harvard seas, newsletter, spring 2008

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Skipping StonesAs readers of this newsletter know, I am

partial to using metaphors. Because this is my last Dean’s Message, it seems only appropriate to turn yet another phrase. For the past few months, I’ve been telling col-leagues that “I’m looking forward to skip-ping stones.” I suspect many thought I was planning to delve into the field of fluid me-chanics. Not quite.Consider the classic childhood game. You fling an inanimate object into motion. Just when you think the rock might sink, it rises again, often repeating the cycle before settling. The phenomenon is a marvel of applied science (see, for example, “Secrets of successful stone-skipping,” Clanet et al., Nature 427 (6969): 29, 2004) and a perfect way to ease into a long afternoon. At its best, skipping stones is a form of active meditation. I’ve long enjoyed listen-ing to the water lap back and forth, a habit I picked up while living in Santa Barbara and now do at my retreat on Cape Cod. The rhythm enables my own thoughts to skip to and fro, unfettered, before eventually landing upon a potential idea. In fact, I owe much of my best thinking, as a researcher and administrator, to the right mix of tide and time.While the next dean will take forward the plans SEAS has set in motion (and add new elements), upon stepping down and return-ing to the faculty full time I am looking forward to dedicating myself to tackling issues that will require many afternoons of energetic reflection.

Improving our teaching. We have heard from current Harvard stu-dents and alumni how much teaching and

mentorship matter, especially in intense disciplines like the sciences and engineer-ing. SEAS is actively engaged in creating new courses (a portal course for engineer-ing; a new track on technology, innovation, and society), building teaching labs (a space for CAD/CAM, mechanics, and photonics is due in September), and reconsidering what “design” means (a committee is hard at work). As important, I will personally strive to find new ways to value teaching, at the school and university levels, by providing time, incentives, rewards, and recognition to those who excel.

Teasing out the interfaces of technology, innova-tion, and society.Henry Petroski wrote that “To Engineer Is Human.” At one level, we need to trace the path of how technology influences our so-ciety and economy (like digital music mak-ing the CD nearly obsolete) and understand how individuals and institutions push tech-nical development (the idea marketplace). More broadly, the decisions we make now about what technologies to support, de-velop, and adopt, from building nanobots to manipulating the human genome, will influence how we live—and even who we will become as individuals and as a species. I will be advocating, in word and action, that we should not take such issues lightly.

Creating links to other parts of HarvardThis has long been a goal of SEAS—and one that will be the most critical aspect of ensur-ing SEAS’ long-term success. We can make deep connections on a local level through joint appointments. By the fall, we will welcome new faculty members in systems biology and environmental engineering, all based in multiple departments and schools. I myself plan to serve as a visiting professor

or scholar, with the goal of strengthening programmatic links. President Faust said that with the launch of SEAS “we affirm [the] power to connect, to bridge, and there-fore to enliven and strengthen a great many parts of our University as a whole.”

Exploring the relationships between public policy and scientific and governmental leadershipProtecting the environment, meeting en-ergy needs, making healthcare accessible, and ensuring overall sustainability of the population and planet require political, intellectual, and engineering muscle. The founder of Engineers Without Borders called this “engineering as diplomacy”—and I am more than ready to join the cause.As a nation, we need to find ways to encour-age positive change by working with politi-cal, industrial, and academic leaders. After all, it is far better for a call to action to come from a shared desire to make the world a better place (such as eliminating hunger) or motivated by the sheer excitement of solv-ing a problem (inventing a clean energy source) than for it to come from a crisis.For the past decade, I have been working hard with everyone here to make these practices ones that define SEAS. We have progressed, thanks to all those who have supported us. On a personal note, I am grateful to the members of the Harvard leadership who gave me the opportunity to serve as dean and to the wonderful SEAS community, which made every day such a joy. I will always remember my friends. In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna says, “As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies …” Although I will keep the same body, I will gain a new intellectual soul. And thus, as I move into my new role, I will remain active as a teacher, researcher, and supporter for SEAS.If you don’t see me in the hallway or some-where on campus, or if my door is closed, just remember, I’m likely near the water somewhere, skipping stones. J

Venkatesh “Venky” NarayanamurtiDean, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied SciencesJohn A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Professor of Physics

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On October 29 (left to right) Dean Michael D. Smith, Dr. Takao Kuramochi, Dr. Koji Kaya, Dean Jeremy Bloxham, and Dean Venkatesh Narayanamurti signed a Memorandum of Understanding to encourage and facilitate collaborations between Harvard and RIKEN researchers.

Venkatesh Murthy in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and SEAS’s L. Mahadevan, created the Harvard-Bangalore Science Initiative (HBSI) to encourage undergraduates to experience research and culture a world away.

Dean Venky to step down in September

Venkatesh Narayanamurti, Dean of SEAS, who for 10 years has directed the renewal and expansion of the former di-vision and its transition to a School, an-nounced on February 15 his intention to step down from his position in Sep-tember 2008. “Venky’s leadership has had a genuinely transformative impact on engineering and applied sciences at Harvard,” said Harvard President Drew Faust. “He has in many ways been both the architect and the chief engineer of Harvard’s newest School, and his vision, energy, and instinct for collaboration have strengthened our capacity and el-evated our sights in a vital academic do-main. It’s been a pleasure to work with him, and I join his many admirers in saluting his service to the University.”

