EECS Faculty Promotions Announced, effective July 1, 2013

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department Head Anantha Chandrakasan and Associate Department Heads Munther Dahleh and Bill Freeman announced the promotions of Professors Regina Barzilay, Karl Berggren, Jongyoon Han, Rob Miller, Li-Shiuan Peh, Joel Voldman, and Lizhong Zheng to the rank of Full Professor effective July 1, 2013. Brief descriptions of their work appear below.  Congratulations! 

Prof. Barzilay studies how computers can understand and generate human language. She develops models of natural language, and uses those models to solve real-world language processing tasks. Her research enables the automated summarization of documents, machine interpretation of natural language instructions, and the deciphering of ancient languages. She is acknowledged to be a world leader in computational linguistics. She is a wonderful mentor to her students, who have received recognition within MIT and nationally for their doctoral theses and their research.
Prof. Berggren is a leader in nanostructure fabrication methods with focus on superconductive quantum and photonic devices. His contributions lie in two distinct dimensions. The first is the development of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector which have set records in detecting photons in the infrared range. The second dimension is focused on the development of new nanofabrication techniques for sub-10nm nanolithography using electron-beam techniques as well as new processes for templated self-assembly of block-copolymers. Karl is an excellent educator and developed the current curriculum of the `Nanostructure Fabrication’ course, bridging the gap between theory and practice in nanofabrication.
Prof. Han studies fundamental properties of micro- and nanoscale fluidics and exploits them in novel ways to solve important problems arising in biotechnology, medicine, energy, and environmental applications. Jay’s lab was the first to provide compelling experimental demonstration of ionic macromolecular concentration arising from non-equilibrium electrokinetic flow conditions. He has proven to be a dedicated teacher and is a co-instructor for popular multi-departmental bioengineering subjects (6.021/2.791/20.370 and 20.330/2.793/6.023). He serves as the director of the inter-departmental Biomedical Engineering undergraduate minor program.
Prof. Miller designs user interfaces and studies human-computer interaction. He has developed “keyword programming”, a widely-copied system for web programming, and has developed ways to program user interfaces using screen-shots, now widely deployed. He is a world leader in "crowd computing", the development of methods to harness the efforts of crowds of people at tasks that are difficult for computers, such as editing documents or taking good photographs. He is a conscientious and gifted teacher and mentor, and his graduate students go to top jobs in academia and industry.
Prof. Peh is an internationally recognized leader in the area of networks-on-a-chip (NoC) focusing on modeling, architecture and implementation of high-performance and power-aware networks. NoCs are an important communication tool in modern microprocessor circuits, which integrate multiple cores on a chip. Li-Shiuan’s group has demonstrated innovative NoCs in state-of-the-art CMOS technologies. She has developed CAD tools for modeling which are widely used in industry and in academia. She co-founded the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Networks-on-Chips and served as the first program chair and organizer in 2007. Li-Shiuan has also played a key role in the SMART program in Singapore.
Prof. Voldman is a pioneer in micro-scale technology intended to manipulate and understand biological cells. His work is deeply motivated by important biological questions and has shed new insights in areas such as embryonic stem cell biology, as well as produced a “Toolbox” used by his and other groups for positioning and separating cells. Joel has developed micro-technology to organize cells and control their environment with specific focus on applications in stem cell biology, and developed ways to sort and separate cells from each other. Joel is an excellent teacher who has invested considerable effort in revising the EECS curriculum. He is a co-director of the MEDRC and MIT PI for an NSF ERC on neural engineering.
Prof. Zheng is a top information theorist who has made seminal contributions to the field starting with his work on MIMO channels that received considerable attention by both the research community and the wireless communication applied community. He is developing a framework based on information geometry that enables the analysis of open problems in network information theory in the limiting regime of low SNR. Using this framework, Lizhong has been able to provide several important contributions involving multi-terminal channel) both from encoding and decoding perspectives. Lizhong is currently involved in creating an inference course for undergraduate students.

The EECS Department Heads also announced the promotions of Professors Armando Solar-Lezama and Dana Weinstein to the rank of Asociate Professor without tenure effective July 1, 2013. Brief descriptions of their work appear below. Congratulations!

Prof. Solar-Lezama and his group develop tools that allow programmers to write software more easily, automating the tedious and difficult aspects of programming. These tools utilize information provided by the programmer at a very high level of abstraction to produce completed code, with the lower-level details or missing components automatically filled-in. Armando’s research work has contributed to a renewed interest in software synthesis among the programming languages and formal methods communities.

Prof. Weinstein works in the area MEMS (Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems) with applications in wireless communication and clocking. Her group develops new electromechanical transducers for RF MEMS resonators to achieve high Q frequency sources up to the mm-wave regime. In particular, her group has demonstrated active MEMS devices integrated monolithically in CMOS. Dana is the recipient of the DARPA YFA, the NSF CAREER, and the Intel Early Career Award, and received the 2012 Jerome Saltzer Teaching Award, given to a faculty member for sustained excellence in teaching of recitations.