Edith Ackermann, who was a professor at the MIT Media Lab from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Dec. 24. She was 70.

Swiss-born Ackermann earned all her degrees from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She earned a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology in 1969, two master's degrees in developmental psychology and clinical psychology in 1970, and a PhD in developmental psychology in 1981.

At the University of Geneva, she was part of an interdisciplinary research team under the direction of Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist renowned for his pioneering work in child development. Ackermann considered Piaget a "hero" in her field. In a list of her greatest influences, Ackermann also included Maria Montessori, a renowned Italian physician and educator, as well as two founding faculty members of the Media Lab: Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert. It was the opportunity to work with Papert that drew Ackermann to the Media Lab in 1985, when she joined his Epistemology and Learning Group. There, Ackermann focused on technological tools for learning and emerging literacies.

On her website, Ackermann described her approach to education research: "I team up with partners from varying backgrounds to help shape the future of play and learning in a digital world. I study how people use place, relate to others, and treat things to find their ways — and voices — in an ever-changing world." Mitchel Resnick, the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research who worked with Ackermann in Papert’s group, says his late colleague "brought a joyful energy, probing questions, and fresh ideas to every conversation. She will be deeply missed."

Ackermann’s relationship with the Media Lab extended well beyond her time on its faculty. Resnick, now head of the Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten group, says that Ackermann continued "as a friend, collaborator, and advisor to people throughout the Media Lab community, serving on many general-exam and dissertation committees, and joining many Media Lab conversations and symposia, including a recent discussion about cybernetics."

In addition to her ongoing affiliation as a visiting scientist at the Media Lab, Ackermann in recent years was a research affiliate at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, a visiting senior researcher for the LEGO Foundation, a senior research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, an honorary professor of developmental psychology at the University of Aix-Marseille, France, and a visiting professor at the University of Siena, Italy. She has been honored with accolades throughout her career, most recently in October 2016, when she received a lifetime achievement award at the FabLearn Conference at Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Ackermann believed that her work was itself an act of continuous self-education. As she wrote on her Media Lab web page: "When it comes to learning and creative uses of technologies, children have more to teach adults than adults to children! When it comes to innovating for others, don’t guess what they want or do what they say: co-create what they — and you — will love, once it is there!"

Otto K. Harling, MIT professor emeritus in nuclear engineering and former director of the MIT Nuclear Reactor Lab (NRL) passed away on Dec. 18. He was 85 years old.

Harling's field-defining contributions in research and teaching cut across nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, nuclear materials, superfluids, fission and fusion reactor technology, and nuclear medicine.

Born in 1931 on Staten Island, New York, Harling graduated from New Dorp High School and completed his undergraduate degree at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Illinois Institute of Technology. He went on to pursue graduate training in Germany at the University of Goettingen and the University of Heidelberg, and he earned his PhD at Pennsylvania State University.

His career at MIT began when he was appointed in 1972 as a senior research associate. He received tenure in 1979 and was director of NRL from 1976 to 1996.

Notably, Harling oversaw a significant expansion of the NRL’s research mission into nuclear materials irradiation and evaluation and boron neutron capture therapy. He was well known for developing productive collaborations on campus, in particular with MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and engaging with the country’s national laboratories to study fusion reactor materials. One of his most ambitious efforts used the MIT reactor core to simulate a fusion reactor to investigate radiation damage in irradiated materials and enable test methods to determine mechanical properties using miniature samples.

“Otto Harling’s visionary research initiatives established the experimental basis for the use of the MIT reactor as a test bed for nuclear materials and engineering research,” says Gordon Kohse, MIT research scientist and deputy director of NRL research and services.

Harling and his MIT colleagues also built on the technology and irradiation techniques developed for the fusion studies to establish a program in support of light water power reactor coolant technology. These experiments, involving the design and operation of innovative, small, in-core high-pressure and temperature water loops, were instrumental in understanding fundamental aspects of both pressurized water and boiling water reactor coolant chemistries. Success hinged on Harling’s ability to bring together a global array of partners, including the U.S. Electric Power Research Institute, the government of Japan, and other industrial members.

During the latter part of his career, Harling was instrumental in reviving work on boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) for cancer at the NRL. In 1994 he and his collaborators led a trial for the experimental therapy on a human patient, the first in more than 30 years and the first to use an epithermal beam (intermediate energy).

In addition to his research contributions, Harling and his colleagues played a significant role in enhancing and expanding educational opportunities for nuclear engineers and scientists at MIT and beyond. He led a faculty effort in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) to broaden the radiological sciences curriculum, revamp courses on the measurement of radiation and its uses, and introduce experiments for the student laboratory and the MIT reactor.

He also taught what is now 22.09, “Principles of Nuclear Radiation Measurement and Protection,” for several years. Harling also personally directed the thesis research of over 70 master’s and doctoral candidates at MIT and helped train generations of students at the NRL who have gone on to become leaders at national laboratories, companies, and medical institutions. He also shared his expertise through the publication of more than 300 scientific papers and reports and in book chapters he authored or edited.

“Harling’s work was in the best tradition of MIT's philosophy of Mens and Manus,” says John A. Bernard, Jr, principal research engineer in NSE. “He loved building things — tools and equipment — and expected his students to be equally enthusiastic about getting their hands dirty when working on solutions to problems.”

Harling was elected to a Fellowship in the American Nuclear Society in 2004 and received the Hatanaka Memorial Award, the highest recognition of the International Society for Neutron Capture Therapy, in 2008. Outside of his professional life, he was an avid tennis player and community volunteer, serving on Hingham’s Energy Action Committee, correcting Hingham’s latest flood maps and running climate change programs.

He is survived by his wife of 59 years, Beth; his three daughters, Betsy Harling of Hingham, Maura Stefl (Greg) of Fayetteville, N.Y., and Ottilie MacKinnon (Ewen) of Chichester, N.H.; his son, Kurt Harling (Lisa) of Durham, N.H., his grandchildren Zachary and Hannah Stefl, Ian Mackinnon, Alexander and Mitchell Harling, and Joseph and Matthew Personeni, his sister Anneliese Ringstad of Malaga, Spain as well as many nieces and nephews.

Donations in Harling’s memory may be made to “The Dr. Otto K. Harling Science Memorial Scholarship Fund” c/o Rockland Trust, 100 Sgt. William B. Terry Drive, Hingham, MA  02043.

Walter E. Morrow, a pioneering electrical engineer and the director of MIT Lincoln Laboratory from April 1977 to June 1998, passed away on Sunday, Feb. 12, at his home in Weston, Massachusetts. He was 88 years old.

Morrow ’49, SM ’51 began his career at Lincoln Laboratory after his 1951 graduation from MIT with degrees in electrical engineering. He joined the laboratory’s Long Range Communications Group, where his early research and development work was in ionospheric and tropospheric beyond-the-horizon communication techniques. As leader of the Systems Engineering Group from 1955 to 1964, he designed and directed Project West Ford, a series of experiments that demonstrated the feasibility of using orbiting thin-wire reflectors to support long-range, high-frequency radio transmissions. For this work, Morrow received an MIT Outstanding Achievement Award that cited his “imaginative contribution to a new concept of intercontinental microwave communication.”

Throughout his career, Morrow was a pioneer in the development of advanced satellite communication systems for the U.S. military. Under his leadership and through his collaborations with staff and sponsors, the Laboratory’s Lincoln Experimental Satellite program developed a wide range of critically important technologies. Much of this technology continues to be central to military satellite communication systems used by the United States and its allies.

Morrow helped to guide Lincoln Laboratory’s expansion into new areas of research and development. In 1969, while assistant director, he led a study group that investigated the possibility of establishing a major air traffic control program at the laboratory. Because of his recommendation to move forward, the laboratory created and has sustained a strong air traffic control program that has developed many important weather forecasting and aircraft safety systems over the past 36 years.

Morrow also had the foresight to initiate the South Laboratory and Microelectronics Laboratory building projects. Both projects resulted in major improvements in Lincoln Laboratory facilities, and the upgraded prototyping and technology development spaces had a major impact on the success of programs at the laboratory.

Morrow served on the Defense Science Board as a member from 1987 to 2002 and as a senior fellow from 2002 to 2009, contributing to dozens of task forces in areas such as space superiority, advanced semiconductors, homeland protection, and air defense. Morrow was a member of the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel for 37 years, the Naval War College Board of Advisors, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, and NASA's Advisory Council.

During his distinguished career, Morrow received numerous awards, including the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service in 1998, the Department of Defense Outstanding Public Service Award in 2010, and the Navy Superior Public Service Award in 2015. He was elevated to the level of fellow in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1966 and was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1978. 

Through his example, Morrow promoted an exceptional level of technical excellence and integrity, and left a profound impact on Lincoln Laboratory and many programs for our nation’s defense. 

Morrow was married for 65 years to the late Janice (Lombard) Morrow and is survived by his sons Clifford and Gregory Morrow, his daughter Carolyn Morrow, two grandsons, and a great-grandson. Information on visiting hours and a memorial service on Friday, Feb. 17, can be found at the Brasco and Sons website.

Bertram Kostant, professor emeritus of mathematics at MIT, died at the Hebrew Senior Rehabilitation Center in Roslindale, Massachusetts, on Thursday, Feb. 2, at the age of 88.

Kostant was a professor of mathematics at MIT from 1962 until 1993, when he officially retired, but he continued his active life in research, traveling and lecturing at various universities and conferences around the world.

His legacy spans six decades and 107 published papers, and his ability to connect seemingly diverse ideas led to remarkable results that formed the cornerstone of rich and fruitful theories both in mathematics and theoretical physics. He held a deep passion for truth, for understanding, and for beauty; and an unshakeable faith that these things are woven together.

Bertram Kostant was born on May 24, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Peter Stuyvesant High School in 1945. After studying chemical engineering for two years at Purdue University, he switched to mathematics, having fallen in love with the subject in the classes of Arthur Rosenthal and Michael Golomb, who were recent immigrants from Germany. In 1950 he earned a bachelor's degree with distinction in mathematics.

Kostant was awarded an Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship for graduate studies at the University of Chicago. There, he found a stimulating environment. Influences on him included Marshall Stone, Adrian Albert, Shing Shen Chern, Paul Halmos, Irving Kaplansky, Irving Segal. Through Andre Weil, Kostant was exposed to the ideas of the Bourbaki group in thinking about and writing down mathematics. Edwin Spanier’s course on Lie groups used Chevalley’s text. He often said, “the sheer beauty of it all resonated with me.” This was the beginning of his lifelong passion for Lie groups — the continuous families of symmetries at the core of great parts of geometry, mathematical physics, and even algebra. His work ultimately touched almost every corner of Lie theory: algebraic groups and invariant theory, the geometry of homogeneous spaces, representation theory, geometric quantization and symplectic geometry, Lie algebra cohomology, Hamiltonian mechanics, and much more.

Kostant received an MS in mathematics in 1951, and under Irving Segal, his PhD in 1954, with a thesis titled, “Representations of a Lie algebra and its enveloping algebra on a Hilbert space.”

Between 1953 and 1956 Kostant was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1955-56 he was a Higgins Lecturer at Princeton University, where he investigated the “holonomy groups” arising in differential geometry and worked deepen our understanding of the structure of the so-called "simple" Lie algebras.

From 1956 to 1962, Kostant was a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, becoming a full professor in 1962. He was a member of the Miller Institute for Basic Research from 1958 to 1959.

In 1962 Kostant joined the faculty at MIT, where he remained for the rest of his career. He was devoted to his weekly seminars in Lie theory. Over the years he supervised more than 20 PhD students — among them, the differential geometer James Simons — and served as a mentor to many postdocs and young faculty members. He worked with great energy and success to build MIT’s faculty in Lie theory and representation theory.