Narayanamurti, the John A. and Eliza-beth S. Armstrong Professor of Engi-neering and Applied Sciences, origi-nally announced his decision to return to teaching and research in 2005 but agreed to stay on as dean to oversee the SEAS transition and launch of the new School last fall. After stepping down, Narayanamurti will continue to devote himself to teaching, research, and other forms of University service. A faculty advisory committee chaired by Provost Steven Hyman and FAS Dean Michael Smith has been convened to begin the search process for a new dean. Alumni are encouraged to email their suggestions and thoughts to: [email protected]

“Skunk works” to open for undergrads

The venerable Pierce Hall is in the midst of yet another round of reengineering. A glimpse through the gaps left in the ripped-away brickwork on the ground floor reveals the ongoing construction of a sizable new engineering teaching lab. Starting with the Fall 2008 term, un-dergraduates will be busy delving into CAD/CAM, mechanics, and photonics

research here. The new lab is located alongside the “wet lab,” created primar-ily to support courses in bioengineering. The lab—a beautiful glass and steel fish-bowl—will become a haven for hands-on experimentation and research.

Welcoming Microsoft Research to New England

Microsoft Research, the basic research arm of Microsoft Corp., unveiled its lat-est lab, to be called Microsoft Research New England and to be based in Cam-bridge, Mass.

The new lab, due to open in July, will enable Microsoft Research to interact closely with the large community of scientists in New England, notably the faculty and students at the many premier academic institutions in the vicinity. It will also provide researchers with the opportunity to interact with people in Microsoft’s incubation cen-ters and newly acquired companies in the region.

Extensive research collaboration with BASF established

Harvard and BASF announced an agree-ment to jointly establish the BASF Advanced Research Initiative. Based at SEAS, the initiative will benefit from strong ties with departments and schools throughout the University. As outlined in the agreement, BASF will provide direct funding (anticipated to be up to $20 million over the next five years) to Harvard researchers, initially supporting 10 postdoctoral students.

Both parties plan to define and pursue projects in areas including applied physics, physics, applied mathemat-ics, chemical biology, systems biology, bioengineering, and materials science. If proof of concept is established in a research project, BASF will have the opportunity to further develop dis-coveries and innovations for possible commercialization. Faculty investiga-tors will have the freedom to distribute and publish any findings arising from

The sizable new engineering teaching lab in Pierce Hall is due to open in September 2008; undergraduates will have opportunities to delve into CAD/CAM, mechanics, and photonics research

The newly created Microsoft Research New England, based in Cambridge, will forge links to local universities like Harvard and MIT.

2 I SEAS – Spring/Summer 2008

Life On & Around Oxford Street

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(left) Whether by helping couples find love or by sharing a love of literature (above), SEAS members put an unexpected twist on the standard image of engineers.

Love at first byteChristopher R. Coyne ’99, Sam A. Yagan ’99, and Maxwell N. Krohn ’99 turned to their applied math skills in creating a new online dating site. The site, OKcupid.com, which, according to Yagan, counts over a half-million active users, is noted for its algorithm that produces “match percentages” based on user-submitted questions on everything from smoking habits to religion.

Random Bits

“I’m from Tennessee and we do a lot of fishing. You can make a fishing lure out of it … and I’m always looking for the prefect lure, as I always want to pull in the biggest fish I can. So one day, when I retire from Harvard, I want to be able to be able to take these biohybrid constructs and make fishing lures out of them.”

— Kit Parker, Associate Professor of Bioengineering, in a BBC World Radio interview about his lab’s creation of biohybrids of elastic film and muscle cells that can generate force to grip, pump, walk, or swim.

Overheard

Harvard and RIKEN look to collaborate

Officials of Harvard and RIKEN, Japan’s equivalent of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratories, signed a memorandum of understanding to en-courage and facilitate collaborations be-tween Harvard and RIKEN researchers. Dean Michael D. Smith; Dean Venky; and Jeremy Bloxham, FAS Divisional Dean for Physical Sciences, met at the Harvard Faculty Club with a RIKEN delegation to celebrate the signing of the agreement. RIKEN exists to conduct comprehensive research in science and technology and to publicly disseminate the results of its research.

Cambridge and Bangalore get one step closer

After a small joint symposium held in Bangalore in 2006, Venkatesh Murthy, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology in the Department of Molecu-

lar and Cellular Biology, and SEAS’s L. Mahadevan, Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, de-cided to create the Harvard-Bangalore Science Initiative (HBSI). HBSI aims to foster collaboration in the natural sci-ences between Harvard University and several academic institutions in Banga-lore, India, and provide undergraduates with the opportunity to experience re-search and culture a world away from Cambridge. With support from the In-ternational Innovation Grants Program, HBSI awarded five Harvard College stu-dents with a lab exchange program for 10–12 weeks last summer. The students combined cultural sightseeing with hard science, investigating everything from computational biology to synap-tic plasticity to protein folding. Both the founders expect that the program will continue in the coming years. J

the initiative’s research efforts. BASF’s Dr. Jens Rieger, scientific director of Polymer Research, and Harvard’s David Weitz, Mallinckrodt Professor of Phys-ics and Applied Physics, and George Whitesides, Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor, will direct the initiative.

Bioengineering comes together

Harvard has created a University-wide planning committee on bioengineering with the goal of integrating related ac-tivities across various schools, programs, and departments. In the last decade, SEAS has welcomed five new faculty members with research interests relat-ed to bioengineering, helped establish the Harvard Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (HIBIE), built an undergraduate research lab for bioen-gineering, and added more courses to the curriculum.

