Recent chair announcements within EECS

By Jane Halpern

October 25, 2022 | Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Top row, left to right: Phillip Isola, Will Oliver, Costis Daskalakis, Manish Raghavan Middle row, left to right: David Perreault, Muriel Médard Lower row, left to right: Polina Golland, Martha Gray, Martin Wainwright, Stefanie Mueller

The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) recently announced the following crop of chair appointments, all effective July 1, 2022.

Karl Berggren has been named the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor. Berggren heads the Quantum Nanostructures and Nanofabrication Group. He is also Director of the Nanostructures Laboratory in the Research Laboratory of Electronics and is a core faculty member in the Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL). From December of 1996 to September of 2003, Berggren served as a staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, and from 2010 to 2011, was on sabbatical at the Technical University of Delft.

His current research focuses on methods of nanofabrication, especially applied to superconductive quantum circuits, photodetectors, high-speed superconductive electronics, and energy systems. His thesis work focused on nanolithographic methods using neutral atoms.

Costis Daskalakis has been named the Inaugural Armen Avanessians (1982) Professor. Daskalakis is a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and an affiliate of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC). He is also an investigator in the MIT Institute for Foundations of Data Science (MIFODS). He primarily works on computation theory and its interface with game theory, economics, probability theory, statistics and machine learning.

Daskalakis completed his undergraduate studies in Greece, at the National Technical University of Athens, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral researcher in Microsoft Research-New England in 2008-2009, and has been with the MIT faculty since 2009.

Polina Golland has been named the Inaugural Sunlin (1996) and Priscilla Chou Professor. A principal investigator in CSAIL at MIT, Golland’s primary research interest is in developing novel techniques for biomedical image analysis and understanding. She is interested in shape modeling and representation, predictive modeling and visualization of statistical models. Her current research focuses on developing statistical analysis methods for characterization of biological processes based on image information. In this domain, she models biological shape and function, as well as how they relate to each other and vary across individuals.

After studying computer science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees there, Golland earned her Ph.D. at MIT in 2001. She joined the MIT faculty in 2003.

Martha Gray has been named the Whitaker Professor in Biomedical Engineering. Gray is also a core faculty member at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), and is a member of the faculty of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST).

Trained in computer science and electrical and biomedical engineering (BS in computer science Michigan State University, SM ’81, PhD ’86), and serving as an MIT faculty for three decades, Gray was the first woman to lead a science or engineering department at MIT. For more than 13 years she directed HST (where she received her PhD in medical engineering), and she currently directs MIT LinQ, which operates several multi-institutional ventures focusing on accelerating and deepening early-career researchers’ potential for impact.

Muriel Médard has been named the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering. Médard leads the Network Coding and Reliable Communications Group within RLE. Her research interests are in the areas of network coding and reliable communications, particularly for optical and wireless networks. Her work in network coding, hardware implementation, and her original algorithms have received widespread recognition and awards.

Médard obtained three Bachelors degrees (EECS 1989, Mathematics 1989 and Humanities 1991), as well as her M.S. (1991) and Sc.D (1995), all from MIT. Additionally, she is the co-founder of three companies to commercialize network coding — CodeOn, Steinwurf and Chocolate Cloud.

Will Oliver has been named the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. A joint appointment, Oliver is also a Professor of Physics. A Lincoln Laboratory Fellow, the Associate Director of RLE, and the Director of the Center for Quantum Engineering, Oliver 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.

Oliver received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and B.A. in Japanese from the University of Rochester (NY), his M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

David Perreault has been named the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering. Perreault’s research interests include design, manufacturing, and control techniques for power electronic systems and components, and their use in a wide range of applications. He also consults in industry, and co-founded Eta Devices, inc. (acquired by Nokia in 2016) and Eta Wireless, inc. (acquired by Murata in 2021) —both startup companies focusing on power management for high-efficiency RF power amplifiers. Over the years, Perreault has held multiple roles within the department, including a stint as Associate Department Head from November 2013 – December 2016.

Perreault received his B.S. from Boston University in 1989, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT in 1991 and 1997, respectively.  In 1997, he joined the MIT Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems as a Postdoctoral Associate, and became a Research Scientist in the laboratory in 1999.

Martin Wainwright has been named the Cecil H. Green Professor. Wainwright’s research interests include high-dimensional statistics, statistical machine learning, information theory, and optimization theory. Prior to joining MIT, Wainwright was the Howard Friesen Chair at the University of California at Berkeley, with a joint appointment between the Department of Statistics and the Department of EECS.

Wainwright received his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from University of Waterloo, Canada, and Ph.D. degree in EECS from MIT.

Career Development Chairs

Phillip Isola has been named the Class of 1948 Career Development Professor. Isola’s research explores learning representations that capture the commonalities between disparate domains, and thereby achieve generality; directly linking experiences via visual translation; and designing representations that can adapt fast. A leader in the use of machine learning to analyze and create images, Isola’s series of 2017 papers introduced a solution to the problem of image translation. His most recent work addresses another fundamental computer vision problem: the requirement of large amounts of labelled, or supervised, training data, which limits most learning-based approaches to computer vision.

Isola joined EECS as an Assistant Professor in July of 2018. He received his Ph.D. in 2015 from the Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) Department at MIT before taking on a postdoctoral position at Berkeley, followed by a visiting research scientist position at Open AI.

Stefanie Mueller has been named the TIBCO Career Development Professor. Mueller is the lead of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Engineering group at MIT CSAIL; in her research, she develops novel hardware and software systems that advance personal fabrication technologies. Of her group, she says that, “Our long-term vision is to give physical objects digital capabilities, such as allowing physical objects to change their appearance as easily as we can change the color of digital models today.”

Mueller earned her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Applied Science Harz in 2010, and her MSc and her PhD from the Hasso Plattner Institute, in 2013 and 2016, respectively.

Manish Raghavan joined the Sloan School of Management and the Department of EECS as an assistant professor in September 2022, and has been named the Drew Houston (2005) Career Development Professor. His research interests lie in the application of computational techniques to domains of social concern, including algorithmic fairness and behavioral economics, with a particular focus on the use of algorithmic tools in the hiring pipeline.

Raghavan received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and PhD from the Computer Science department at Cornell University. Prior to joining MIT, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society.