The tenured engineers of 2020

Top row, left to right: Thomas Heldt and William Oliver. Bottom row, left to right: , Vivienne Sze, and Caroline Uhler.

The School of Engineering has announced that MIT has granted tenure to eight members of its faculty, including four from EECS: Thomas Heldt, William Oliver, Vivianne Sze and Caroline Uhler

“This year’s newly tenured faculty in the School of Engineering are truly inspiring,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “Their dedication to research and teaching drives novel solutions urgently needed to advance their fields.”

This year’s newly tenured associate professors are:

Thomas Heldt, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, focuses his research on signal processing, mathematical modeling, and model identification to understand the physiology of the injured brain and to support real-time clinical decision-making, monitoring of disease progression, and titration of therapy. His research is conducted in close collaboration with clinicians from Boston-area hospitals — particularly in emergency, neonatal and neurocritical care — where his team is integrally involved in designing and deploying high-fidelity data-acquisition systems and in collecting clinical data. 

William Oliver, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, works with the Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems Group at Lincoln Laboratory and the Engineering Quantum Systems Group at MIT, where he provides programmatic and technical leadership for programs related to the development of quantum and classical high-performance computing technologies for quantum information science applications. His interests include the materials growth, fabrication, design, and control of superconducting quantum processors, as well as the development of cryogenic packaging and control electronics involving cryogenic CMOS and single-flux quantum digital logic. He is director of the Center for Quantum Engineering and associate director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics.

Vivienne Sze, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, focuses her research on designing and implementing computing systems that enable energy-efficient machine learning, computer vision, and video compression for a wide range of applications, including autonomous navigation, digital health, and the internet of things. In particular, she is interested in the joint design of algorithms, architectures, circuits, and systems to enable optimal tradeoffs between energy consumption, speed, and quality of results. 

Caroline Uhler, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, focuses her research at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and genomics. In particular, she is interested in obtaining a better understanding of genome regulation by developing machine learning methods that can integrate different data modalities, including interventional data, and bridge the gap from predictive to causal modeling.

Original article published on the MIT News website on July 24, 2020