Author, author!A current SEAS faculty member in bioengineering, David Edwards, and a current graduate student in applied math, Erez Lieberman, have both published works of fiction; a late SEAS faculty member, Thomas McMahon, an expert on animal locomotion, published four novels; the late famed author James Michener concentrated in aeronautical engineering at Harvard. J

SEAS – Spring/Summer 2008 I 3

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A Roundup of Discoveries & Innovations

Researchers ponder whale-inspired wings

Ernst van Nierop, a current graduate stu-dent; Silas Alben, a former postdoc now at Georgia Tech; and Michael Brenner, Glover Professor of Applied Mathemat-ics and Applied Physics, proposed a new explanation for how the knotty bumps (called tubercles) on humpback whale pectoral flippers may enable the mas-sive mammals to swim with such grace, speed, and agility. Previous wind tunnel tests conducted at the U.S. Naval Acad-emy on a scale-model whale flipper re-vealed that the bumpy design increases lift, decreases drag, and reduces stall.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, the researchers mathematically demonstrated how the bumps modify the flow over the whale’s flipper so that the troughs between the bumps stall first. A current flowing over a series of bumps and troughs on the edge of the flipper causes the overall loss in lift to be much more gradual. As the ampli-tude of the bumps is increased, the lift curve flattens out, leading to potentially desirable control properties.

Because whale-inspired aircraft wings have, however, already performed ably in tests, the researchers expect that a fuller understanding of the mechanism

will lead to additional practical appli-cations. Potential uses might include improved wind turbine or helicopter blades, hydrofoils, or “unstallable” wings for special-purpose aircraft.

New type of optical tweezers developed

Researchers demonstrated a new type of optical tweezers with the potential to make biological and microfluidic force measurements in integrated systems such as microfluidic chips. The device, consisting of a Fresnel Zone Plate mi-crofabricated on a glass slide, has the ability to trap particles without the need for high-performance objective lenses. The device was designed, fabri-cated, and tested by postdoctoral fellow Ethan Schonbrun and undergraduate researcher Charles Rinzler under the direction of Assistant Professor of Elec-trical Engineering Ken Crozier.

The researchers note that the Fresnel Zone Plate optical tweezers could be fabricated on the inner walls of micro-fluidic channels or even inside cylin-drical or spherical chambers and could perform calibrated force measurements in a footprint of only 100x100um. Tradi-tional tweezers, by contrast, would suf-fer from crippling aberrations in such

locations. The team envisions using their new tweezers inside microfluidic chips to carry out fluid velocity, refrac-tive index, and local viscosity measure-ments. Additional applications include biological force measurements and sorting particles based on their size and refractive index.

Ham lab and HMS develop micro-NMR system

In collaboration with Hakho Lee in Ralph Weissleder’s Group at Massachu-setts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, the two engineering graduate students who work with Donhee Ham, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, built what may be the smallest complete nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) system to date.

NMR is the basis for most medical imag-ing devices. The “nano-” version of the system, about the size of a breadbox and weighing 2kg, detects biological sam-ples by using magnetic nanoparticles. To do so, the diminutive device relies on a sophisticated CMOS RF receiver chip (like those in Bluetooth devices) and a magnet of only 0.5 Tesla. The results are anything but small: The system delivers 60 times more sensitivity than a 120kg commercial machine that costs $70,000.

(top left) By mathematically modeling how the flipper of the humpback whale allows the massive mammal to fly through the water, Ernst van Nierop, Silas Alben, and Michael Brenner may one day help engineers build better blades and wings; (right) The lab of Ken Crozier demonstrated a new type of optical tweezer: (a) microfabricated Fresnel Zone Plate optical tweezers, consisting of concentric gold rings (50-nm thick) on a microscope slide; (b) CCD camera image of fluorescent bead trapped in zone plate focus.


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In addition to the obvious benefits of being portable, Sun says that the extra boost in sensitivity could enable physi-cians to find pathogens much earlier, at the first sign of a disease.

Engineered weathering could retard global warming

Researchers at Harvard University and Penn State University have invented a technology, inspired by nature, to re-duce the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by human-caused emissions.

By electrochemically removing hydro-chloric acid from the ocean and then neutralizing the acid by reaction with silicate (volcanic) rocks, the researchers say they can accelerate natural chemi-cal weathering, permanently transfer-ring CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean. Unlike other ocean sequestration processes, the new technology does not further acidify the ocean and may be beneficial to coral reefs.

The innovative approach to tackling climate change is reported in the No-vember 7 issue of the journal Environ-mental Science and Technology by co–lead authors Kurt Zenz House, a Ph.D. candi-date in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Michael J.

Aziz, Gordon McKay Professor of Ma-terials Science in SEAS; Christopher H. House, Associate Professor of Geosci-ences at Pennsylvania State University; and Daniel P. Schrag, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Professor of En-vironmental Science and Engineering in SEAS, and Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

Lead authors House and Aziz add that more research is needed on some of the chemical processes’ effects on ocean bi-ology and on improving efficiency and scalability.

Compact QC laser’s range of applications is huge

Engineers have demonstrated a highly versatile, compact, and portable quan-tum cascade laser sensor for the fast detection of a large number of chemi-cals, ranging from infinitesimal traces of gases to liquids, by broad tuning of the emission wavelength. The potential range of applications is huge, including homeland security, medical diagnostics such as breath analysis, pollution moni-toring, and environmental sensing of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming.

The team is headed by Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Ap-

plied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineer-ing, and includes graduate student Ben-jamin Lee, researchers Mikhail Belkin and Jim MacArthur, and undergraduate Ross Audet. The researchers have also filed for U.S. patents covering this new class of laser chips.

The broad emission spectrum of the Quantum Cascade Laser material, grown by a commercial reactor, is designed using state-of-the-art nanotechnology. An array of 32 lasers, each designed to emit at a specific wavelength, is then fabricated on a single chip by standard semiconductor processing techniques. A microcomputer individually fires up and tunes each laser in the array in any desired sequence. This generates a broad and continuously tunable wavelength spectrum that can be used to detect a large number of chemical compounds.

