EECS Department Head Anantha Chandrakasan recently announced the appointments of Qing Hu as Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and of Charles E. Leiserson as Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Professor Hu, [photo left] the inaugural holder of the Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has made significant contributions to physics and device applications over a broad electromagnetic spectrum, from millimeter wave, through terahertz (THz), to infrared frequencies. His research has involved technology development for detectors and sources, as well as system-level imaging and sensing applications. A most distinctive contribution is his development of high-performance THz quantum cascade lasers. This breakthrough has already found applications in sensing and real‐time THz imaging, which was also pioneered by his group. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA), of the American Physical Society (APS), of the IEEE, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is the recipient of the 2012 IEEE Photonics Society William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award. He has been an Associate Editor of Applied Physics Letters since 2006, and was the co-chair of the 2006 International Workshop on Quantum Cascade Lasers.
In addition to his research, Professor Hu has also made important contributions to the department in service and teaching. He has served on the EECS faculty search committee during 2008-2011, the EECS ABET committee during 2012-2013, and the personnel committee since 2012. He has taught a broad range of courses, including signals and systems (6.003), microelectronic devices and circuits (6.012), electromagnetics (6.013/6.014), quantum mechanics (6.017 prior to 1995), and solid-state physics (6.730 and 6.732).
Professor Leiserson [photo right] will be occupying a chair held over its sixty years by a succession of distinguished faculty in our department, including Ernst Guillemin in 1960, Lan Jen Chu in 1963, Peter Elias in 1974, Ronald Rivest in 1992, and most recently Alan Willsky. The Edwin Sibley Webster chair is also currently held by Professor Srini Devadas. Professor Leiserson's research centers on algorithms and parallel computing. He wrote the first paper on systolic architectures, devised the retiming method of digital-circuit optimization, invented the fat-tree interconnection network, introduced the notion of cache-oblivious algorithms, and developed the Cilk multithreaded programming technology, which incorporated the first provably efficient work-stealing scheduler. Many of Professor Leiserson's inventions have been embodied in industrial artifacts.
Parallel to his seminal contributions to computer science and engineering, Professor Leiserson has made important contributions in education within the MIT community and beyond. His annual workshop on Leadership Skills for Engineering and Science Faculty has educated hundreds of faculty at MIT and around the world in the nontechnical issues involved in leading technical teams in academia. He has taught widely in the EECS undergraduate curriculum — including 6.001, 6.002, 6.004, 6.032, 6.033, 6.042, 6.045, 6.046, 6.172 — and led the development of 6.042, 6.046, and 6.172. He has also taught graduate subjects in algorithms, VLSI theory, and parallel computing, as well as led the Singapore-MIT Alliance distance-education program in computer science. He is well known for coauthoring Introduction to Algorithms, one of the most cited and best selling textbooks in computer science. Professor Leiserson has been recognized for his educational and research contributions with the ACM/IEEE Computer Society 2014 Ken Kennedy High-Performance Computing Award, the IEEE Computer Society 2014 Taylor L. Booth Education Award, and the ACM 2013 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award.
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