAA IPO Sounder Operational Algorithm Team, and the NASA Precipitation Mapping Mission Science Team.

Bernhardt Trout’s research focuses on molecular engineering, specifically, the development and application of both computational and experimental molecular based methods to engineering chemical products and processes with unprecedented specificity.

Since 2000, he has focused on molecular engineering for crystallization, formulation and the development of pharmaceutical separation processes. In 2007, together with several colleagues from MIT, he set up the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing, a partnership with the objective of transforming pharmaceutical manufacturing. In addition to Novartis, he has worked with many other pharmaceutical companies in research or consulting. He has published more than 80 papers and currently has four patent applications submitted.