The team’s coauthors are research as-sociates Laurent Diehl and Christian Pflügl of SEAS; Doug Oakley, David Chapman, and Antonio Napoleone of MIT Lincoln Laboratory; David Bour, Scott Corzine, and Gloria Höfler, all for-merly with Agilent Technologies; and Jérôme Faist of ETH Zurich. J

(top left) SEAS researchers (left to right: Benjamin Lee, Mikhail Belkin, Federico Capasso) demonstrated a highly versatile quantum cascade laser sensor for the fast detection of chemicals; (right) By electrochemically removing hydrochloric acid from the ocean and then neutralizing the acid by reaction with volcanic rocks, Mike Aziz and Kurt House propose accelerating natural chemical weathering, permanently transferring CO

2 from

the atmosphere to the ocean; (bottom right) Donhee Ham’s micro–nuclear magnetic resonance system is both portable and powerful.


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180 Degrees: Assessing SEAS

Who are you?Surprisingly, when it comes to academic institutions, that question may be more functional than meta-physical. After all, prospective students and their parents want to know every last data point before making a four-year commitment. Company executives want to know if holding a given degree will ensure star performance at work. Alumni want to know if their alma matter is protecting its heritage while still embracing the future.

To get past the spin cycle (what a place proclaims about itself), savvy investigators look to what others, especially those on (or previously on) the inside, say about an institution. In fact, such an 180-degree turn allows an institution to get a bracing reality check. Today such feedback loops (from product reviews to personal musings) are ubiquitous and nearly instantaneous, thanks to channels of online chatter. Meaning, if an institution doesn’t assess itself, an army of virtual pundits will gladly do so.

As mentioned in the previous Fall/Winter newsletter, in the spring of 2007 Harvard’s Alumni Affairs and Development Office asked 22,700 graduates (including 1,700 SEAS alumni across all areas and degree programs) to report on their Harvard experiences and current attitudes toward the University. What follows is a select summary of the responses given by SEAS alumni, all taken from the open feedback section of the survey. We hope you find the scrutiny as enlightening as we did.

“We are ambitiously interdisci-plinary.” “We provide an un-

matched learning and research environ-ment.” “We are uniquely positioned.” Are such statements valid or vaporware? To find out we began with a loaded ques-tion: “What did you find most rewarding or distinguishing about your experi-ences as an engineering and applied sci-ences student at Harvard?”

Nearly all the responses hit the dartboard at approximately the same spot. Alumni reported that attaining a broad-based education while receiving a heavy dose of technical and engineering knowledge, or having the “… ability to get a broad en-gineering education, not limited to one engineering field, but including educa-tion in other fields as well as in liberal arts,” most defined their experience at SEAS.

In a slightly more roundabout way, an alumnus noted that SEAS students have an advantage because “engineer-ing doesn’t dominate” the University. In large part thanks to the smaller scale of Harvard’s engineering and applied sci-ences program and its integral relation-ship to the entire College and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, “Harvard engineers are much more balanced and fully edu-

cated than [other] engineers” who go to technology-focused or dominated schools. In other words, engineering, as a discipline, is treated on par with the rest of the liberal arts. The result of being “part of a university with strong empha-sis on social sciences and humanities” means students gain “a … broader per-spective.” Said one, “I personally believe the greatest [advantage] I have over my professional engineering peers is an aca-demic background that is not entirely dominated by engineering.”

In fact, such intellectual inclusiveness is virtually unavoidable. Harvard engi-neering students, undergraduate and graduate alike, are not enrolled separate-ly; nor do they live in separate housing. They share much of their lives with stu-dents from all areas, even when inside the classroom or laboratory. In fact, for many SEAS alumni, their top reason for originally attending Harvard ended up meshing with what became the making of their fondest memories: “simply being on the Harvard campus with amazing students.”

Alumni pointed out that engineering, as an academic discipline, is distinctive, even in a liberal arts context. Moreover, it matters how Harvard faculty approach

and teach the subject relative to their peers. Graduates across all programs and degrees noted the curriculum’s strong emphasis on theory. Surprisingly, for many that insight became apparent only several years after leaving Harvard. One responder wrote, “While I didn’t appreci-ate them fully at the time, the theoretical approaches covered were very helpful in providing a framework that has made absorbing/performing in a variety of ar-eas easy to do.” Others, however, found that stressing the basics left little room for real-world exploration. In the words of one alumnus, “I realize it’s important to teach us how to think, but when you take an Applied Math class, the problem sets should never be entirely proofs.”

In either case, the broader emphasis on problem-solving, a hallmark of engi-

Identity studies: What sets SEAS apart?

“I personally believe the greatest [advantage] I have over my professional engineering peers is an academic background that is not entirely dominated by engineering.”


From glossy viewbooks to speeches to videos, SEAS has sketched out a vision for the future: ways to enhance education, advance research, and better society. The

trick going forward is finding a way to maintain what alumni say sets SEAS apart while also finding a path that enables the organization to adapt, grow, and evolve. For perspective, we asked SEAS graduates a critical question: As we now focus more resources on curricular development and advising, what two or three recommenda-tions would you have?

Continue to teach theory“despite radical change in technology, the basics are still the same and still important.”

Promote entrepreneurship“create a loose and flexible ecosystem for entrepreneurs.”

Enhance teaching“more innovation in teaching and more care for students.”

Reward teaching as well as research“The importance of strong, innovative teaching in engineering, physical, and applied sciences. It’s way too boring as it is, and professors need to be reward-ed for innovative teaching, not just (or even instead of!) innovative research.”

Push practical experience“more practical experience is necessary for students to consider themselves engineers.”

Create a design-centered curriculum“Put design in all aspects of the courses.”

Attract daring students“I am concerned that the types of student who is being accepted at top univer-sities like Harvard are intellectually fragile thinkers who lack the creative and outside-the-box thinking ability to really shape the world.”

