Founded in 2018 and named for the late EECS professor, the annual Seth J. Teller Award for Excellence, Inclusion, and Diversity honors members of the MIT community who embody those three values through work, research, or educational innovation.
Eligibility
MIT Students, staff and faculty are all eligible. Any EECS student, member of staff, or faculty member wishing to nominate someone for this award should send a short email to teller-award@mit.edu stating how the nominee embodies excellence, enhances diversity, and/or promotes inclusion in the MIT community.
Background
Seth Teller was a technological visionary who pursued grand challenges throughout his career. Full of ideas and enthusiasm, Seth was driven to make bold rather than incremental advances to help people’s everyday lives. A native of Connecticut, Teller received his BA in physics from Wesleyan University in 1985 and his PhD in Computer Science from Berkeley in 1992. He joined the MIT Faculty in EECS in 1994 and was promoted to Professor in 2007.
Teller’s research was driven by the idea that robots might someday work collaboratively with people. He made major contributions in numerous arenas: computer graphics, digital mapping of cities, navigation for mobile robots, perception for self-driving cars, aids for the blind, assistive technology, and human robot interaction. He was the recipient of many awards, including an NSF Career Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship.
Additionally, Teller was an inspirational teacher. He co-developed and taught 6.141 Robotics: Science and Systems, a cornerstone of MIT’s robotics curriculum, and also developed 6.811: Principles and Practice of Assistive Technology. In this class, small teams of students work with a single individual who lives with a disability to develop an assistive technology device to provide aid to them in the performance of some activity of daily living. Teller was deeply committed in his service to the Institute, especially to EECS undergraduate and graduate students. He was a mentor for several hundred UROP projects and was a recipient of the MIT IEEE/ACM Best Undergraduate Academic Advisor Award.
Past Winners
The award’s past winners include:
2022
Rachel Holladay
Justin Solomon
2021
Caris Mariah Moses
Arvind Satyanarayan
2020
Leslie Kolodziejski
Candace Ross
Jose Cambronero
2019
Bruke Mesfin Kifle
Ronitt Rubinfeld
2018
Irene Chen
Marzyeh Ghassemi