In the early 1960s, Kostant began to develop his “method of coadjoint orbits” and “geometric quantization” relating symplectic geometry to infinite-dimensional representation theory. Geometric quantization provides a way to pass between the geometric pictures of Hamiltonian mechanics and the Hilbert spaces of quantum mechanics. His ideas have been at the heart of several very different mathematical disciplines ever since.

Again and again, Kostant was able to make powerful use of the relationships he found between deep and subtle mathematics and much simpler ideas. For example, in the early 1960s he proved a purely algebraic result about “tridiagonal” matrices. In the 1970s, he used that result and the ideas of geometric quantization to study Whittaker models (which are at the heart of the theory of automorphic forms) and the Toda lattice (a widely studied model for one-dimensional crystals).

Kostant received many awards and honors. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1959-60 (in Paris), and a Sloan Fellow in 1961-63. In 1962 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1978 to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1982 he was a fellow of the Sackler Institute for Advanced Studies at Tel Aviv University. In 1990 he was awarded the Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society, in recognition of his 1975 paper, “On the existence and irreducibility of certain series of representations.”

In 2001, Kostant was a Chern Lecturer and Chern Visiting Professor at Berkeley. He received honorary degrees from the University of Córdoba in Argentina in 1989, the University of Salamanca in Spain in 1992, and Purdue University in 1997. The latter, from his alma mater, was an honorary Doctor of Science degree, citing his fundamental contributions to mathematics and the inspiration he and his work provided to generations of researchers.

In May 2008, the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences hosted a conference: “Lie Theory and Geometry: the Mathematical Legacy of Bertram Kostant,” at the University of British Columbia, celebrating the life and work of Kostant in his 80th year. In 2012, he was elected to the inaugural class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society. Last June, Kostant traveled to Rio de Janeiro for the Colloquium on Group Theoretical Methods in Physics, where he received the prestigious Wigner Medal, “for his fundamental contributions to representation theory that led to new branches of mathematics and physics.”

Kostant is survived by his wife, Ann, of 49 years; daughter Abbe Kostant Smerling of Lexington, Massachusetts; son Steven Kostant of Chevy Chase, Maryland; daughter Elizabeth Loew of Stoughton, Massachusetts; son David Amiel of Glendale, California; daughter Shoshanna Kostant of Boston, Massachusetts; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

A memorial will be held at MIT in late May. Further information will be posted on the MIT Department of Mathematics website.
 

Mildred S. Dresselhaus, a celebrated and beloved MIT professor whose research helped unlock the mysteries of carbon, the most fundamental of organic elements — earning her the nickname “queen of carbon science” — died Monday at age 86.

Dresselhaus, a solid-state physicist who was Institute Professor Emerita of Physics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was also nationally known for her work to develop wider opportunities for women in science and engineering. She died at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, following a brief period of poor health.

“Yesterday, we lost a giant — an exceptionally creative scientist and engineer who was also a delightful human being,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote in an email today sharing the news of Dresselhaus’s death with the MIT community. “Among her many ‘firsts,’ in 1968, Millie became the first woman at MIT to attain the rank of full, tenured professor. She was the first solo recipient of a Kavli Prize and the first woman to win the National Medal of Science in Engineering.”

“Millie was also, to my great good fortune, the first to reveal to me the wonderful spirit of MIT,” Reif added. “In fact, her down-to-earth demeanor was a major reason I decided to join this community. … Like dozens of young faculty and hundreds of MIT students over the years, I was lucky to count Millie as my mentor.”

A winner of both the Presidential Medal of Freedom (from President Barack Obama, in 2014) and the National Medal of Science (from President George H.W. Bush, in 1990), Dresselhaus was a member of the MIT faculty for 50 years. Beyond campus, she held a variety of posts that placed her at the pinnacle of the nation’s scientific enterprise.

Dresselhaus’s research made fundamental discoveries in the electronic structure of semi-metals. She studied various aspects of graphite and authored a comprehensive book on fullerenes, also known as “buckyballs.” She was particularly well known for her work on nanomaterials and other nanostructural systems based on layered materials, like graphene, and more recently beyond graphene, like transition metal dichalcogenides and phosphorene. Her work on using quantum structures to improve thermoelectric energy conversion reignited this research field.

A strong advocate for women in STEM

As notable as her research accomplishments was Dresselhaus’s longstanding commitment to promoting gender equity in science and engineering, and her dedication to mentorship and teaching.

In 1971, Dresselhaus and a colleague organized the first Women’s Forum at MIT as a seminar exploring the roles of women in science and engineering. She received a Carnegie Foundation grant in 1973 to support her efforts to encourage women to enter traditionally male dominated fields of science and engineering. For a number of years, she led an MIT seminar in engineering for first-year students; designed to build the confidence of female students, it always drew a large audience of both men and women.

Just two weeks ago, General Electric released a 60-second video featuring Dresselhaus that imagined a world where female scientists like her were celebrities, to both celebrate her achievements as well as to encourage more women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Dresselhaus co-authored eight books and about 1,700 papers, and supervised more than 60 doctoral students.

“Millie’s dedication to research was unparalleled, and her enthusiasm was infectious,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and head of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). “For the past half-century, students, faculty and researchers at MIT and around the world have been inspired by her caring advice. I was very fortunate to have had her as a mentor, and as an active member of the EECS faculty. She made such a huge impact on MIT, and her contributions will long be remembered.”

Diverted from teaching to physics

Born on Nov. 11, 1930, in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus attended Hunter College, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1951 and then winning a Fulbright Fellowship to study at Cambridge University.

While she had planned to become a teacher, Rosalyn Yalow — who would go on to win the 1977 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine — encouraged Dresselhaus to pursue physics instead. She ultimately earned her MA from Radcliffe College in 1953 and her PhD in 1958 from the University of Chicago, where she studied under Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi. From 1958 to 1960, Dresselhaus was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University.

Dresselhaus began her 57-year association with MIT in the Solid State Division of Lincoln Laboratory in 1960. In 1967, she joined what was then called the Department of Electrical Engineering as the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Visiting Professor, a chair reserved for appointments of distinguished female scholars. She became a permanent member of the electrical engineering faculty in 1968, and added an appointment in the Department of Physics in 1983.

In 1985, Dresselhaus became the first female Institute Professor, an honor bestowed by the MIT faculty and administration for distinguished accomplishments in scholarship, education, service, and leadership. There are usually no more than 12 active Institute Professors on the MIT faculty.

Scientific leadership and awards

In addition to her teaching and research, Dresselhaus served in numerous scientific leadership roles, including as the director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy; as president of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; as chair of the governing board of the American Institute of Physics; as co-chair of the recent Decadal Study of Condensed Matter and Materials Physics; and as treasurer of the National Academy of Sciences.

Aside from her Medal of Freedom — the highest award bestowed by the U.S. government upon American civilians — and her Medal of Science, given to the nation’s top scientists, Dresselhaus’s extensive honors included the IEEE Medal of Honor for “leadership and contributions across many fields of science and engineering”; the Enrico Fermi Award from the U.S. Department of Energy for her leadership in condensed matter physics, in energy and science policy, in service to the scientific community, and in mentoring women in the sciences; and the prestigious Kavli Prize for her pioneering contributions to the study of phonons, electron-phonon interactions, and thermal transport in nanostructures. She was also an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Active on campus

Always an active and vibrant presence at MIT, Dresselhaus remained a notable influence on campus until her death. She continued to publish scientific papers on topics such as the development of 2-D sheets of thin electronic materials, and played a role in shaping MIT.nano, a new 200,000-square-foot center for nanoscience and nanotechnology scheduled to open in 2018.

In 2015, Dresselhaus delivered the keynote address at “Rising Stars in EECS,” a three-day workshop for female graduate students and postdocs who are considering careers in academic research. Her remarks, on the importance of persistence, described her experience studying with Enrico Fermi. Three-quarters of the students in that program, she said, failed to pass rigorous exam requirements.

“It was what you did that counted,” Dresselhaus told the aspiring scientists, “and that followed me through life.”

Dresselhaus is survived by her husband, Gene, and by her four children and their families: Marianne and her husband, Geoffrey, of Palo Alto, California; Carl, of Arlington, Massachusetts; Paul and his wife, Maria, of Louisville, Colorado; and Eliot and his wife, Françoise, of France. She is also survived by her five grandchildren — Elizabeth, Clara, Shoshi, Leora, and Simon — and by her many students, whom she cared for very deeply.

Gifts in her memory may be made to MIT.nano.

MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Stephen Ross, inventor of the arbitrage pricing theory and a foundational member of the practice of modern finance, died Friday, March 3. He was 73.

Ross, the Franco Modigliani Professor of Financial Economics, was best known for his arbitrage pricing theory, developed in 1976. The theory, commonly known as APT, is used to identify and exploit mispriced assets by tracking a number of macroeconomic factors. It serves as a framework for analyzing risks and returns. The APT is widely applied in investment management practice today. Ross is also responsible for the economic theory of agency and was the co-creator of the Cox-Ingersoll-Ross model of pricing government bonds and the binomial model for pricing options.

Those theories and models are cornerstones of neoclassical finance, a field which Ross pioneered and defended in a 2004 book of the same name. MIT Sloan Professor Leonid Kogan, a former student, co-authored the behavioral economics-based “The Price Impact and Survival of Irrational Traders” with Ross in 2006.

“Steve was a scholar. If the model tells you otherwise and the results go against his beliefs, he updates his beliefs,” Kogan said. “His main position wasn’t dogmatic. He was trying to get to the truth.”

More recently, Ross developed the recovery theorem, which allows the separation of probability distribution and risk aversion to forecast returns from state prices. His most recent research “focused on applying the recovery theorem to existing option pricing data, extending the recovery approach to fixed income markets, and using options to improve the performance of institutional portfolios,” according to his biography on MIT Sloan’s website.

“Steve Ross will be remembered as an intellectual giant,” MIT Sloan Dean David Schmittlein wrote in a message to the MIT Sloan community. “What is known today about the science of finance and its application owes much to Steve’s pioneering work, ranging from asset pricing to investment management and to corporate finance. Steve did not believe in narrow specialization and intellectual boundaries. It is difficult to imagine the discipline of modern finance without Steve’s contributions.”

“Steve Ross was one of the giants of modern finance with a razor sharp intellect and a heart of gold,” said MIT Sloan Professor Andrew Lo. “The cold, hard logic of his mathematical theories stood in sharp contrast to the warmth of his personality. He was more humanist than financial economist, and was deeply connected in so many communities that would rightly claim Steve as their own. This is an enormous loss to MIT and the world.”

A bias for practical research

MIT’s motto, "mens et manus," or mind and hand, emphasizes both scientific thought and the development of its practical applications. As one of the founders of modern finance, Ross was a perfect fit for the MIT culture, said MIT Sloan professor and Nobel laureate Robert Merton.

“What’s very unusual about finance — and Steve exemplified it — is the most sophisticated models, the theories, the empirical work … get accepted quite rapidly into the mainstream of practice,” Merton said. “The binomial model literally is used millions of times a day.”

“Steve was a very quantitative guy and very theoretical, but he also had a strong practical streak in the sense that he really liked to see this stuff get used,” Merton said.

In Stephen Ross Prize, recognition of a storied career

In 2006, a group of Ross’ former students began to secretly raise funds amongst themselves to establish the Stephen A. Ross Prize in Financial Economics, to recognize published research that “exemplifies Steve’s research style and values.” The group raised more than $600,000, surpassing an initial $250,000 goal, and established the Foundation for the Advancement of Research in Financial Economics to award the prize. The prize has since been granted four times between 2008 and 2015.