Think big“the need to have the faculty think prospectively rather than retrospectively; to be willing to change and adapt to the world rather than to just do things as they’ve always done them.”

neering and applied sciences in general, left a long-lasting intellectual impres-sion: “I think my courses shaped the way I see things, including problem-solving. As much as I disliked CS 50 at the time, I have a very solid understanding of how changes can affect a system nine years later for it”; “the greatest advantage I have over my professional peers is that I

don’t think like someone who spent my school years entirely thinking about lab assignments and problem sets. (The abil-ity to swap thought styles from very dif-ferent disciplines into my engineering is a huge advantage.)” Many suggested that learning how to think was as important as mastering the specific course content. More broadly, an engineering degree has

a way of informing how an individual faces an array of problems: “I learned a new way to think—a top-down approach that can be used to solve many problems I face in life, personal and professional. It is this way of thinking, rather than any actual learned fact, that was the most important.”

faculty member interested in exploring various aspects of technology. That is, teaching science engineering to nonen-gineers should be part of the fundamen-tal mission of SEAS, if not of Harvard itself—“I’m an entrepreneur-engineer and feel that technology needs to play a broader role in student life, in particular how it can address the world’s problems. I am not talking about laptops for stu-dents here, I am thinking more about the need for every student to have a basic physics and math background.”

Overall, there was a sense that SEAS has an amazing opportunity (if not obliga-tion) to combine its intellectual and research achievements with Harvard’s worldwide presence and global reach to tackle the “big issues” or to “engage stu-dents with society’s problems, especially using Harvard’s global reach to connect engineering to real-world need.”

SEAS alumni agreed that addressing “the point of the education” should be ever on the minds of administrators, faculty, and students. What matters, said one, is “the importance of producing individuals who care about more than personal ac-complishments and advancement, and the role of Harvard in developing leaders who will invest their time, energy, and talent in creating a safer, more just, bet-ter balanced, more sustainable, and more caring society.” Similarly, an alumnus suggested a call to arms: “We need great thinkers schooled in the liberal arts who are interested in … the core questions we are grappling with that will truly affect our quality of life in the next century, such as carbon output reduction, design of cities, energy production, water re-source management, agricultural biodi-versity …”

Future echoes: What should SEAS do going forward?

All admitted the challenge of providing depth and breadth in terms of the aca-demic program, warning about falling into the trap of “focusing primarily on the accredited engineering program (B.S. degrees) that don’t leave enough time for students to explore other options,” and instead finding ways to “focus on training people who can apply rigorous

logical and quantitative analysis to prob-lems in a variety of fields.” Moreover, integrating industry experiences either directly into the curriculum or through internships or research opportunities was seen as essential for rounding out a solid engineering curriculum.

Alumni also broadly agreed that SEAS should become a hub for any student or


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Looking inward inevitably results in the desire to put an institution in a wider context. In the case

of SEAS, one doesn’t need to look far. This year, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) issued its Grand Challenges for Engineering, rallying think-ers, researchers, politicians, and the public to work together toward ambitious goals such as the devel-opment of cleaner and renewable energy sources, providing access to clean water, advancing public health, and securing cyberspace.

Through the engineering accomplishments of the past, the world has become smaller, more inclu-sive, and more connected. The challenges facing engineering today are not those of isolated locales, but of the planet as a whole and all the planet’s people. Meeting all those challenges must make the world not only a more technologically ad-vanced and connected place, but also a more sus-tainable, safe, healthy, and joyous—in other words, better—place.

A new school of engineering, especially at an insti-tution with the resources and reputation of Har-vard, will likely be judged in terms of how well it contributes to such grand challenges by those both within and outside. (NAE’s Grand Challenges.)

In fact, the American Society for Engineering Edu-cation (ASEE), in the February 2008 issue of its PRISM magazine, boasted: “With the rare opening of a new school, Harvard restores engineering to its once-prominent spot.”

Even Dean Venky, who will step down in Septem-ber, plans to remain engaged and watchful. He said in a press release, “… I believe SEAS is exceptionally well positioned for the future. I will watch from the sidelines with great interest as it continues to develop and take its place among the great Schools of Harvard.”

As SEAS evolves, the questions about its identity and purpose will remain. Assessments of success, however measured, will also be ever-present. Said one sage alumnus, “Right now a Harvard-trained en-gineer is somewhat of an unknown quantity. That can be changed.” J

Turning a corner: How to internalize external insights


(top) The February issue of ASEE’s PRISM magazine took more than a full spread to cover the launch of the School of Engineering and Applied sciences.

The writing is on the wall. MOMA in New York displayed Rob Wood’s robotic fly as part of the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit.

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Nota BeneTuring Corners … The February issue of the American Society for Engineering Education magazine, PRISM, covered the launch of SEAS, proclaiming, “With the rare opening of a new school, Harvard re-stores engineering to its once-prominent spot.” We will, of course, do our best to live up to such lofty claims. In addition, the April 2008 issue of IEEE’s Spectrum investigated how to engineer the Harvard engineer, dedicating nearly 4,000 words to the topic.

Open books … The New York Times, Bos-ton Globe, Chronicle of Higher Education, Bloomberg, and others covered Stuart Shieber’s proposal, passed by the mem-bers of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, to post scholarly research online for free.

Follow your heart … Technology Review followed postdoctoral student Adam Feinberg and faculty member Kit Parker in their quest to engineer heart tissue. BBC Radio’s World Service also interviewed Parker and Feinberg (see page 3). In ad-dition to forseeing use of the engineered tissue, which can contract like muscle tissue, in drug screening and implantable devices, Parker expressed his desire to try it out as the ultimate fishing lure.

