Grimson and Boning named Associate Department Heads

July 26, 2004

Dear colleagues,

It is our pleasure to announce the appointments of Professors Eric Grimson and Duane Boning as Associate Department Heads in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), effective September 1, 2004.

Eric received a B.Sc. (High Honors) in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Regina and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT in 1980. He holds the Bernard Gordon Chair of Medical Engineering at MIT. He also holds a joint appointment as a Lecturer on Radiology at Harvard Medical School and at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Eric was Associate Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1998 to 2003. He currently serves as the Education Officer of MIT's EECS Department. He also heads the Computer Vision Group of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which has pioneered state-of-the-art systems for activity and behavior recognition, object and person recognition, image database indexing, image guided surgery, computational anatomy, site modeling and many other areas of computer vision. Eric has received the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching in the School of Engineering at MIT. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a Fellow of the IEEE.

Duane holds S.B. degrees in both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and earned his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1991, all from MIT. His research focuses on interconnect technology; variation modeling, control, and environmental issues in semiconductor and MEMS manufacturing; and CAD tools for statistical process, device, and circuit design. From 1991 to 1993 he was a Member of the Technical Staff at Texas Instruments in Dallas. Duane has been Associate Director of the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories since 1998. He is also serving as the Co-Director for Undergraduate Education in the Cambridge-MIT Institute. Duane has participated in the MIT Leaders for Manufacturing Program, as well as the manufacturing program of the Singapore-MIT Alliance. He is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing.

Both Eric and Duane have strong credentials in teaching and research, and a deep commitment to education, our department, and MIT. We are grateful to them for their willingness to accept such a demanding and important responsibility.

We also want to thank Professor Barbara Liskov, who steps down as Associate Department Head on August 31, 2004. Barbara is a wonderful colleague, an effective leader, a strong advocate for diversity, and an uncompromising promoter of quality in research and education. The Department has benefited tremendously from her leadership and wisdom. The good news is that we will all continue to benefit from Barbara's (as well as John Guttag's and Tomas Lozano Perez's) experience and expertise as a distinguished member of our faculty.

Tom Magnanti and Rafael Reif