Merton said the prize’s growing prestige is a testament to Ross’ following, including his list of PhD students, a who’s who of a generation of finance researchers and practitioners. Kogan described the cohort of students advised by Ross as “unmatched in our profession.” Ross, Kogan said, was a cheerleader for his students, giving them space and support to nurture ideas that other advisers may have rejected.

Ross received a bachelor’s degree from Caltech in 1965 and a PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1970. He served on the faculties at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and at Yale University before joining MIT Sloan, first as the Fischer Black Visiting Professor in 1997, then as a professor in 1998. His career was marked by many significant awards, most recently the 2015 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics and the 2012 Onassis Prize for Finance. He was the 1996 International Association for Quantitative Finance Financial Engineer of the Year and won the 2007 Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize.

In the private sector, Ross founded a series of asset management firms, including Roll and Ross Asset Management, and was more recently the co-founder of Ross, Jeffrey and Antle LLC, a Connecticut institutional investment firm. In 1988, he was president of the American Finance Association. He advised government agencies and had served as a director at Freddie Mac, CREF, and elsewhere.

A more complete list of Ross’ awards and affiliations is available on his MIT Sloan faculty directory page.

High standards and a reputation for kindness

Merton remembered Ross as a connoisseur of fine wine and cuisine who was an amiable companion and colleague, even as he accepted nothing but the best in his work.

“I’m going to miss his smile,” Merton said. “He could be a very tough guy. He had high standards and he made no bones about expressing them. But he also had a nice way about him.”

MIT Sloan Professor Jiang Wang concurred, saying Ross conducted himself in an “artful” manner, both professionally and in personal encounters.

“The other thing I found very inspiring about him is that he was always very positive, very optimistic, not just about research, but about other people,” Wang said. “And yet he didn’t compromise a bit when it came to intellectual pursuits.”

Ross is survived by his wife, Carol, two children, and two granddaughters. Plans for services and a celebration of his life by MIT Sloan are forthcoming.

James W. Mar, a former head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), and a chief scientist of the U.S. Air Force, passed away in Seattle, Washington, on March 4. He was 96.

Known for his work on aircraft and spacecraft designs, Mar’s special interests were in the disciplines of structures, aeroelasticity, and materials.

Mar retired as MIT’s Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aerospace Education in July 1990. His MIT career, which spanned 41 years, included a 1981-1983 term as head of AeroAstro, and service as chair of numerous faculty committees including the Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid, Committee on Engineering Education, the Athletic Board, and the Independent Activities Period.

Mar’s research focused on advanced filamentary composite materials and large structures in space. He headed the AeroAstro Division of Structures, Materials, and Aeroelasticity. Mar founded and directed both the Technology Laboratory for Advanced Composites, and, with Professor Rene Miller, the Space Systems Laboratory. Mar was instrumental in creating the Unified Engineering subjects, which formed the foundation of AeroAstro’s undergraduate education.

Following his retirement, Mar remained active in the aerospace field including serving as a member of NASA’s Space Systems and Technology Advisory Committee and of the Air Force Studies Board, and chairing the FAA’s Technical Oversight Group for Aging Aircraft.

Over the years, Mar took on numerous advisory assignments including panels examining development of Air Force and Navy jet engines, and the operation of the Air Force Logistic Command and the Military Airlift Command. Between 1970 and 1972, he took leave from MIT to serve as the U.S. Air Force Chief Scientist. He chaired a committee reporting to the NASA Associate Administrator Office of Space Flight on the design of the graphite/epoxy filament-wound solid rocket motor, and was vice-chairman of the National Academy of Engineering panel that provided oversight of the Space Shuttle’s solid rocket booster redesign following the 1986 Challenger disaster.

Originally from Oakland, California, Mar received his BS, MS, and ScD from MIT, all in civil engineering, in 1941, 1947, and 1949, respectively. Between 1941 and 1944 he was employed by Curtiss-Wright as an aeronautical engineer. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 until 1946.

AeroAstro Professor Paul A. Lagace, who began his MIT aeronautical education as one of Mar’s students and eventually became a faculty colleague, said, “Jim Mar was an outstanding person in many ways, making significant contributions to aerospace engineering, to the Institute, and to the aeronautics and astronautics department. But most importantly, he sincerely cared for, and helped, each student with whom he worked. I wouldn’t be where I am today without all he did for, and with, me.”

As an MIT undergraduate in the late 1950s, Institute Professor Sheila Widnall was a Mar advisee. “Jim was a giant in the field. His expertise and his passion really shaped the AeroAstro department,” she said. She recalled a semi-serious hurdle that Mar suggested the department should place before faculty candidates, which became known as the Jim Mar Test. “Jim would say that if an airplane flew over and the candidate didn’t look up, that candidate didn’t belong in our department.”

Ernesto E. Blanco, a renown inventor, mechanical designer, and beloved former professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE), passed away on March 21, in Murrieta, California. He was 94 years old.

Over the span of a half-century, Blanco designed a number of groundbreaking devices that aided the handicapped — including the first stair-climbing wheelchair and an improved Braille typewriter.

Born in pre-revolutionary Cuba, Blanco began his career as chief draftsman of Havana's city planning department. In 1949, he left for the United States, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Blanco briefly returned to Havana to lead the University of Villanueva’s mechanical engineering department. In 1960, after the Cuban Revolution, Blanco left every item he owned behind and fled to the United States under the guise of a vacation to visit his American-born wife’s family.

Within a week of arriving in the U.S., Blanco was offered an assistant professor position at MIT. In 1964, he temporarily left MIT and accepted a role on the faculty at Tufts University. Blanco then took a five-year hiatus from academia, acting as a textile technology consultant before founding his own company in 1974. However, it wasn’t long before he was back in lecture halls. He was invited by Professor Robert Mann to join MechE at MIT as an adjunct full professor in the Design Division in 1977.

During his nearly 38 years at MIT, Blanco developed a reputation as a consummate educator who treated every student, faculty, and staff member with the utmost care and respect. He emphasized creativity and analytical rigor in his courses. His compassion and consideration for everyone he encountered, along with his sartorial choices, earned him the affectionate title as “the man in the white lab coat.”

While teaching and inspiring new generations of engineers, Blanco continued to invent devices that improved the quality of life for the physically impaired. In addition to his stair-climbing wheelchair and Braille display, Blanco invented trocars for endoscopic procedures and ophthalmological surgical tools. Blanco demonstrated his forward thinking nature by helping to develop an interactive online program that captured mechanical design processes for future students. He also found time for fun in his work, co-inventing a pancake flipping robot. 

In 2002, during the final competition for MechE’s 2.007 (Design and Manufacturing) course, Blanco was honored for a quarter century of engagement with the class. After his retirement in 2007, he remained a regular attendee at the 2.007 and 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes) final presentations. He eventually moved to Temecula, California, where he could frequently be found in his home workshop or mentoring a local school’s robotics program.

Blanco is survived by son Ricardo and his wife Ana, son René, sister Dinorah, and beloved grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. He was preceded by his wife of 54 years Sonia, who passed away in 2007.

MIT Corporation life member and biotechnology pioneer Henri A. Termeer, who led the iconic Genzyme Corporation for nearly three decades, with a strong focus on combating rare diseases, died on Friday night at his home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He was 71.

Widely regarded as a founder of Boston’s biotech industry, Termeer joined a fledgling Genzyme in the early 1980s, when the biotech industry itself was still in its infancy. Serving as Genzyme’s chairman, president, and CEO from 1983 until 2011, Termeer nurtured the company from a startup with fewer than 20 employees into one of the world’s largest biotech companies, employing more than 12,500 people worldwide.

At Genzyme, Termeer waged a therapeutic battle against rare genetic diseases that had few, if any, effective treatments available. Under his leadership, Genzyme developed a group of rare-disease medicines that have now reached thousands of patients — including the enzyme-replacement drugs Cerezyme for Gaucher disease and Fabrazyme for Fabry disease, as well as Lemtrada, a multiple sclerosis drug. Consequently, Termeer rose to prominence as an innovator of rare-disease drugs (called “orphan drugs”), which is fast becoming a lucrative market.

In 2011, Genzyme sold to French drug giant Sanofi SA for more than $20 billion — the second-largest acquisition deal in the history of the biotech industry, thanks largely to Termeer’s vision and business acumen.

In 2006, Termeer joined the MIT Corporation — the Institute’s board of trustees — as a term member, and was re-elected in 2011. In 2013, Termeer was named an MIT Corporation life member.

“Henri Termeer was a gentleman — and a giant,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif says. “Brilliantly creative, wise, charming, gracious, and brave, he showed us all, in everything he did, how to live and how to lead. At Genzyme, by developing treatments for patients struggling with rare diseases, he built a thriving company, created thousands of jobs, and offered hope and health to countless individuals who otherwise had neither. In the process, he helped launch the biotechnology revolution in Greater Boston. And he built a parallel career as one of the region’s leading citizens, offering his insight and vision to help guide many of our most important institutions.”

“At MIT alone,” Reif continues, “he was a life member of the MIT Corporation and served on its Executive Committee; he chaired its Risk and Audit Committee; and he was crucial to shaping the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. We will miss Henri terribly — as an advisor, an inspiration, and a friend. Our hearts go out to his wife, Belinda, to all the Termeers, and to the broader Genzyme family.”

“Henri was an extraordinarily wise man who gave MIT the wisdom of his experience, judgement, and perspective, such that the Institute could better serve its mission,” MIT Corporation Chair Robert B. Millard ’73 says. “He tangibly guided and amplified the work of MIT. He was one of the most respected and admired people we had the honor of knowing.”

Termeer’s impact on the local and global biotech industry was enormous. Scores of biotech leaders from around the world considered Termeer a mentor. In numerous articles published online about Termeer’s passing over the weekend, a number of those leaders mourned the loss of their former friend, praising Termeer as a mentor and biotech pioneer, and noting his magnetism and warmth as a business leader.

In a Boston Business Journalstory, Josh Boger, founding CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, called Termeer an “example for how to run a biotech firm” as a human- and community-centric organization: “I really was tutored by Henri Termeer about how [being a biotech CEO] is not just something that’s added to who you are. ... He was such a wonderful advocate for the patients, and an advocate for the industry he was a part of.”

Echoing that sentiment was David Meeker, now president of Sanofi Genzyme, in an article about Termeer in The Boston Globe. Termeer, Meeker told the Globe, was “the dean of the biotech community.” “His vision was to cure rare diseases, and he always had time to meet with the people dependent on our treatments,” he said. “He had the ability to forge such an intense relationship with everyone he met, and he made everyone in the industry feel like he cared about them as an individual.”

Many also attribute the rise of the Boston and Massachusetts biotech scene to Termeer’s work at Genzyme. In the Globe article, Bob Coughlin, president of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, called Termeer “a true visionary and an exemplary leader,” noting that Termeer and Genzyme had helped mold Massachusetts “into the best biotech hub in the world.”

After leaving Genzyme, Termeer stayed active in the biotech industry and never lost his love of launching and building companies. In 2011, Termeer and his wife, Belinda, donated $10 million to launch the Henri and Belinda Termeer Center for Targeted Therapies at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he served on the board of trustees. The center is designing a fast-growing pipeline of targeted treatments for rare tumors that have had few effective treatments.

Until his passing, Termeer also served on the boards of directors of several biotech companies, including X4 Pharmaceuticals, ProQR Therpeutics, and Lysosomal Therapeutics, all of which he co-founded, as well as Moderna Therapeutics, Verastem, Aveo Oncology, and others.