Fly art … The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA) displayed the robotic fly, created by Rob Wood, as part of its Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition in February. Wood himself authored “Fly, Robot, Fly” for the March issue of IEEE’s Spectrum.

Cold comfort … Lene Hau discussed pos-sible applications from the coldest frontier in applied physics on NOVA’s “Absolute Zero.”

Friendly press … FAS’s Fall/Winter 2008 issue of The Yard highlighted the SEAS launch and the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS). The Winter 2008 Radcliffe Quarterly profiled Radcliffe fellow Christine Mummery’s collaboration with Kit Parker to find a way to put new heart cells into damaged hearts. The November/December issue of Harvard Magazine highlighted Colleen Hansel’s studies of microbial interactions with metals, part of the Microbial Sciences Initiative.

Favorite things … The editors of Nature chose papers by SEAS graduate student Erez Lieberman (applying evolutionary models to linguistic standardization) and faculty member Lene Hau (converting light into matter, then back into light) as among their favorites for 2007.

Radio waves … NPR reporters chatted with bioengineering faculty member David Edwards about his new book and Le Laboratoire, his creative space in Paris (see below), and with Steven Wofsy, who monitors carbon activity, as part of a profile of Harvard’s 3,000-acre forest laboratory.

ArtScience … Bioengineer David Edwards wrote an editorial in Nature about his Le Laboratoire project, the first experiment-driven art and science incubator opening in Paris. His book on the topic, ArtScience:

Creativity in the Post-Google Generation, ranked #4 on The Boston Globe’s February list of bestselling books. President Faust’s new book about the Civil War grabbed the top spot.

Industry meets ivy … In Chemical and Engineering News Shriram Ramanathan discussed making the transition from cor-porate life to the halls of academia and the distinctive skill set former industry experts have to offer. In a different issue, SEAS’s new research partnership with BASF (see p. 2) made the cover, showing how SEAS is forging new relationships with industry partners to further research with techno-logical and commercial promise. Last but not least, FAS Dean Mike Smith, SEAS Dean Narayanamurti, and former Associ-ate Dean Seltzer explained the business sense needed to be a good administrator in The Crimson. J

The editors of Nature chose papers by Erez Lieberman (pictured) and Lene Hau as among their favorites for 2007.


Promotions and AppointmentsFred Abernathy, Gordon McKay Profes-sor of Mechanical Engineering and Ab-bott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering, and Paul Martin, John H. Van Vleck Professor of Pure and Applied Physics and former Dean of Engineering and Applied Sciences, will become emeri-tus professors in June. Both received their Ph.D. degrees from Harvard, in 1959 and 1954, respectively. (See p. 14)

Long-time SEAS staff members Sandra Godfrey, Academic Programs Adminis-trator, who helped ensure that countless undergraduates made it through their degree programs on time (and with their sanity still intact), and Ralph Generazzo, Director of Procurement, the consum-mate Red Sox fan who likely knows the whereabouts of every stapler and every laser ever purchased by a member of SEAS, retired in June.

AwardsBarbara Grosz, Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences and Interim Dean of the Radcliffe Institute; Frans Spaepen, John C. and Helen F. Franklin Professor and Director of the Rowland Institute at Harvard; and Zhigang Suo, Allen E. and Marilyn M. Puckett Professor of Mechan-ics and Materials, were elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). They are among 65 new members elected to the NAE in 2008. Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineer-ing literature,” and to the “pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in tradition-al fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

Lene Hau, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for her experiments on the ma-nipulation of photons. The Academy is an independent organization whose overall objective is to promote the sciences and strengthen their influence in society.

Todd Zickler, Assistant Professor of Elec-trical Engineering, was named a 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. The award recog-nizes exceptional faculty who are early in their research careers.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded 2008 CAREER awards to Ken Crozier, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, for his work in near-field optical forces, and Vinothan Manoha-ran, Assistant Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering, for his work on imaging colloidal self-assembly. The honor is considered one of the most prestigious recognitions of rising stars in science and engineering. The Fac-ulty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Founda-tion’s most prestigious awards in support of the early career development activities of those teacher-scholars who most ef-fectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.

Robert Wood, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, won both the Conference Best Paper Award and the Best Video Award at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and

Remembrance Henry Ehrenreich, Clowes Professor of Science, Emeritus, a pioneer in semiconductor materials, and a Harvard professor for more than four decades, died on January 20, a few months before his 80th birthday. He also served as the University’s first Ombudsman and extended his academic interests to government and public policy, spending a year working with the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House and serving on several national and international panels.

Ehrenreich received his B.A. (1950) and his Ph.D. in the emerging field of semiconduc-tor physics (1955) at Cornell, where he also met and married Tema, his wife for almost 55 years. He spent the next eight years at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y., then a hub for scientific research. In 1963 he was appointed a professor in what was then Harvard’s Division (now School) of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

In addition to educating and mentoring students in his research specialty, Ehrenreich de-veloped courses for students at all levels that covered topics ranging from the physics, chemistry, and policy aspects of materials and devices to energy and the environment, even to ones that touched on his personal interests in history and music. Ehrenreich, a skilled pianist, developed his love of music early, thanks to his father, a choral conductor and music critic.

“An enormous number of colleagues, friends, and students at Harvard and throughout the world have benefited from their interactions with Henry as well as from the papers and reports he wrote and the volumes he edited. His insights, wisdom, and thoughtfulness will be sorely missed,” said Paul Martin, John H. Van Vleck Professor of Pure and Applied Physics at Harvard.

In addition to his wife, Tema, Ehrenreich leaves a daughter, Beth; two sons, Paul and Robert; and 10 grandchildren. J

Systems (IROS 2007) sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics En-gineers (IEEE) in San Diego in November. In fact, Harvard researchers were authors of three of the four finalists for the best paper award, out of 681 accepted papers.

