MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science EECS Great Educators

Professor Adler was a major contributor to extensive revisions in electrical engineering education that were made in the 1950s and again in the 1960s. In the early 1950s our department concluded that, in light of extensive post-World War II advancements in electrical technology, the profession would be better served if our undergraduate program consisted of a core curriculum that emphasized fundamental scientific principles underlying modern electrical engineering, rather than only traditional engineering practice. Through his wisdom and insights about electrical engineering fundamentals, Professor Adler played an important role in the development of the new curriculum. This "engineering-science" approach was widely adopted and has served the profession well for many decades.

Later, in the 1960s, he was a leader in the preparation of textbooks and films that would help move undergraduate electrical engineering education, nationwide, away from vacuum-tube electronics and into the age of solid-state semiconductor electronics.

Born in New York City in 1922, Professor Adler attended Harvard University before transferring to MIT, where he received the S.B. degree in electrical engineering in 1943. While working toward his degree he was a VI-A student, doing his internship at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Upon graduation he joined the MIT Radar School staff while serving as an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He received the Sc.D. degree at MIT in 1949 and was appointed to the faculty a year later.

The undergraduate core curriculum adopted by our Department in the 1950s included a substantial amount of material on electromagnetism and on electromagnetic energy transmission and propagation over a wide range of frequencies, including the recently developed microwave part of the spectrum. It was to this body of material that Professor Adler made important contributions. He and two colleagues, Lan J. Chu and Robert M. Fano, published two textbooks, one on Electromagnetic Fields, Energy and Forces, the other on Electromagnetic Energy Transmission and Radiation. Together, the two texts laid the groundwork for effective teaching of these subjects, not only in our Department at MIT, but in electrical engineering departments across the country.

In the early 1960s, after the invention and adoption of the transistor, it became evident that the golden age of vacuum-tube electronics was ending, and the age of solid-state electronics was beginning. Professor Adler responded by starting initiatives that helped ensure that instructional materials would become available to the university community at large, for use at the undergraduate level. He formed and became technical director of the international Semiconductor Electronics Education Committee (SEEC), a group of 30 educators and engineers from industry and academia, whose job was to prepare instructional material on semiconductor theory and applications suitable for undergraduate teaching. SEEC eventually published seven books and four films. Professor Adler was co-author of two of the books.

Professor Adler was one of those unusual persons who was both an outstanding scholar and administrator. As Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and later as Distinguished Professor, he made critical analyses of the various sub-areas of our department to ensure that the educational programs were at the leading edge of technology, while concurrently carrying out his own research with his graduate students.

He was appointed Associate Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1978. In this capacity he participated in the plan-ning and fund-raising for the Microsystems Technology Laboratories which now provide research opportunities for approximately two hundred graduate and undergraduate students. He became co-director of MTL in 1979.

Professor Adler was awarded the prestigious Education Medal by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1986 for "leadership in engineering education through teaching and textbooks in semiconductors and electromagnetics." His brilliant career ended abruptly in 1990 when he was struck by a car while jogging, and died of his injuries at age 67.