Termeer was also a board member for Partners Health Care, Harvard Medical School, Project HOPE, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the world’s largest biotech trade association that he helped launch. Termeer also helped launch the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation, a Cambridge-based nonpartisan national health policy institute. From 2007 to 2011, Termeer served as a member of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and as chairman from 2010 to 2011.

Born in the Netherlands in 1946, Termeer studied economics at the Economische Hogeschool, Erasmus University. In 1973, he earned his MBA at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and started working for Baxter International, a medical device company in Deerfield, Illinois, where he quickly climbed the ranks. From 1976 to 1979, he served as general manager for Travenol GmbH in Munich, Germany, and then as vice president of the Hyland Therapeutics division of Baxter Travenol in Glendale, California, from 1979 to 1981.

In 1983, Termeer was named president of a relatively unknown two-year-old biotech startup, Genzyme, located in Boston’s Chinatown, then called the “Combat Zone” — a former red-light district that Termeer had wryly described once as “the most romantic of neighborhoods.” Coincidentally, that year saw the passing of the Orphan Drug Act, a U.S. law that facilitated the development of drugs to treat rare diseases — such as Huntington’s Disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and muscular dystrophy — that then had limited treatment options.

In 1985, Termeer was appointed as Genzyme CEO and, in 1988, was named as chairman. By its 2011 acquisition, Genzyme, with Termeer at the helm, had become the third largest company of its kind, with more than 12,500 employees spanning more than 70 offices and plants worldwide. Much of the company’s value has been credited to Termeer’s leadership and focus on developing orphan drugs with unique biochemical designs to fight rare diseases. The National Organization for Rare Disorders estimates that 30 million Americans suffer from 7,000 rare diseases. In recent years, experts have projected that the steady-growing global orphan drug market will reach anywhere from $150 billion to $200 billion by 2020.

In a 2011 Boston.com article, Termeer fondly recalled his fateful first introduction to Genzyme nearly three decades prior — an unassuming company with infinite promise: “One day I got a call to visit whatever it was at Genzyme. And it was, of course, not much. It had the right ingredients. I liked that the direction hadn’t been really established. It was an open book. I could go where I wanted to go. I gave up my job, gave up half my income, and moved here. It was a shot in the dark, and it was magnificent.”

Termeer’s survivors include his wife, Belinda, and their daughter, Adriana, of Marblehead; his son, Nicholas, who lives in England; two sisters, Ineke of France and Marlies Verduijn of the Netherlands; and three brothers, Bert, Paul, Roel, all of the Netherlands.

A celebration of Termeer’s life will be held on Saturday, May 20, at 11 a.m. in Kresge Auditorium. Parking is available in the West Garage on Vassar Street.

T. William “Bill” Lambe, professor emeritus in civil and environmental engineering, passed away on March 6. He was 96 years old.

Lambe SM ’44 PhD ’48 arrived at MIT to pursue graduate studies in civil engineering after a brief stint working in the engineering industry.

As a graduate student in 1945, Lambe began working as an instructor at MIT. By July 1959, he was a full professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He held the first Edmund K. Turner Professor of Civil Engineering professorship from 1969 until his retirement from teaching in June 1981.

Lambe’s research is remembered for having a close relation to engineering practice, reflective of his own career path. His academic contributions to geotechnical engineering were fundamental and far-reaching, and included research of soil chemistry, soil stabilization and freezing, the stress path method, and the formalizing of geotechnical prediction. Lambe’s predictions are one instance of the overlap between engineering practice and academia. His contributions as an academic were fundamental to geotechnical engineering.

His textbooks, “Soil Testing for Engineers,” published in 1951, and “Soil Mechanics,” co-authored with Robert Whitman and published in 1969, were also groundbreaking in the field.

Another example of Lambe’s ability to have research and practical engineering benefit from each other was the instrumentation of foundation work on multiple MIT buildings constructed during the building boom of the 1960’s and for Boston-area subway construction. MIT geotechnical students were educated to become engineers through practice-oriented research and direct or indirect involvement in Lambe’s consulting projects.

Following his retirement from MIT, Lambe returned to the engineering industry, serving as a consultant on numerous international projects. These projects included landslides; earth dams for storage of oil, mining waster, and water; building foundations; foundations for an off-shore storm surge barrier; and hydraulic reclamation projects, among others. He remained active as a consultant until his early 90’s.

Lambe was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an honorary member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), a fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, an honorary member of the Southeast Asian Society of Geotechnical Engineering, and an honorary member of the Venezuelan Society of Soil mechanics and Foundation Engineering. His more than 100 publications earned him many awards including the ASCE’s highest award, the Norman Medal, in 1964; the ASCE Terzaghi Award in 1975; and the N.C. State University Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award in 1982.

He is survived by five children: Philip and wife Catherine; Virginia and husband Robert Guaraldi; Richard and wife Michele; Robert and wife Judith; and Susan and husband Scott Clary, who live in North Carolina, New Hampshire, Washington, Massachusetts, and Virginia, respectively. His growing family includes 14 grandchildren and their six spouses, and seven great-grandchildren.

Arthur K. Kerman, professor emeritus of physics and a distinguished international researcher in MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) and Laboratory for Nuclear Science, passed away May 11 at the age of 88.

He was known for his work on the theory of the structure of nuclei and on the theory of nuclear reactions. 

“He was a wonderful friend and colleague, accomplishing many important things in the creation and promotion of science,” says Professor Emeritus Earle Lomon of the CTP, and Kerman’s longtime friend. “We will greatly miss his friendship and guidance.” 

As Mike Campbell of the University of Rochester poetically says, “The world is a little more empty and quiet without Arthur in it.”

Arthur Kent Kerman was born May 3, 1929, in Montreal. He graduated in 1950 from McGill University, where he studied physics and mathematics. At MIT, under Victor Frederick Weisskopf, he completed his PhD in nuclear surface oscillations in 1953. From 1953 to 1954, he studied with R.F. Christy at Caltech under a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, and in 1954 he began a two-year stay at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. 

“With the presence of Niels Bohr, Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and Willem V.R. Malkus, there were many physicists from Europe and elsewhere, including MIT’s Dave Frisch, making the Institute for Physics an exciting place to be,” recalls Lomon. Kerman’s close friend since the early 1940s, when they were Boy Scouts in Montreal, Lomon studied with Kerman at McGill, MIT, and Copenhagen.

Kerman’s research included nuclear and high-energy physics, astrophysics, and the development of advanced particle detectors. His interests in theoretical nuclear physics included nuclear quantum chromodynamics-relativistic heavy-ion physics, nuclear reactions, and laser accelerators. He developed a set of nucleon-nucleon potentials, which were found to be useful for the study of nuclear matter and finite nuclei. 

Kerman published or co-published more than 100 papers. He wrote papers on the effects of the Coriolis interaction in rotational nuclei; quasi-spin; the application of the Hartree-Fock method to the calculation of the ground state properties of spherical and deformed nuclei; pairing correlations in nuclei; and the possible existence of transuranic islands of stability. In his research on reactions, his papers discussed the scattering of fast particles by nuclei. He also wrote papers on intermediate structure in nuclear reactions; on the properties of isobar analog states; and strangeness analog resonances. He was an early advocate of the importance of quarks for understanding nuclear physics. He developed a nucleon-nucleon potential with a soft core that fits nucleon-nucleon scattering data as well as potentials with a hard repulsive core do, which was found to be useful in the study of what is needed beyond scattering data to determine the properties of nuclear matter and finite nuclei.

Kerman joined the MIT faculty in 1956 as an assistant professor of physics. In the summers of 1959 and 1960 he was a research associate at the Argonne National Laboratory, and during this period he also was a consultant to the Shell Development Company of Houston, and the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory. He also participated in the Physical Science Study Committee — a group of high school and university physics professors — to write a more accessible and engaging high school physics textbook. He was a consultant with Educational Services Inc. from 1959 to 1966, and collaborated in the quantum physics part of the experimental course Physics: A New Introductory Course (nicknamed PANIC), produced by the Education Research Center at MIT. He became an associate professor in 1960, and the following year, he went on academic leave and was “professeur d’echange” at the University of Paris under a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He became professor in 1964. 

In the early 1960s, Kerman traveled with physics professors Sheldon Glashow, then of the University of California at Berkeley and now of Boston University, and Charles Schwartz of Berkeley for a month-long visit as potential members to JASON, a scientific advisory group in Washington, sponsored by the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, among other government groups.

“We were asked at the beginning of our particular interests,” recalls Glashow. “What they were getting at was whether we wanted ‘war’ work or ‘peace’ work. Everybody, except us three ‘lefties’ including Arthur, chose ‘war.’ Our ‘peaceful' challenge was to examine all available sources, whether classified or not, to assess the potential value of airborne or satellite surveillance of the Soviet Union and to produce a supposedly unclassified document. We did our work, and our document was promptly classified. We never heard back from JASON, nor did we care.” 

From 1976-1983, Kerman was the director of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics, and from 1983 to 1992, he was director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science. For many years, Kerman was a leading force in pushing for new initiatives in science. He had various longstanding consulting relationships with Argonne, Brookhaven, Knolls Atomic Power, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos Scientific, and Oak Ridge national laboratories, and with the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST). 

Kerman advised 43 students, from 1958 to 2006. Kerman officially retired from MIT after 47 years, and retained the title of professor emeritus from 1999 until his passing.

He served on many influential bodies, including the Visiting Committees of Bartol Research Foundation, Princeton-Penn Accelerator, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Inertial Confinement Fusion; National Ignition Facility Programs Review Committee at Livermore; Directorate and Division Review Committees at Livermore; the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider Policy Committee at Brookhaven; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Scientific Policy Committee; Secretary of Energy Fusion Policy Advisory Committee; the White House Science Council Panel on Science and Technology; the Department of Energy’s Inertial Confinement Fusion Advisory Committee, and the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center Advisory Board. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, he was on the Physics Division Advisory Committee and the Theory Advisory Committee. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he served on the Director’s Advisory Committee, the Physics and Space Technology Advisory Committee, and as chair, the Director’s Review Committee for the Physics Directorate. 

Kerman was made a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the New York Academy of Sciences; he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Natural Sciences. He was associate editor of Reviews of Modern Physics.

Many describe Kerman as an outspoken advocate in his field. “He never hesitated, regardless of the consequences, to speak out and to support me when called upon in different circumstances to analyze programs that involved large-scale funding while lacking adequate justification,” says MIT  professor of physics Bruno Coppi, Kerman’s friend since the 1960s. “We both had to take a public stand, and time proved that our assessments were correct.”

“He was, until the end, a valued advisor to different national laboratories and to the highest levels of the Department of Energy,” Coppi adds.

In his presentation, “Three Decades of Interacting with Arthur Kerman,” Michael N. Kreisler, SAIC contractor to the National Nuclear Security Administration at the Department of Energy, and physics professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, had spoken at the 2012 CERN International Conference on Nuclear Reaction Mechanisms about Kerman’s influence on policy within the scientific community: “Arthur either knows everyone of importance or had them as students. I continue to be amazed at his ability to get appointments with everyone in DOE or at the laboratories […] If you want something done, convince Arthur and he’ll be an influential advocate.”

Kreisler added, “Whenever you work on an exciting new science project, Arthur is sure to tell you that he was involved in the very early stages of that project. While it sometimes seems impossible for him to have actually done as much as he says, I know from experience that it really is true.” 

However, Kerman was known for his calm, quiet style of leadership. “He had an extraordinary capacity to think on his feet, inspiring collaborators,” says Lomon. “Although, he had much less interest in writing papers, which was a source of some frustration to the same collaborators.” 