Shriram Ramanathan, Assistant Profes-sor of Materials Science, is among the recipients of the Air Force’s Young Inves-tigator Research Program. The program fosters creative basic research.

Daniel Jacob, Vasco McCoy Family Pro-fessor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering, and Steven Wofsy, Abbott Lawrence Rotch Profes-sor of Atmospheric and Environmental Science and Associate Dean of FAS, are among the participants in the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, an assessment of climate change research, for which the 2007 No-bel Peace Prize was awarded.

Howard Stone, Vicky Joseph Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathemat-ics and Associate Dean for Academic Programs, has been selected as the first winner of the G. K. Batchelor Prize for Fluid Mechanics for research published over the past 10 years.

Eric Mazur, Balkanski Professor of Phys-ics and Applied Physics, was elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America for his “pioneering contributions to op-tical waveguiding at the nanoscale level and to understanding the interaction of ultrashort laser pulses with materials.”

Dave Mooney, Gordon McKay Professor of Bioengineering, won the 2008 Clem-son Award in Biomaterials. Awardees are selected by the Society for Biomaterials Awards, Ceremonies and Nominations Committee, and confirmed by the Presi-dent of Clemson University.

Bob Westervelt, Mallinckrodt Professor of Applied Physics and of Physics, was named a 2007 American Physical Society fellow for “seminal contributions to our understanding of the quantum behavior of electrons inside nanoscale semicon-ductor structures, including imaging the coherent flow of electron waves. Fellow-ship is therefore a distinct honor signi-fying recognition by one’s professional peers.”

Peter Rogers, Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Engineering, was awarded the 2008 Warren A. Hall Medal to rec-ognize his accomplishments in the water resources field. The award was instituted in 1992 by the Universities Council on Water Resources. J

Much-admired mentor, teacher, researcher, Henry Ehrenreich passed away in early 2008.

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Ece Semiha Kamar (front right) and Rohan Narayana Murty (behind left), both Ph.D. candidates in computer science at SEAS, were among the 2008 Research Fellows sponsored by Microsoft Research. The prestigious honor recognizes graduate students who are considered among best and the brightest in North America.

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Microsoft Research named two SEAS graduate computer science

students as Research Fellows in 2008: Ece Semiha Kamar, advised by Barbara J. Grosz, Higgins Professor of Natural Sci-ences and Interim Dean of the Radcliffe Institute, and Rohan Narayana Murty, advised by Matt Welsh, Associate Profes-sor of Computer Science. This marks the first time any Harvard student has been selected for the prestigious honor.

Upon hearing the news, Margo Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science, emailed, “Yesterday at a faculty meeting, several people were basking in the afterglow of having Microsoft award two of their 12 Ph.D. Fellowships to Har-vard students. This is an incredible statis-tic: 1/6 of a prestigious fellowship being

awarded to a tiny place like ours! This wonderful news coupled with the new Cambridge lab seems like an omen—we should shout this from the treetops.”

Competition is especially fierce for the fellowships—and for good reason. Fel-lows receive support for two years—a stipend covering 100 percent of tuition and living expenses, a conference al-lowance, a salaried internship, and, of course, a Tablet PC loaded with the latest software. And then there’s that dinner with Bill Gates, at his home.

Murty, a voracious reader who tracks his literary progress online, grew up in Bangalore, India. After attending Cor-nell University as an undergraduate and spending his summers pursuing research at Caltech, he settled into

SEAS to focus on designing multiagent decision systems. While a passionate “academic at heart,” Murty has already interned twice with the Microsoft Re-search branch in India.

Kamar also crossed the ocean to pur-sue her Ph.D. She completed her un-dergraduate studies at the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences of Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey. At SEAS she focuses on “how people make decisions—especially the problem of in-terruption management, or when a com-puter agent interrupts you by sending you a message or asking for your prefer-ences.” She wants to answer a seemingly simple question: When is the best time to butt in on a user?

While practical, both Kamar and Murty’s research is forward-looking and moves at a decidedly academic pace. So why would a company facing competition from all sides in business moving at the speed of an instant message stop and smell the ivy? Kamar says the organization, to bor-row a friendly phrase from a competitor, thinks different. “Microsoft Research is really doing research, which is often surprising to outsiders. They publish a lot. Their measurement mechanism for how good they are is how much they publish,” she says.

Murty, in fact, authored part of what will become his thesis while interning at Microsoft Research. He says of the re-lationship, “It is helpful because when I am there I work on a very practical and immediate problem, and when I come back here, I work on an extension of that that sort of looks five to 10 years ahead. It lets a company experiment with an idea in an academic setting before they push ahead and test it in the marketplace.”

That such a balance works for both achieving profitable quarters and com-pleting academic theses definitely seems worth, to modify Seltzer’s phrase, shouting from skyscrapers and ivory towers alike. J


GraduateHonorable Fellows

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UndergraduateCareer finder

Anthony Arcieri, Assistant Director for Careers in Science and Technology at the Office of Career Services (OCS),

arrived in the spring of 2007 with some compelling words of wisdom—an entire book’s worth, in fact. The author of Major-ing in Success: Building Your Career While Still in College has been dedicated to increasing students’ access to—and awareness of—options: career options, graduate school options, support and counseling options, and perhaps most important, the op-tion to connect with alumni and begin developing networking skills. We asked Anthony for some highlights of his career-building efforts over the past year and about ways companies and alumni can get involved.

