The tenured engineers of 2019

(L to R) EECS Professors Mądry, Williams, and Sanchez

School of Engineering

MIT has granted tenure to 17 School of Engineering faculty members, including three from EECS: Aleksander Mądry, Daniel Sanchez, and Virginia Vassilevska Williams.

“The tenured faculty in this year’s cohort are a true inspiration,” said Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “They have shown exceptional dedication to research and teaching, and their innovative work has greatly advanced their fields.”

Following are details about the newly tenured EECS faculty members, who are also principal investigators in in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Aleksander Mądry studies topics ranging from developing new algorithms using continuous optimization, to combining theoretical and empirical insights, to building a more principled and thorough understanding of key machine learning tools. A major theme of his research is rethinking machine learning from the perspective of security and robustness.

Before joining the MIT faculty in 2015, Madry was an assistant professor of computer science at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England. Among other awards and honors, he has received the Presburger Award from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), a Google Research Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER Award. He received a PhD in computer science from MIT in 2011.

Daniel Sanchez works on computer architecture and computer systems with an emphasis on large-scale multi-core processors, scalable and efficient memory hierarchies, architectures with quality-of-service guarantees, and scalable runtimes and schedulers. He joined the MIT faculty in 2012.

Awards and honors include, among others, three Google Faculty Research Awards, and an NSF CAREER Award. He received several IEEE Micro “Top Picks from the Computer Architecture Conferences” awards and was inducted in the Micro Hall of Fame in 2018. He received a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2012.

Virginia Vassilevska Williams is the Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Associate Professor. She applies combinatorial and graph theoretic tools to develop efficient algorithms for matrix multiplication, shortest paths, and a variety of other fundamental problems. Her recent research is centered on proving tight relationships between seemingly different computational problems. She is also interested in computational social choice issues, such as making elections computationally resistant to manipulation.

Before joining the MIT faculty in 2017, she was an assistant professor and research associate at Stanford, an assistant research engineer at the University of California at Berkeley, and a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley and the Institute for Advance Study. Among other honors, she has received a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and a Hoover Fellowship from Stanford. In 2018, she was an invited lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians, and she was a technical co-chair for Rising Stars in EECS at MIT. She received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.

For a full list of the School of Engineering’s newest tenure tenured associate professors, please visit the MIT News website.