Kerman kept frequent contact with his friends and collaborators, despite his declining health. Kerman was coming regularly to weekly physics department lunches. “He delighted in reminiscing about the special atmosphere we had in our department during the times of the ‘Copenhagen Table,’” says Coppi, who met weekly with Kerman, up until a week before his passing away. 

After one of his stays in Europe, Kerman had brought back a large table that was kept within the Center for Theoretical Physics. “All active theorists and experimentalists, including Herman Feshbach, Felix Villars, and Martin Deutsch, interested in developments of theory in our department and outside, would gather around it,” Coppi recalls. 

“I always enjoyed and learned from our lively physics discussions,” recalls Professor John Negele. “His shared interest in high-performance computing and extensive contacts in DOE enabled us to obtain a supercomputer at MIT to study the role of quarks in nuclear physics from first principles.”

Despite health problems in his later years, his commitment to physics and service to the country still saw him traveling all over the world, as well as back to campus, well into his 80s. Until several days before he died at age 88, he was working with Mark Mueller on a new theory of dark matter and energy.

“In recent years Arthur was deeply concerned about the trends in funding and management of research, and of physics in particular, both at the national and international level,” says Coppi. “Arthur will be greatly missed at MIT, in our department, and in the international scientific community.” 

A long-time resident of Winchester, Massachusetts, Kerman was the husband of Enid Ehrlich for 64 years. He was extremely attached to and proud of his children. Eldest son Ben Kerman ’81, who is an MIT biology alumnus and physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital, lives in Hingham, Massachusetts. Dan is a mechanical engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration and lives in New Hampshire. Elizabeth is an architect and lives in San Francisco. Melissa has her own creative arts and crafts business and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. Jaime got his PhD in physics from Stanford University, works at Lincoln Lab and lives in Arlington, Massachusetts. Arthur is also survived by 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Gifts in Kerman’s name may be made to the Arthur Kerman Fellowship Fund, #3302540. Gifts will support fellowships in the Department of Physics, with a preference for fellows conducting research in theoretical physics. For more information, contact Director of Development Erin McGrath at 617-452-2807.

Thomas J. McKrell, a research scientist in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), passed away on June 9 at the age of 47.

An expert in materials behavior, especially corrosion of metallic alloys used in nuclear and conventional power plants, he came to MIT in 2006 after serving as a consultant in the power industry for more than a decade.

During his time at MIT, McKrell focused primarily on nuclear engineering, in particular, thermal-hydraulics. He became a technical leader in the area of heat transfer enhancement through the use of nanofluids, on which he organized sessions and gave invited lectures at domestic and international conferences. In 2011 he was appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Nanofluids.

McKrell was a prolific contributor to a diverse range of other subjects, including the study of oxidation of accident-tolerant fuel (ATF) for nuclear reactors, the mitigation of tube fouling in geothermal power systems, and the probing of fundamental mechanisms in boiling heat transfer using advanced infra-red diagnostics. He also helped to advance the testing of cruciform rods for advanced nuclear power systems, the measurement of optical properties in molten salts for nuclear and solar applications, and the development of drag-reducing coatings for torpedoes.

“Tom was one of the best people and scientists I met at MIT,” says MIT research scientist Bren Phillips. “His personal commitment and dedication was focused not only on the results of the research, but also on the personal growth of the individual students working with him. His colleagues all saw him as essential, both in terms of his scientific knowledge and for his daily enthusiasm and effort.”

Notably, McKrell served as director of the Thermal Hydraulics and Materials in Extreme Environments Laboratory (known as the “Green Lab” to everyone in NSE), within the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, from May 2006 onward. He led the transformation of the lab into a flexible multiuse tool, supporting up to eight different simultaneous experiments — all carefully maintained and orchestrated to be safe and efficient.

In addition to his research and leadership, McKrell was praised as a teacher and mentor of MIT students. He introduced dozens of graduate and undergraduate students to the challenges and joys of experimental work, offering advice on their experiments, including the design of new facilities, help with ordering parts, and interpretation of data.

One student said he always looked forward “to going to the lab to work because of the friendly, fun, exciting, cooperative, and safe culture he has fostered in the laboratory.” Another student commented on the ways that McKrell remained influential even to those he no longer directly mentored, saying, “Tom continues to provide me with personal and professional insight that nurtures my progress even though I no longer work under his cognizance. I have … known no other research scientist to be as important and involved in student progress as Tom.”

Such contributions did not go unnoticed by his colleagues in NSE, at MIT, and beyond. “Simply put, McKrell was an invaluable contributor to NSE’s successful experimental fission research program. His dedication helped advance NSE’s fission research and helped it to become the recognized program it is today,” says Jacopo Buongiorno, associate head of NSE.

In an NSE profile about McKrell written in 2015, he admitted that while mentoring could often take over his days, he still found the time to explore his own research interests. As a child growing up in New Hampshire, McKrell said he noticed cars bellowing exhaust on the highway. “I could see the toll that people were having on the environment, and their disregard for nature. I always thought it would be great to make some sort of meaningful contribution, to have a huge positive impact on the environment in some way.” At MIT, he said, “I’ve been able to contribute to the clean energy sector more than that inquisitive child could have ever imagined.”

McKrell’s love of nature, which began during his childhood years living in a rural area, never subsided. In his adult years, McKrell carved out time for lingering in the woods near his home. “I like to sit quietly and wait for animals, like deer, to come and bed for the night,” he said. “I’ve always had that connection with the environment.”

McKrell is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, and two children, Grace and John. A memorial service to celebrate his life will be held in the fall.

Physician and former MIT faculty member Robert S. Lees died on Monday, June 5, at the age of 82, after a lengthy struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Lees had a long and distinguished career in academic medicine. He was a cardiologist on the staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital for 50 years, as well as a professor at MIT in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST). His devotion to his patients, and his remarkable skill at keeping them alive and happy for many years, were widely admired and appreciated. He made several valuable clinical and research discoveries, and was an advisor to students at MIT and HST.

Lees was born on July 16, 1934 in the Bronx, New York. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1955 where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; he graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1959. He began his medical career as an intern in surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. In July 1960, he married Ann Mirabile, a 1961 graduate of Harvard Medical School and a long-time research colleague. Also that year, he began a yearlong clinical and research fellowship in medicine in the newly opened arteriosclerosis unit at the MGH. There, he developed a practical method for improving the diagnosis of patients with high blood lipids, the first research achievement in his long career focusing on the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of arteriosclerosis, the thickening and hardening of the artery walls.

In the following two years, he was an assistant resident in medicine at the MGH and then a fellow at the National Heart Hospital in London.

From 1963 to 1966, Lees served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service at the National Heart Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. There, he demonstrated the widespread value of the diagnostic tool he had developed at the MGH arteriosclerosis unit.

From 1966 to 1968 he was an assistant professor at the Rockefeller University in New York City. While there, he treated two young women who each had a double dose of bad genes for high blood-cholesterol. Such patients are unable to respond to any standard treatments, and they ordinarily die from coronary artery disease in their teens or early twenties. Lees developed a novel treatment to remove the lethal cholesterol from the patients’ plasma. After six months of the treatment, a form of plasmapheresis, there was marked improvement in both patients. The experiment led to a machine that is still in use to extend productive lives for patients with dangerously high cholesterol who do not respond to drugs.

When Lees became director of the MIT Clinical Research Center in 1969, he began treating two other patients who had a double dose of high blood-cholesterol genes. Treatment for one of them started when she was 16. She lived to her early 50s. The other patient, whom Lees first met when she was 3 years old, is still happily alive at the age of 51.

Lees also collaborated with an MIT professor of mechanical engineering to develop a machine that analyzed the sound waves made by blocked carotid arteries, which are located in the neck and deliver blood to the brain. The noninvasive technique used a microphone placed on the neck that sent the sound of blood flow in a blocked artery to a computer that determined how narrow the artery had become. The technique was called phonoangiography. It could measure carotid arterial narrowing to within 1 millimeter.

From 1973 to 1982, Lees was the first director of the Noninvasive Diagnostic Lab at MGH, where ultrasound was used to locate atherosclerotic plaques.

Another long-standing project was finding a way to locate atherosclerotic lesions by using compounds with a short-lived radioactive label attached. A promising element of this work was the discovery of a previously unknown protein in the artery wall. The protein, christened atherin, binds low density lipoproteins, the carriers of blood cholesterol, so tightly in the artery wall that the binding is believed to lead to atherosclerotic plaques.

From 1982 to 1991, Lees undertook clinical and research work at the New England Deaconess Hospital where he was director of medical research; after that, the work continued at the nonprofit Boston Heart Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an organization that Lees founded and directed from 1991 until retiring in December 2004.

Lees was member of the MIT Premedical Advisory Council from 1969 to 2007. He was also a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Metabolism Study Section of the National Institutes of Health, which he chaired from 1978 to 1980, as well as several other committees at MIT and Harvard Medical School. He was a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and the Council on Arteriosclerosis of the American Heart Association. He co-founded two companies, Diatide, and Atherex. He had many scientific publications and patents.

In addition to Ann Mirabile Lees, his wife of 56 years, Lees is survived by his sons, David and Steven; his daughters, Sarah and Martha; and five grandchildren.

A.R. "Pete" Gurney Jr., an internationally acclaimed playwright and author who served on the MIT faculty for 36 years, died June 13 at his home in New York City. He was 86.

The author of such well-known plays as “The Middle Ages,” “The Dining Room,” and “The Cocktail Hour,” Gurney was named a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play "Love Letters." His Broadway debut, in 1987, was with "Sweet Sue" starring Mary Tyler Moore. He was also the author of three novels. A complete list of Gurney's works is available on his website.

Gurney joined the faculty of the Department of Humanities — a predecessor to the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) — in 1960. He earned tenure in 1968, was promoted to full professor in 1972, and retired in 1996, moving to New York City to focus more completely on the theater.

In 1994, MIT honored Gurney with the McDermott Award for his contribution to the arts. Among many other honors and awards, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.

Deborah Fitzgerald, the Cutten Professor of the History of Technology, and a former dean of SHASS, recalls Gurney as a "legend at the Institute. We have had many enormously distinguished faculty in SHASS over the years," she said, "and he was one of the most remarkable from the humanities and arts."

"Gurney was a wonderful mentor to young faculty in the MIT Humanities and an outstanding teacher," says Philip Khoury, associate provost and the Ford International Professor of History. "His many students continue to remember him with fondness and appreciation. One of America’s leading playwrights, Pete Gurney was forever conscious of what MIT meant for his professional career. And he contributed enormously to making the MIT humanities so vital.”

"I remember Gurney sitting in on an American literature class when I was an undergraduate at MIT," recalls Duane Boning, now the Clarence J. LeBel Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "He wasn't the lecturer — Gurney was there out of love for the subject, and to hear what young students were thinking about these books. I thought that was pretty cool. Even when he wasn't teaching, he was inspiring."

In an extensive tribute to the life and works of A.R. Gurney, The New York Times reports on the driving force of his writing: “'What seems to obsess me,' he once said, 'is the contrast between the world and the values I was immersed in when I was young, and the nature of the contemporary world.' Early on, he said, 'I sensed the comforts of civilization — but also its discontents, what you give up. The emotions are carefully trained, ultimately honed, tamped down.' He devoted his life to bringing those feelings to the surface."

Story prepared by MIT SHASS Communications
Editorial Director: Emily Hiestand
Senior Writer: Kathryn O'Neill

Carl W. Garland, professor emeritus in the Department of Chemistry, died Tuesday, July 11, at the age of 87.

“Carl was an influential and outstanding scientist, mentor, educator, and colleague,” said Professor Timothy Jamison, head of the Department of Chemistry, upon learning of Garland’s passing. “We continue to hold him in very high esteem and will remember him fondly.”

