George Verghese receives 2021 Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising

George Verghese. Photo credit: Ann Kailath

MIT’s School of Engineering has named George Verghese, Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, the 2021 recipient of the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising. The award honors “those exemplary professionals who have significantly and consistently supported the personal and professional development of their students and colleagues, have enduringly engaged minds, elevated spirits and stimulated best efforts.”

Verghese has been on the Department’s faculty since 1979 and is Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering. He served as the EECS Education Officer from 2004 to 2008. He received the MIT ACM/IEEE Best EECS Advisor award from the Department’s students in both 2003 and 2006, and the Department’s Jamieson Teaching Award in 2010. He was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT in 2011, for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education. Associate Professor of EECS Thomas Heldt, who was a postdoctoral associate with Verghese in the 2000s, shared his perspective on what he called Verghese’s “great gift” for advising: “Whether it is through his meticulous preparation for his lectures, the time he makes to meet with and advise students, the care he takes in commenting on thesis and manuscript drafts, the out-of-the-blue e-mails he sends to colleagues congratulating them on particular pieces of work of theirs he happened to come across, or his past service on the MIT Faculty Newsletter editorial board, helping to frame and steer often heated and passionate discussions into fruitful directions, George has demonstrated a deep and lasting commitment to the personal and professional growth of innumerable members of our community.”

Verghese received his BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1974, his MS from Stony Brook University in 1975, and his PhD from Stanford University in 1979, all in electrical engineering. His research interests and publications are in the areas of dynamic systems, modeling, signal processing, and control. His research focus for two decades was on applications in power systems and power electronics, and since then has been on applications in biomedicine. He is currently a Principal Investigator with MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), where he co-directs the Computational Physiology and Clinical Inference Group. He is an IEEE Fellow, and coauthored the textbooks currently used in 6.334 (Principles of Power Electronics) and 6.011 (Signals, Systems and Inference).

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