Department of EECS names new chair recipients

By Jane Halpern

July 25, 2024 | Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Top row, left to right: Caroline Uhler, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Yael Kalai Bottom row, left to right: Yury Polyanskiy, Adam Chlipala, Jing Kong, Sendhil Mullainathan

The Department is pleased to announce the new crop of chair recipients, which include:

Adam Chlipala has been named the Arthur J. Conner (1888) Professor, effective July 1. Chlipala earned his BS from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2003, and his MS and PhD from Berkeley in 2004 and 2007, respectively. He spent time at Jane Street as a software developer and Harvard as a postdoc before joining MIT in 2011. Chlipala is the head of the Programming Languages and Verification Group in CSAIL, where his research focuses on developing methods for integrating the work of software and digital hardware design and verification. His recent work on formally verified compilation for cryptographic libraries has been adopted by Google for its Chrome web browser. 

Among other honors, Chlipala has been awarded a 2013 NSF CAREER award, a Best Paper award at SOSP 2015 for his FSCQ work on file system verification, the Most Influential Paper award at the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) 2018 and two Communication of the ACM (CACM) research highlights. He was elected as ACM Distinguished Member in 2019. In 2023, he was awarded the Department of EECS’s Burgess (1952) & Elizabeth Jamieson Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Yael Kalai has been named the Ellen Swallow Richards (1873) Professor, effective July 1. Kalai completed her PhD at MIT in 2006, previously graduating from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1997 and earning a master’s degree at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2001. A member of CSAIL, Kalai currently focuses on both the theoretical and real-world applications of cryptography, including work on succinct and easily verifiable non-interactive proofs. Her extensive contributions to the field include the 2021 co-invention of ring signatures (a type of digital signature that could protect the identity of a signee) with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir. Additionally, Kalai’s work on the widely-adopted Fiat-Shamir heuristic established a better understanding of the paradigm’s security issues.  Her work later evolved into key components of cryptocurrency systems, and is now used by companies such as Cryptonote, Monero and Etherium. 

Her awards include an Outstanding Master’s Thesis Prize from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2001, the George M. Sprowls Award for Best Doctoral Thesis in Computer Science in 2007, an MIT Presidential Graduate Fellowship 2003 to 2006, an IBM PhD Fellowship from 2004 to 2006, an International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) fellowship, and the 2022 ACM Prize in Computing.

Jing Kong has been named the Jerry Mcafee (1940) Professor In Engineering, effective July 1. She received the B.S in chemistry from Peking University in 1997 and the Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford University in 2002. Following stints as a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center and a postdoctoral researcher at Delft University, she joined the EECS faculty in 2004. Kong is a principal investigator in RLE, where she heads the Nanomaterials and Electronics Group. Her research interests focus on the vapor deposition synthesis of low dimensional materials including carbon nanotubes, graphene, and other 2D materials, their characterizations and potential applications. 

Kong is a member of the IEEE. Among other awards, she has received the Jerome H. Saltzer Award for Excellence in Teaching, the HKN (Eta Kappa Nu) Best Instructor Award, the 2001 Foresight Distinguished Student Award in Nanotechnology in 2001, the Stanford Annual Reviews Prize in Physical Chemistry in 2002, and the MIT 3M Award in 2005.

Sendhil Mullainathan has been named the Peter de Florez Professor, effective July 1. Mullainathan received his BA in computer science, mathematics, and economics from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard University, then spent five years at MIT before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2004, and then the University of Chicago in 2018; he joins the department of EECS, with a dual appointment in Economics, this month. Mullainathan’s research builds algorithmic tools to understand complex problems in human behavior, social policy and medicine. 

Among other awards, he is a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” has been designated a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, was labeled a “Top 100 Thinker” by Foreign Policy Magazine, and was named to the “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world” by Wired Magazine (UK). He serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation, is affiliated with the NBER and BREAD, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Yury Polyanskiy has been named the Leverett Howell Cutten ’07 And William King Cutten ’39 Professor, effective July 1. Polyanskiy received his M.S. degree in applied mathematics and physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2005, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2010. After a postdoc at Princeton, he joined MIT EECS in 2011; he currently serves as the Education Officer for AI+D within the Department of EECS. Polyanskiy’s research interests span information theory, statistical machine learning, error-correcting codes and wireless communication. His work is fundamentally rooted in a fascination with the flow of information: be it in the traditional setting of digital communication, or (more recently) in the domain of machine learning from data.

Polyanskiy’s excellence in research and teaching was recognized by the Department of EECS with the Jerome Salzer Teaching Award in 2016, and with the IEEE Information Theory society James L. Massey award in 2020. In addition, he was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2024, an Amazon Scholar in 2020, and received the 2013 NSF CAREER award and 2011 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award. 

Caroline Uhler has been named the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Engineering, effective July 1. Uhler holds BSc degrees in math and biology, an MSc in mathematics, and an MEd in mathematics education from the University of Zurich (years spanning 2004-7), and a PhD in statistics from UC Berkeley (2011). Before joining MIT as a faculty member in 2015, she spent three years as an assistant professor at IST Austria. She is a professor in both EECS and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). She is also affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), The Statistics and Data Science Center, and the Operations Research Center (ORC). Additionally, Uhler is a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she is the director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center. Uhler’s research focuses on machine learning methods for integrating and translating between vastly different data modalities and inferring causal or regulatory relationships from such data. She is particularly interested in using these methods to gain mechanistic insights into the link between genome packing and regulation in health and disease.

She is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and is the recipient of a Simons Investigator Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and an NSF Career Award. Recently, she was named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), 2024, and a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Class of 2023.

Vinod Vaikuntanathan has been named the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering, effective July 1. He earned his BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2003, and his SM and PhD degrees from MIT in 2005 and 2009, respectively. After a postdoctoral stint at IBM Research, a year as a researcher at Microsoft, and two years as a faculty member at the University of Toronto, he joined the faculty of MIT EECS in September 2013. A principal investigator at CSAIL and the chief cryptographer at Duality Technologies, Vaikuntanathan’s research focuses upon the foundations of cryptography and its applications to theoretical computer science at large. He is known for his work on fully homomorphic encryption (a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables complex computations on encrypted data), as well as lattice-based cryptography (which lays down a new mathematical foundation for cryptography in the post-quantum world). Recently, he has been interested in the interactions of cryptography with quantum computing, as well as with statistics and machine learning. 

Among many other awards, Vaikuntanathan has received the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Award, the Godel Prize, the Simons Investigator Award, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a Best Paper Award from CRYPTO 2024, test of time awards from IEEE FOCS and CRYPTO conferences, and was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2024.