Born on October 1, 1929 in Bangor, Maine, Garland was a resident of Lexington, Massachusetts. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Rochester in 1950, and went on to receive his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1953. He joined the faculty at MIT later that year as an instructor in the Department of Chemistry. Garland was a professor of physical chemistry in the department for over 40 years, until his retirement in 1997.  His early teaching activity with former Professor David Shoemaker resulted in the laboratory textbook "Experiments in Physical Chemistry." Currently in its 8th edition with new co-authors, the text has been widely used across the country.

Garland held visiting professor appointments across the globe, including the universities of Bordeaux, Paris, Rome, and Cambridge; Israel’s Ben Gurion University of the Negev; and Belgium’s Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In addition, he served as a scientific editor of the journals Optics and Spectroscopy and Liquid Crystals. He was an A.P. Sloan Fellow (1954-1960), a Guggenheim Fellow (1963-1964), and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

“Carl was part of a golden age of physical chemistry at MIT,” says Professor Robert Guy Griffin. Professor Emeritus John Deutch shares a similar sentiment. “He was part of the distinguished group of physical chemists at MIT: John Ross, John Waugh, Irwin Oppenheim, Jim Kinsey, and Bob Silbey, now all gone, who made the MIT the leading department in physical chemistry from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s,” Deutch remembers. “A dedicated colleague, Carl did his share, and should not be forgotten.”

Professor emeritus of chemistry Jeffrey Steinfeld has the unique distinction of remembering Garland in two capacities — first, as one of Garland’s students, and later, as a colleague. “In the early 1960s, all Course 5 majors were required to take a physical chemistry laboratory subject, which was taught by Professor Garland,” Steinfeld says. “I took this class, along with [Stanford University Professor Emeritus] Hans Andersen and the Koch twins, Dave and Billy. After I joined the chemistry faculty, Professor Garland — possibly impressed by my performance in his lab class — asked me to join him and Dave Shoemaker as a co-author in a new edition of their classic 'Experiments in Physical Chemistry'laboratory textbook.” Years later, when both Steinfeld and Garland had retired to emeritus status with the department, they remained in touch via a group fondly known as the “Old Faculty Club,” which would meet most Tuesdays in the Stata Center faculty dining area, and included fellow emeritus chemistry faculty Irwin Oppenheim, John Waugh, Robert Alberty, and Dietmar Seyferth.

"Carl will be remembered as a tremendously kind, gentle, and magnanimous colleague whose research and teaching exuded scholarship and excellence,” says Sylvia Ceyer, the J.C. Sheehan Professor and former department head. 

Garland’s early work (1953-1965) involved studying the infrared spectra of chemisorbed molecules in order to characterize the bonding and structure of surface species. Subsequent work (1965-1985) focused on order-disorder and critical phenomena in crystals and fluids. This involved mostly ultrasonic velocity and attenuation as a function of temperature down to 4 kelvins and pressure up to 10 kbar in order to characterize both static thermodynamic and dynamic relaxation behavior. Finally, he undertook extensive studies of second-order phase transitions in liquid crystals (1980-2010), primarily high-resolution AC calorimetry work on the critical behavior in nematic and smectic systems. This work involved pure liquid crystals, binary mixtures of liquid crystals (LCs), and dispersions of silica nanoparticles in LCs. The latter systems allowed one to characterize the effects of random fields on bulk critical behavior in several theoretically interesting universality classes.

Robert Birgeneau, former MIT faculty member and dean of science, and current chancellor emeritus and professor of physics, materials science and engineering, and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, remembers Garland as one of his “most cherished, long-time collaborators … both a close friend and one of the finest scientists that I have ever known.” In particular, Birgeneau recalls a collaboration in the late 1970s, wherein Garland, J. David Lister, and Birgeneau conducted a comprehensive study of the phase transition behavior of thermotropic liquid crystals. “We realized that by carrying out heat capacity, light scattering, and X-ray scattering studies on the same material and analyzing all of the data together, we could obtain a comprehensive and definitive picture of the fundamental physics characterizing these systems,” Birgeneau explains. “This led to a number of landmark papers. Carl was an ideal collaborator; he was an excellent experimentalist, he understood theory well and he thought deeply about the science. Equally importantly, he was generous and kind. I particularly admired his care for his own graduate students, and for mine as well.”

Birgeneau considers his final scientific interaction with Garland among the very best. “After I had come to Berkeley, a former graduate student, Mehmet Ramazanaglu; a postdoc, Byron Freelon; and I extended some of the earlier work that Carl and I had done at MIT on smectic liquid crystals embedded in silica gels. The results were, on the one hand, quite complicated but, on the other hand, prospectively quite important. Given my responsibilities as chancellor, I simply did not have the time required to oversee this project. I literally called Carl out of retirement to help me with this research. He did this with great verve and enthusiasm … it was as if he had gone back in time 30 years. Because of Carl, the project was an incredible success, with the resultant paper enthusiastically praised by the Physical Review referees. ... His passing represents a great loss to us all.”

Garland is survived by his wife of 62 years, Joan Garland, who remembers meeting her husband at the MIT Faculty Club. "I kibitzed on a bridge game [Carl] was playing with John Waugh, David Shoemaker, and Dan Leussing," she recalls. "We were the second couple to get married in the new MIT Chapel, and had our reception at the MIT Faculty Club."

Garland also leaves a daughter, Leslie Garland, of Maynard, Massachusetts, as well as a son, Andrew Garland, his wife, Helene, and three grandchildren, Rachel, Justin, and Daniel of Wyckoff, New Jersey. In addition, he is survived by a brother, David Garland, of Minneapolis, Minnesotta. Funeral services will be private. Those wishing to make a contribution in Garland's memory can do so with Friends of Acadia.

Gene M. Brown, MIT professor emeritus of biology, former department head, and former dean of the School of Science, passed away on Aug. 4 at the age of 91.

“He was really the heart and soul of the department for a very long time, devoted to undergraduates and to teaching,” says MIT Professor Lisa Steiner. Steiner, an expert in the evolution and development of the immune system, was hosted by Brown during her recruitment visit to MIT and became the first female faculty member hired in the Department of Biology. “The idea of the department without him is quite shocking.”

A pioneer in the field of intermediary metabolism, Brown’s research career focused on how living systems carry out chemical reactions in order to survive. He trained himself in enzymology after arriving at MIT, and he and his students and postdocs focused primarily on the enzymatic synthesis of several B vitamins, including thiamine, folic acid, riboflavin, and coenzyme A. He is best known for his work on the biosynthesis of folic acid and related compounds both in microorganisms and in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, publishing over 100 research papers in his career.

“Gene was a wonderful research advisor and teacher,” says Linda Spremulli, professor emerita of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was a graduate student with Brown from 1969 to 1973. “He transformed my life, instilling in me a love for the beauty of metabolic pathways with their complex mechanisms.”

Growing up in rural Missouri and Idaho, Brown was the first member of his family to finish high school, and the only person in his graduating class to attend college. After a year as a college student in Idaho, Brown enlisted in the Army Air Forces, where he taught defensive measures against chemical warfare. After his term in the Army Air Forces, he returned to college at Colorado A & M College, where he majored in chemistry, graduating in 1949. He completed his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin in 1953 under the direction of Esmond Snell, isolating and characterizing the enzymatic synthesis of pantetheine, an analog of vitamin B5, and an intermediary in the production of coenzyme A.

Brown continued working with Snell as a postdoc at the University of Texas until he was recruited by Professor Jack Buchanan to join the newly forming biochemistry division of the MIT Department of Biology in 1954. Brown served as executive officer of the department from 1967 to 1972; as associate department head under Professor Boris Magasanik from 1972 to 1977; as department head from 1977 to 1985; and as dean of the School of Science from 1985 to 1991. While serving as dean of science, Brown closed his research program. He officially retired from MIT in 1996, but continued teaching until 2014.

Brown’s deepest passion was teaching. “As dean, he would leave meetings with the president of MIT to go teach,” recalls Professor Tom RajBhandary, who co-taught 7.05 (Introductory Biochemistry) with Brown for over 20 years. He was legendary for teaching intermediary metabolism without any notes, filling the boards of Room 10-250 with detailed pathways in meticulous handwriting. Brown got his first taste of teaching in high school, when his math and chemistry teachers would routinely call him to the board to explain the material. He was the first person in the Department of Biology to give open book and open note examinations, promoting the view that students should not have to memorize, but rather should be assessed for their ability to think and to solve problems. He was involved in teaching 7.05 for 60 years.

“I loved teaching with Gene and will miss him,” says Professor Matthew vander Heiden, who currently teaches 7.05. “The privilege to see how he taught the class has had a tremendous impact on my own approach to teaching. I think he would be pleased to know that the unique insights he provided continue to be passed on each spring, and will continue to be passed on as long as I am involved in the course.”

Teaching undergraduates was a value that extended throughout his career. As dean of science, he made it clear that the quality of teaching would be an important consideration for tenure decisions. He also co-chaired the committee that instituted the undergraduate communications requirement aimed at improving skills in both written and oral communications. The Department of Biology gives two teaching awards in his honor: The Gene Brown Prize, funded by Brown himself, recognizes teaching excellence among undergraduates; and the Gene Brown-Merck Teaching Award, funded by Merck and by Brown’s former graduate students and postdocs, recognizes teaching excellence among graduate students.

During Brown’s administrative tenure in biology, the MIT Center for Cancer Research (the predecessor of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research) and the Whitehead Institute were established with Department of Biology faculty leadership (Professor Salvador Luria for the Center for Cancer Research in 1974, and Professor David Baltimore for the Whitehead Institute in 1982).

A longtime resident of Concord, Massachusetts, Brown is survived by his children, James, Lindsey, and Holly, and his four grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife, Shirley, and a brother, James. 

Gifts in Brown’s name may be made to the Gene Brown Undergraduate Education Fund, fund No. 3839399. Donations in his memory will support undergraduates and undergraduate education in the MIT Department of Biology. For more information, contact Rebecca Chamberlain at 617-253-4729 or rchambe@mit.edu.

Paul Gray ’54, SM ’55, ScD ’60, a devoted leader at MIT whose lifetime career at the Institute included turns as a student, professor, dean of engineering, associate provost, chancellor, president, and MIT Corporation chair, died today at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 85.

As MIT’s 14th president, from 1980 to 1990, and in his other roles, Gray transformed the Institute through his commitment to enhancing undergraduate education and increasing the presence of women and underrepresented minorities on campus. With his wife, Priscilla King Gray, at his side, he helped guide MIT through the social change and technological transformation that marked the second half of the 20th century.

His commitment to MIT, particularly to its students, was absolute. Even after retiring as MIT Corporation chair in 1997, he returned to teaching and advising. His work at the Institute was carried out in partnership with Priscilla, a champion of public service who led efforts to create a sense of community at MIT and co-founded what is now called the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center.

“Paul Gray led MIT with the clear-eyed pragmatism and uncommon steadiness of a born engineer, and the humility, warmth, and wisdom of an exceptional human being,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “He was an indispensable advisor to two MIT presidents who preceded him and all three who have followed him. His affection for and trust in our students allowed him to serve as an anchor at MIT during the turbulence of the Vietnam War; inspired him to greatly increase the presence and profile of underrepresented minority and women students in our community; and led him to pioneer the creation of the then-revolutionary Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, now an inseparable part of the MIT experience. Paul loved the MIT community like family — and we feel his loss like family, too.”

