The School of Engineering welcomes 15 recent faculty members in six of its departments. These recent faculty members, who recently began working at MIT or will begin next yr, conduct research in a wide selection of disciplines.
Many of those recent faculty concentrate on research that intersects multiple disciplines. In addition to positions within the School of Engineering, a few of these faculty have positions in other units at MIT. Faculty with appointments within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) report back to each the School of Engineering and the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. This yr there are also joint appointments for brand new faculties between the Faculty of Engineering, the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Science.
“I’m pleased to welcome this cohort of talented recent faculty to the School of Engineering,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, chief innovation and strategy officer, dean of engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I’m particularly impressed by the interdisciplinary approach that lots of these recent faculty soak up their research. They are working in areas that could have a huge effect. I sit up for watching them grow as researchers and educators.”
The recent Faculty of Engineering includes:
Stephen Bates joined the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in September 2023. He can be a member of the Information and Decision Systems Laboratory (LIDS). Bates uses data and AI to make reliable decisions within the face of uncertainty. In particular, he develops tools for statistical inference with AI models, data influenced by strategic behavior, and settings with distributional shifts. Bates also works on applications in life sciences and sustainability. Previously, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow within the statistics and EECS departments on the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Bates received a BS in statistics and arithmetic from Harvard University and a PhD from Stanford University.
Abigail Bodner joined the EECS and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences departments in January as an assistant professor. She can be a member of LIDS. Bodner's research interests include climate, physical oceanography, geophysical fluid dynamics and turbulence. Previously, she worked as a Simons Junior Fellow on the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Bodner received her BS in geophysics and arithmetic and her MS in geophysics from Tel Aviv University and her SM in applied mathematics and her PhD from Brown University.
Andreea Bobu '17 will join the Department of Aerospace Engineering as an assistant professor in July. Her research lies on the intersection of robotics, human mathematical modeling and deep learning. Previously, she was a research scientist on the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, specializing in how robots and humans can efficiently arrive at shared representations of their tasks to enable more seamless and reliable interactions. Bobu earned a BS in computer science and engineering from MIT and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley.
Suraj Cheema will join the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in July as an assistant professor, with a joint appointment within the EECS department. His research focuses on developing electronic materials on the atomic level to deal with challenges related to energy consumption, storage and generation and to develop more sustainable microelectronics. This includes computing and energy technologies via integrated ferroelectric devices. He previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley. Cheema holds a BS in applied physics and applied mathematics from Columbia University and a PhD in materials science and engineering from UC Berkeley.
Samantha Coday will join the EECS department as an assistant professor in July. She can even join the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics. Her research interests include ultra-dense power converters enabling renewable energy integration, hybrid electric aircraft, and future space exploration. To enable high performance converters for these critical applications, her research focuses on the optimization, design and control of hybrid switched capacitor converters. Coday holds a BS in electrical engineering and arithmetic from Southern Methodist University and an MS and PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley.
Mitchell Gordon will join the EECS Department as an assistant professor in July. He can even be a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In his research, Gordon designs interactive systems and assessment approaches that mix principles of human-computer interaction with the realities of machine learning. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow on the University of Washington. Gordon received a BS from the University of Rochester and an MS and PhD from Stanford University, all in computer science.
Kaiming He joined the EECS department as an associate professor in February. He can even join the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research interests cover a wide selection of topics within the areas of computer vision and deep learning. He is currently focused on constructing computer models that may learn representations and develop intelligence from and for the complex world. In the long run, he hopes to enhance human intelligence through improved artificial intelligence. Before coming to MIT, he was a research scientist at Facebook AI. He earned a BS from Tsinghua University and a PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Anna Huang SM '08 will join the EECS and Music and Theater Departments as an assistant professor in September. She will help develop graduate programs focused on music technology. Previously, she spent eight years at Magenta at Google Brain and DeepMind, where she led efforts in generative modeling, reinforcement learning, and human-computer interaction to support human-AI partnerships in music-making. She is the creator of Music Transformer and Coconet (on which the Bach Google Doodle relies). She was a judge and organizer of the AI Song Contest. Anna holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila, a BM in Music Composition and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, an MS from MIT Media Lab, and a PhD from Harvard University.
Yael Kalai PhD '06 will join the Department of EECS as a professor in September. She can be a member of CSAIL. Her research interests include cryptography, computational theory, and security and privacy. Kalai is currently focused on each the theoretical and real-world applications of cryptography, including work on succinct and simply verifiable non-interactive proofs. She received her bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a master's degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a PhD from MIT.
Sendhil Mullainathan will join the EECS and Economics departments as a professor in July. His research uses machine learning to know complex problems in human behavior, social policy, and medicine. Previously, Mullainathan spent five years at MIT before joining the school at Harvard in 2004 and the University of Chicago in 2018. He received his BA in computer science, mathematics, and economics from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Alex Rives will join the Department of EECS in September as an assistant professor, with a core membership on the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In his research, Rives focuses on AI for scientific understanding, discovery, and design for biology. Rives worked with Meta as a graduate student at New York University, where he founded and led the Evolutionary Scale Modeling team that developed large language models for proteins. Rives received his BS in philosophy and biology from Yale University and is currently pursuing his PhD in computer science at NYU.
Sungho Shin can be appointed as an assistant professor within the Faculty of Chemical Engineering in July. His research interests include control theory, optimization algorithms, high-performance computing and their applications in decision-making in complex systems corresponding to energy infrastructures. Shin is a postdoctoral fellow within the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Argonne National Laboratory. He received a BS in mathematics and chemical engineering from Seoul National University and a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jessica Stark joined the Department of Bioengineering as an assistant professor in January. In her research, Stark develops technologies to use the largely untapped potential of cell surface sugars, so-called glycans, for immunological discoveries and immunotherapies. Previously, Stark was an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. She earned a bachelor's degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Cornell University and a doctorate in chemical and biological engineering from Northwestern University.
Thomas John “TJ” Wallin joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in January. As a researcher, Wallin's interests lie in advanced functional soft matter manufacturing, with a give attention to soft wearable technologies and their applications in human-computer interfaces. Previously, he was a research associate at Meta's Reality Labs Research, working on the haptic interaction team. Wallin earned a BS in physics and chemistry from the College of William and Mary and an MS and PhD in materials science and engineering from Cornell University.
Giorgio Zardini joined the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering in September as an assistant professor. He can even join LIDS and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society. Driven by societal challenges, Zardini's research interests include co-design of sociotechnical systems, compositionality in engineering, applied category theory, decision and control, optimization and game theory with socially critical applications to intelligent transportation systems, autonomy and complicated networks and infrastructures. He received his bachelor's, master's and PhD in mechanical engineering with a give attention to robotics, systems and controls from ETH Zurich and frolicked at MIT, Stanford University and Motional.
