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MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
EECS Announcement |
December 29, 2000
The EECS Department is pleased to announce that Professor Paul Penfield, Jr. is the recipient of the Outstanding Service Award 2000 for the National Electrical Engineering Department Heads Association (NEEDHA). The Outstanding Service Award is given annually to a NEEDHA member or former member in recognition of his/her commitment and dedication to electrical and computer engineering education, leadership and extensive contributions to NEEDHA, and outstanding service to the profession throughout his/her career.
Paul completed the Sc.D. in electrical engineering at MIT in 1960, under the supervision of Prof. Hermann Haus. He joined the faculty that year, becoming a full professor in 1969. Since then, he has served the Department ceaselessly, as Associate Head of the Department from 1974 to 1978, as Director of the Microsystems Research Center from 1985 to 1989, and as EECS Department Head from 1989 to 1999. In addition, Paul served as President of NEEDHA from 1996-1997. He is currently Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Electrical Engineering.
Early in his career, Paul's research was primarily in the area of electrodynamics of moving media. Among his more notable contributions was the first correct description of magnetic forces in time-varying magnetic fields. This issue led Paul to formulate more general results in special relativity of time-varying fields involving the energy-momentum tensor. This work appeared in the book "Electrodynamics of Moving Media," co-authored with Hermann Haus.
Paul is also well-known for his work as a circuit theorist. His circuit-theory expertise and feeling for applications lead to a widely recognized contribution to VLSI timing analysis. He formulated a set of closed-form formulas that give upper and lower bounds on signal delay through branching fanout networks on chips. These are several orders of magnitude faster to compute than numerical simulations on a circuit simulator like SPICE. Paul and his coauthors were awarded the IEEE Darlington prize for this important piece of work.
Paul is also a great and dedicated teacher. He has taught, and taught well, a great breadth of courses ranging from electromagnetic fields, classical dynamics, linear systems, circuit theory and devices to 6.111, and 6.001. He recently developed an exciting new freshman subject on entitled Information and Entropy.
The Department extends warm congratulations to Paul on this well deserved honor.