“Paul became my first and most essential guide to MIT. With the wisdom gained from a lifetime devoted to the Institute, he showed me MIT’s ethos and history,” says MIT President Emerita Susan Hockfield, who served as president of the Institute from 2004 to 2012. “Whether at dinner with his newly red-coated Class of ’54 classmates, or walking the Infinite Corridor with wonderful Priscilla — love of his life and partner in a presidency of warmth and purpose — his love of the place, of the people, and of our mission shone brightly in all he said and did. A part of me has always and will always see MIT through his eyes.”

A vigorous embrace of diversity

When Gray arrived at MIT as an undergraduate, women made up less than 2 percent of each MIT class, and the percentage of underrepresented minorities was similarly low. After joining the administration, he took up the charge to make the MIT community more representative of society at large.

In 1968, in response to recommendations from the newly created Black Students Union, Gray, who was then associate provost, and others created the Task Force on Educational Opportunity. Among other efforts, they hired an assistant director of admissions and worked with him to actively recruit minority students. MIT also began the landmark summer program Project Interphase, staffed largely by students of color.

As chancellor, Gray wrote and began implementing the Institute’s first formal plan to increase the presence of women and minorities among MIT’s faculty as well as its student body. In a 2008 MIT Infinite History interview, Gray recalled that these efforts represented a sea change for the Institute. Until that time, “MIT had never recruited [any students]. We waited for applications to come,” he said.

By the time he stepped down from the presidency in 1990, women made up more than 30 percent of incoming undergraduate classes, and underrepresented minorities constituted 14 percent. Gray’s efforts had laid the foundation for MIT’s subsequent leaders to further increase diversity and inclusion at the Institute. His work on diversity among students and the faculty “may be the most important thing I did around here,” Gray said in the Infinite History interview.

One of the first members of the Black Students Union was Shirley Ann Jackson ’68, PhD ’73, who is now the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a life member of the MIT Corporation. “For me, Paul was foremost a great friend, advisor, supporter, and confidante. I always turned to him at critical junctures in my career. He never failed me — his advice and guidance were always spot on,” Jackson says.

Reshaping undergraduate education

Even after becoming a full-time administrator in the 1970s, Gray maintained a close connection with the Institute’s students. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from MIT, all in electrical engineering, in 1954, 1955, and 1960, respectively. After three years of teaching as an instructor, he joined the faculty in 1960 and became the MIT Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering from 1968 to 1971. He was associate dean for student affairs from 1965 to 1967, associate provost from 1969 to 1970, and dean of the School of Engineering from 1970 to 1971.

“To me, he is the iconic president of MIT because he was made out of pure Institute clay, as an undergraduate, graduate, professor, and academic leader,” says Institute Professor Emeritus John Deutch, who served as MIT provost from 1985 to 1990. “As his provost, I witnessed his endless devotion to education and scholarship. His love for Priscilla and his family matched his love for MIT.”

In his Infinite History interview, Gray reflected on his early days of teaching, which he did alongside Harold “Doc” Edgerton, another popular MIT professor: “I found it enormously satisfying. Demanding, but very satisfying. And somewhere in that two-year interval, with teaching every semester, I came to the conclusion that this is what I want to do with my life.”

As a professor, Gray was part of an effort in the 1960s to overhaul the way electrical engineering was taught, moving the focus away from vacuum tubes and squarely onto semiconductor electronics. In support of this transition, Gray wrote seven textbooks and other materials, working with MIT colleagues as well as others at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Raytheon, and IBM.

Gray joined the MIT administration full-time when he accepted the position of chancellor, serving from 1971 to 1980, followed by a decade as MIT president. He was chairman of the MIT Corporation from 1991 to 1997.

As associate provost, Gray championed professor Margaret MacVicar SB '64, ScD '67 and her innovative proposal to create a program that would involve undergraduates in faculty research. The result was the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), one of the earliest programs of its kind in the United States and now a national model, supporting thousands of projects each year. Today, 90 percent of MIT graduating seniors participate in at least one UROP during their undergraduate years.

As president, Gray committed himself to paying renewed attention to the “pace, coherence, and intellectual impact” of the undergraduate experience.

To this end, he helped make a number of reforms to MIT’s undergraduate curriculum. He reaffirmed the pass/no record grading system for freshman that he had helped implement while associate provost. He also launched a formal review of an undergraduate curriculum that until then had been largely focused on engineering, mathematics, and the physical sciences. This led to the addition of biology to the core requirements, as well as a strengthening of the offerings in the humanities and social sciences.

“There may be no single person in modern history who has had such an impact on MIT as Paul Gray,” says MIT Corporation Life Member Emeritus Jim Champy ’63, SM ’65. “So much of what we experience at MIT today was begun by Paul. I worked for him in my years at MIT while he was chancellor, and knew him later as a friend and Corporation member. For all the magnitude of his impact, Paul — together with Priscilla — brought a genuine warmth and caring for every student and member of the MIT community.”

Responding to national and international trends

In broadening the MIT curriculum, Gray was also carrying out another of his goals: to rededicate science and technology as socially powerful activities. 
“We continue to hear the complaint that … many of our human and social ills are the direct result of unanticipated and deleterious artifacts of technology, foisted upon the world by technicians with tunnel vision,” he said in his inaugural address.

“It is clear, however, that the future development not only of this nation, but of the world, is inexorably tied to continued scientific progress and to the humane and thoughtful applications of science,” Gray continued. “What is needed is not a retreat from science and technology, but a more complete science and technology. We must strive to develop among ourselves, among our students, and in the public at large, an understanding of the fact that engineering and science are, by their very nature, humanistic enterprises.”

Gray furthered his vision of a science and engineering enterprise in service of society while developing new ventures at MIT and representing the Institute in Washington.

In 1986, with the economic recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s still a recent memory, MIT under Gray’s leadership created the Commission on Industrial Productivity. The group, which comprised 17 MIT faculty members, produced the landmark study “Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge,” which examined the causes of the recent slowdown in U.S. productivity growth and made recommendations for improved economic performance.

Gray also helped establish the Leaders for Manufacturing Program (now Leaders for Global Operations), a joint effort by the MIT Sloan School of Management and the School of Engineering in partnership with top manufacturing companies. The program’s goal was to help students develop the technical, analytical, and business skills needed to lead strategic initiatives in high-tech, operations, and manufacturing companies.

Also during his presidency, Gray implemented a plan to establish the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. Initially headed by MIT Professor David Baltimore, the institute brought major new biology resources to MIT.

Gray served for four years on the White House Science Council and the Council’s Panel on the Health of Universities. He was also vice chairman of the nonprofit Council on Competiveness. He was a staunch advocate for public understanding of science, federal support for research and higher education, and collaboration between academia and industry.

Increasing MIT’s financial strength

Federal funding for science and technology research and for higher education had been at a historic high during the Sputnik era, but it declined significantly in the 1970s and remained stagnant in the ’80s, during Gray’s term as president.

In 1987, MIT under Gray launched the five-year Campaign for the Future, which raised $710 million. And in 1994, while at the helm of the MIT Corporation, Gray played a lead role in the seven-year Campaign for MIT, which raised $2.05 billion, surpassing the original goal of $1.5 billion and bringing the Institute into a small group of universities — many with significantly larger alumni populations — that had comparably ambitious campaign goals. By the time Gray retired from the Corporation in 1997, MIT’s endowment was more than $2.1 billion.

Gray also helped MIT secure funding from corporations in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and created long-term partnerships with industry that provided relatively unconstrained support for MIT research.

Much of Gray’s success in the fundraising arena can be credited to the personable approach both he and his wife brought to MIT.

Many alumni have recalled the care the couple demonstrated toward MIT students. Together, the pair held weekly dinners for seniors in the president’s house — now known as Gray House — and visited dormitories and other student residences. They were often seen together on campus, talking with students, faculty, and staff from across the MIT community.

“In the whole history of MIT, very few people have ever rivaled Paul Gray’s legacy of stewardship and service — as a faculty member, an administrator, an alumnus, a trustee, and a leader,” says Robert Millard ’73, chair of the MIT Corporation. “His nearly 50 years on the MIT Corporation included 26 as a member of the Executive Committee and, after his presidency, seven distinguished years as Corporation Chair. He played a pivotal role in countless key decisions, including the selection of MIT’s two most recent presidents. Universally respected and loved, Paul was — and remains — an inspiration to all of us charged with caring for what he called ‘this special place.’”

Family at the center of life

Paul Edward Gray was born on Feb. 7, 1932, in Newark, New Jersey. He cited his father, a technician at a public utility who never finished high school, as an influential figure who helped him discover his interest in electricity at an early age. By first or second grade, Gray was winding copper wire around nails to make electromagnets, and by age 10 he was repairing his neighbors’ radios. He built his own radio equipment and was a ham radio operator for many years.

By high school, Gray knew he wanted to be an engineer. As an undergraduate at MIT, he joined the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity, enrolled in ROTC, and met Priscilla on a blind date. After earning his master’s degree and marrying Priscilla in 1955, he served in the U.S. Army for two years, then returned to MIT for further graduate study. Together, the Grays raised and educated four children. In his spare time, Gray played squash, made furniture in his woodshop, and enjoyed many outdoor activities with his family.

Gray served on the board of directors of the Boeing Company and Eastman Kodak Company, and was a Life Trustee of the Boston Museum of Science and Wheaton College. He was a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Gray is survived by his wife, Priscilla King Gray; by four children and their spouses — Virginia and Thomas Army, Amy and David Sluyter, Andrew and Yukiko Gray, and Louise and Timothy Huyck — and by 12 grandchildren, three of their spouses, and one great grandchild. He also leaves a sister-in-law and brother-in-law, Cynthia and Louis Schueler, and several nephews and nieces.

Gifts in Gray’s memory may be made to MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative to support research on Alzheimer’s disease. A memorial service will be held at Hancock United Church of Christ in Lexington on Oct. 1. An MIT memorial service is planned for 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 30, in Kresge Auditorium. 

Stanislaw “Stan” Olbert PhD ’53, professor emeritus of physics and a distinguished researcher with MIT’s Space Plasma Group, died from a heart attack on Sept. 23. He was 94.

Olbert fought with the Polish underground during World War II, came to MIT on a scholarship to earn his doctorate, and, as a member of MIT’s Space Plasma Group, was one of the pioneer theorists of the space age. He specialized in the understanding of the solar wind, the streams of atomic particles flowing outward from the sun. He participated in, and brought insight to, the measurements of the solar wind with instruments on several NASA space missions, including the Voyager missions to the outer planets and interstellar space.

Born in 1923, Olbert was raised by his widowed mother in a small village in Eastern Poland. He showed early academic promise, and, during the Russian occupation of 1939 to 1941, he concentrated in math and physics under Russian teachers. Under the subsequent German occupation of 1941, however, his studies were interrupted. He was forced to work as a mason, and later, because he spoke German, as a bookkeeper on a German-run farm. He secretly shared information about German-bound food shipments for later interception by the Polish underground.   

In 1944, he fought in the Warsaw uprising and, at the surrender, was taken prisoner by the Germans. At the war’s end, Olbert was declared a "displaced person" and enrolled at the University of Munich to resume his studies in math and physics. He earned a scholarship to the doctoral program of MIT’s Department of Physics in 1949. With the Cosmic Ray Group led by Professor Bruno Rossi, he earned his doctorate in 1953, became an assistant professor in 1957, and became full professor in 1967; he retired in 1988.

Following his thesis research, Olbert studied the properties of high-energy nuclear interactions and the extensive air showers — large cascades of atomic particles propagating through the atmosphere — that are produced by those interactions. This provided the first theoretical framework in which the implications of various assumptions about the basic cascade processes could be worked out for comparison with observed shower phenomena.

