MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Professor Paul Penfield Awarded Dugald C. Jackson Chair

January 18, 2000

The EECS Department is pleased to announce that Professor Paul Penfield has been awarded the Dugald C. Jackson Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The Chair is named after Professor Dugald Jackson, who was EECS Department Head from 1907 to 1935. In the more than quarter century since its establishment, this chair has been held by only two people prior to Paul, Louis Smullin and Joel Moses.

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.

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 is currently working on an exciting new freshman subject on "information."

In addition to his accomplishments in teaching and research, Paul has served the EECS Department in many administrative capacities: Associate Department Head, Director of the Microsystems Research Center (now MTL), and finally Department Head. Many know Paul best through his highly successful tenure as EECS Department Head, which ran for ten years starting in 1989. The Department accomplished many things under Paul's leadership. Most notably, Paul secured the long term future of the Department by hiring a string of extraordinary young faculty. Attempting to fill Paul's shoes has been a daunting task for current Department Head John Guttag.