Aiming High

“When September comes around at MIT, the air just crackles,” says Associate Provost Claude Canizares.

That’s mostly about the impact of returning students, notes Canizares, also MIT’s vice president for research. But there’s a similar if not so calendar-driven phenomenon that occurs when an MIT unit — a department, for example, or research center — has a critical mass of younger faculty.

“There’s just this feeling about it — a kind of fresh ‘oomph,’” says Canizares, formerly head of MIT’s Center for Space Research.

MIT, of course, has always taken special care in choosing candidates for faculty slots of all types. That’s especially crucial these days, says Canizares, when the pace of scientific and technological change just keeps accelerating, and when other top schools have made science and engineering key institutional priorities.

Meanwhile, the challenge of attracting the best keeps on growing. Canizares says it’s not unusual for the cost of equipping a lab for individual new faculty members in selected technical fields to top $1 million.

Yet the challenge is worth meeting, says the official, and not solely because MIT prides itself on the brilliance, commitment, and singular relevance of its faculty. Another rationale: the growing role of interdisciplinary research in many areas, including such current MIT priority realms as cancer and energy.

The Institute has a long tradition of fostering interdisciplinary work. Partly for that reason, faculty at all levels are steeped in the concept that boundaries between fields should be as porous as possible. “We have Nobel Prize-winners who are in the thick of multi-disciplinary projects”, says Canizares.

On the other hand, with today’s young faculty, the concept isn’t one that has to be imparted once they join MIT. They come here with the mindset that interdisciplinary work is a completely natural thing to do, he says. They’re walking the talk right from the start.

Such faculty, he notes, can also spur the development of exciting new lines of research, not least because they bring fresh perspectives on a wide range of fields to MIT. Here are selected examples of young faculty whose contributions are such that they have been honored with named career development professorships.

by Richard Anthony Next »

On Topic: faculty