Olbert’s research in the field of space plasmas began with a study of the origins of cosmic rays in our galaxy. This work, performed in collaboration with Rossi and Professor Philip Morrison, led Olbert into fundamental investigations of individual and collective behavior of charged particles in the interplanetary environment.

The results of these investigations became the basis of two MIT graduate courses. One of these, taught in collaboration with Rossi, led to the publication of a textbook on the subject, "Introduction to the Physics of Space" (McGraw-Hill, 1970).

“Professor Olbert was the theoretical backbone of MIT’s Space Plasma Group,” said his colleague Hale Bradt, professor emeritus of physics. The group flew instruments in numerous space missions to study the solar wind, beginning with its first in situ measurement with Explorer 10 in 1961, and including the 1977 launches of Voyager I and Voyager II. Even today, the Voyagers continue to send data from in and beyond the heliosphere. Among other contributions, Olbert engaged in theoretical studies of a variety of mechanisms that could be responsible for the generation of stellar winds.

From 1979 to 1986, Olbert undertook two major research projects: the self-consistent solution of the problem of solar wind dynamics, and theoretical studies of radiation generated by solid conductors moving through a magnetized plasma. Olbert maintained contact with many graduate and undergraduate students who have since become well-known in the field of space research.

“He gave me private lessons on the physics of space plasmas, which had not been covered in my coursework,” said Olbert’s last doctoral student, Alan Barnett PhD ’83. “His cheerful and optimistic outlook was infectious.”

In the 1980s, Olbert was a frequent visitor to the University of Rome and the Arcetri Observatory in Florence; and, in 1991, at the Institute for Cosmic Studies in Warsaw, Poland. He collaborated abroad and at home with former students and associates on various projects. One of these papers, in 2003, provides methods for the visualization of the motion of electromagnetic fields that have been used in the teaching of freshman physics both at MIT and around the world. His last first-author paper was published in 2012, at the age of 89. Until late in his life, Olbert kept up with current events with regular reading of newspapers in German, Italian, Polish, and English.

He and his family lived in Melrose, Massachusetts, and later in Cambridge, with summers spent on their New Hampshire farm. Olbert is survived by his wife, Norma (DeVivo), and their two children, Thomas of Cambridge, and Elizabeth of Farmington, Maine, where she is adjunct professor at the University of Maine.

In 1980, Elizabeth created the abstract painting "Jupiter," inspired by the Voyager spacecraft images; it hangs in the headquarters of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. In 2014, Norma published a biography of Olbert’s early years in Poland and Germany, "The Boy from Lwów" (CreateSpace, 2014), for which Thomas wrote the foreword and Elizabeth designed the cover.

Olbert’s body was cremated, and there will be no funeral service. A memorial gathering will be announced in the near future.

Michael B. Cohen ’14, SM ’16 had a deep love for mathematics and the theoretical foundations of computing — a love that was infectious, brilliant, and always shared with others. Cohen, a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), died suddenly from natural causes in September. He was 25 years of age.

At the time of his passing, Cohen was visiting the University of California at Berkeley, where he had gone to meet with colleagues at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. A member of the Theory of Computing group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, he had roots in the Washington area.

Daniela Rus, the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director CSAIL, said, “We are all still stunned by the news of the passing of Michael Cohen. Michael was a beloved student at CSAIL, a brilliant colleague in the theory group, and a joyful presence everywhere he went. This is a huge and collective loss for the entire CSAIL community.”

Cohen first came to MIT as an undergraduate student, and he lived in East Campus. He earned his bachelor’s in mathematics in 2014, having skipped his second year at MIT to work at Facebook. He then stayed on at MIT to pursue a graduate degree in computer science.

Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin who taught at MIT from 2007 to 2016, recalled Cohen as a particularly motivated first year student, ready to solve open problems, or basically tackle anything.

Writing on his blog, Aaronson noted that when he met Cohen he realized at once that he “was a freshman who I could — must — talk to like an advanced grad student or professor.” In his class on quantum complexity theory, Cohen had the habit of sitting in the front row and carrying on dialogues with Aaronson, often catching any errors or “unjustified claims.” At the same time, Aaronson was impressed by Cohen’s intellectual humility, as his focus was on understanding and clarifying tough concepts for everyone in the class, not showing off. Such openness led to Cohen “having a huge circle of friends.”

His fellow MIT students described him as “energetic, fun, and supportive,” and admired his irrepressible spirit of “exuberance and generosity.” Cameron Musco, a doctoral student in the same lab as Cohen and a frequent co-author, wrote, “It was impossible to ignore his energy, wonder, and excitement for research, current events, and everything in between.” Cohen was a notable presence on the 5th and 6th floors of the Stata Center at MIT, Musco also recalled, “always … surrounded by a group of friends happy to banter or simply to listen. He was a natural teacher — truly kind, humble, welcoming, positive, and always willing to slow his thoughts for a moment to share his brilliance.”

Cohen was an intellectual tour-de-force beyond the campus as well. He spent a summer at Microsoft Research, where he quickly cemented a reputation for “his larger-than-life personality” and academic brilliance. A statement by the team he worked with at Microsoft read: “Michael was a brilliant mathematician and a rising star in his field. … [H]e made sweeping progress in online learning and online algorithms, two fields he had just recently become acquainted with. In addition to solving five open problems in these areas, he continued his substantial progress on the k-server problem, one of the most celebrated and notoriously difficult challenges in the space of adaptive algorithms.”

Sebastien Bubeck, a researcher in the Theory Group at Microsoft Research who worked alongside Cohen, shared what he called a “typical Michael story,” about when they first met in October 2016 at MIT: “We were about to start lunch with a small group of graduate students and Michael entered the room, he (gently) interrupted the conversation and his first sentence to me was a question about mirror descent that I was not able to answer. (We now know the answer, and as it turns out his question was pretty deep and the answer highly non-trivial.)”

Bubeck, like many others, was also struck by Cohen’s remarkable way of doing mathematics, primarily never writing anything on paper. James R. Lee, a professor of computer science at University of Washington, said, “His mind was always going at 100 mph, so it was remarkable that he didn’t miss a beat in calibrating (i.e., slowing down) for an audience (or for those who did not know him).”

Luca Trevisan, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley, noted that “in a few short years, Michael left his mark on a number of problems.” At the time of his death, Cohen was credited as a co-author on papers with more than 30 distinct collaborators. Tom Cohen, Michael’s father, remarked that his son, “more than anything, wished to become part of that community and to engage in a meaningful way on relevant research in the field.” Cleary, he achieved that and much more, becoming a leading light in the theoretical computer science community.

As Lee wrote, “one got the sense that this was all a warmup for Michael. It’s really disheartening that we won’t get to see what comes next.” He and others have committed to ensuring that Cohen’s work is more than just remembered, but spread far and wide and used to tackle the kinds of open problems that he adored.

Those wishing to making contributions in Cohen’s name should consider givedirectly.org, a charity he admired that provides money to individuals in extreme poverty in Kenya and Uganda.

In the 3rd grade, Henoch Argaw began tutoring his fellow students at Southeast Christian Academy Elementary School in Colorado.

“He told me and Sehin [his mother] that he was writing a math instruction book,” recalls Neway Argaw, his father. “By that time, he was already attending 5th grade [level] math and science courses.” Their son continued tutoring all the way through high school and also took up a related pursuit, refereeing and coaching youth soccer for the Colorado Storm and other Colorado soccer clubs. He was also a competitive chess player and played the trumpet since 4th grade.

Mustafa Amjad, a student at University of Pennsylvania who met Argaw when he was attending the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) Jordan program, writes: “He was always willing to help and offer his advice whenever I needed it and I was truly inspired by the breadth of his knowledge.”

Argaw, a second-year MIT student who passed away unexpectedly in late September, inspired countless others during his time at MIT and elsewhere. He was 19 years old. A resident of East Campus, Argaw was pursuing one of the Institute’s newest majors, 6-14 (Computer Science, Economics and Data Science) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). The major was a perfect fit, as he had been enamored of complex analysis from an early age.

In middle school, Argaw’s proclivity for math and science garnered him a presidential award for education excellence, and he went on to attend and win numerous STEM competitions prior to coming to MIT. “For two consecutive years he was the highest scorer in his middle-school math competition and highest among all 7th and 8th grade students from across his school district,” his father says.

His close friend, Benjamin Farnsworth, writes that he and Argaw formed a bond over being the only two 6th graders in Algebra 1 class — but also notes his broader interests and playful humor: “I remember countless hours playing Mario Hoops on our Nintendo DSs and practicing musical duets. One time, we went to preform 'Ode to Joy' for the school talent show, and we accidentally repeated it at separate times. The result: We both burst out in laughter for a good two minutes, to our embarrassment. Every time we heard 'Ode to Joy' after that, we couldn't help but smile.”

As with mathematics, music and languages came easily to Argaw. Born in Tampere, Finland, he was fluent or near-fluent in Amharic, Arabic, Mandarin and English. Argaw shared on a personal profile page that he had “learned a substantial amount of Arabic … after starting with barely any knowledge of the language” during an internship this past summer at liwwa, Inc., a peer-to-peer lending company in Amman, Jordan.Ahmed Moor, co-founder and CEO of the firm writes, “He had an easy and generous way of grinning at you; it always brightened my day. I'm grateful for the short time I had with him. The pain of his loss goes deep, but the joy of having known him goes deeper.”

Argaw’s ability to weave together his interests was impressive, as demonstrated in 2013 when he designed and developed a mobile app for Chinese language flashcards. To do so, all he had to do was master programming from scratch. Likewise, he applied his mathematical gifts to economic issues, first as a summer E2 (Engineering Experience at MIT) participant, where he focused on trading, optimization, and portfolio management; and later as an undergraduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative, creating an open-source solution for private cryptocurrency transactions. His most recent project included developing an artificial poker player/robot that won him and his partner $500 in a competition with more than 40 other competitors.

Beyond academics, he belonged to Sigma Alpha Epsilon, served as an officer for the MIT Club Sports Council, treasurer of the MIT Ethiopian-Eritrean Student Association (MIT-EESA), and participated in numerous campus activities, including the MIT Taekwondo Club, the Bitcoin Club, and the Skydiving Club. His many interests were a reflection of his multifaceted personality, as underscored by a eulogy given by Argaw’s cousin: “Henoch was more than just his academic achievements… more than his comprehensive abilities and it should be the last thing to define him. … I’m not going to miss Henoch the student, I am going to miss Henoch the human being.”

Moreover, his sister Peniel adds, “Henoch had many more attributes than just being smart, he had a genuine care and kindness for others. Whether he had a huge assignment due the next day or not, Henoch would always be there for the people he loved. He knew the true meaning of putting others before himself, which continues to inspire me to this day.”

Argaw’s mother calls him her “trophy,” celebrating his generosity, his firm ethical principles, such as always standing for the truth, and his dedication to reading the Bible. “As many said, Henoch was very smart but what surprised me was how he could teach himself anything from scratch, from tying a cravat to day-to-day things like cooking to sophisticated things like programming and stock analysis.” Moreover, rather than complaining about uncomfortable situations, she adds, he always made the best use of his circumstances. “He had so many questions still unanswered. I know he will get all the answers in Heaven.”

On his LinkedIn profile, Argaw described himself and his hopes as both practical and philosophical, writing: “Since a very young age software, computers, and the internet have been critically important to me as a clear display of how humanity can shape the world around it to pursue its desire and its higher purpose. … I would like to further my studies in artificial intelligence and also work to produce a product in AI that will allow people to walk further in their journey — discovering more than anyone prior had imagined.”

A campus memorial service will be held on Saturday, Nov. 4 from 4 to 5 p.m. in the MIT Chapel.