What’s happening? In September the annual Career Forum in-cluded a variety of employers seeking to recruit SEAS students as well as an expert panel focused on Careers in the Life Sciences (which particularly appealed to Biomedical Engineering con-centrators). October found SEAS students attending programs on Applying to Graduate School in the Sciences and on Work-ing Beyond the Bench. Spring saw an equal flurry of activity, with students participating in both the Engineers Week Career Fair in Boston and the All Ivy Environmental Career Fair in New York City in search of jobs and internships. OCS also cospon-sored a new Science, Technology, and Society Career Chat Se-ries, which kicked off with a discussion about careers in science policy and will continue with an upcoming chat on science and democracy, with particular focus on the changing landscape for science funding. Future career programming will include on-demand chats on topics such as the environment and energy.

On behalf of the New York City Post of the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME), Harvard College senior Connie Cheng ’08 has been awarded the 2007 Colonel and Mrs. S. S. Dennis III Scholar-ship in recognition of her hard work and dedication to research. At a ceremony in Pierce Hall, Venkatesh Narayanamurti, Dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, presented her with a certificate of accomplishment and a schol-arship check for $1,000 from SAME.

Jessica Shang ’08 (Engineering Sciences) has been awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. The program enables non-U.K. students to study at the University of Cambridge. According to her biosketch, she worked with faculty member Rob Wood “developing a microrobotic drag-onfly as part of my honors thesis to gain insight into the dynamics and evolution of insect flight. This research will aid the development of highly maneuverable, autonomous vehicles useful in search

and rescue missions. At Cambridge, I will pursue an M.Phil. in Engineering to more deeply explore my research interests be-fore Ph.D. studies.”

Xuanhe Zhao, a Ph.D. candidate in Zhigang Suo’s group, won the American Academy of Mechanics Founder’s Prize for his essay on soft active materials.

Two doctoral students in computer science, Rohan Narayana Murty and Ece Semiha Kamar, were named 2008 Microsoft Re-search Fellows (see page 12).

Undergraduate Ahmad Khairi ’08 (En-gineering Sciences) and postdoctoral student Jian Han from Donhee Ham’s lab received the 2008 Analog Devices, Inc., Outstanding Student Design Award.

The Crimson named concentrator Jackie Stenson ’08 (Engineering Sciences) one of the 15 most interesting seniors in the class of 2008. Stenson, a globetrotter by nature, “said her senior project, the equivalent of a senior thesis for engi-neering science concentrators, came from

her experience traveling in South Africa. She is currently designing a chimney for thatched-roof huts that would provide heat and reduce the indoor air pollution that results from using wood fires to cook food indoors. And in addition to project ideas, Stenson returned home with a cu-rious souvenir: dreadlocks, courtesy of a South African salon.”

Several robotics researchers were recog-nized for outstanding work at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2007) in San Diego in November. Postdoctoral fellows from Robert Howe’s Harvard BioRobotics Lab, Riichiro Tadakuma and Mahdi Tava-koli were finalists for the Conference Best Paper Award. In addition, Harvard under-graduate Dan Kettler ’07 (Engineering Sci-ences), now a Ph.D. student at MIT, was one of four finalists for the Best Student Paper Award, for work from his senior design project on new instruments for beating-heart surgery.

Student AwardsShayak Sarkar ’07 (A.B. in Applied Math-ematics and a Master’s in Statistics) and Sammy K. Sambu ’08 (Engineering Sci-ences), representing Kenya, were selected as Rhodes Scholars. A biomedical science and engineering concentrator and a resi-dent of Leverett House, Sambu plans to conduct research at the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering on improving vaccine delivery technology. Sarkar, having served the homeless, refugees, and low-income youth through various public ser-vice organizations while an undergraduate, is now interested in applying his analytic skills in mathematics, statistics, and eco-nomics to addressing problems associated with poverty, especially affordable housing and education reform.

Yuancheng was selected as a Computing Research Association (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Award finalist. CRA’s pro-gram recognizes undergraduate students in North American universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. J

Who is hiring? Technical employers continue to show an in-terest in recruiting Harvard students, with Google leading the pack of the most popular employers for students to interview with. Others, including Facebook, Microsoft, NASA, Meebo, Symantec, and NVIDIA, provided plentiful internship and full-time opportunities for interested students through the On-Campus Recruiting program, the Career Forum, and listings on the OCS Website.

How can alumni get involved? This year, OCS organized topi-cal panels of invited guests, including alumni, to speak about their career paths and provide advice to students and also hosted alums for intimate “career chats” with current students. Anthony invites alumni of SEAS and those in related graduate engineering fields to connect with current students by becom-ing involved with some of these career programs or by posting internship and full-time opportunities with OCS on behalf of their employers. If you are interested in participating, please contact Anthony Arcieri at [email protected]. J

SEAS Grads’ Primary Occupations, Post-Harvard 23%

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Computer software, hardware, systems

Banking, finance, communications

Other

Engineering and science

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Medicine, healthcare, public health

Arts, government, politics

* Data from 2007 Alumni Survey.


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Fred Abernathy and Paul Martin The Changing of the Guards

The top shelf of Paul Mar-tin’s bookshelf is reserved

for the dissertations of his graduate students, many of whom, he proudly tells, have made significant contribu-tions to the field of theoreti-cal physics. Recounting his career at Harvard, where he has been “forever,” Martin,

the former dean of the then Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is more comfortable talking about his past students’ accomplish-ments than his own.

Martin joined the faculty in 1957 and worked closely with graduate students for the next two decades. “I was fortunate

to have unusually gifted stu-dents at a time when we had lots of interesting problems for them to tackle,” he says. He and his students had countless discussions and scratched innumerable equa-tions on blackboards, many in the same Lyman Labora-tory office where the disser-tation-adorned bookshelf now resides. They introduced methods now widely used in statistical and condensed-matter physics and used them to study the properties of magnetic systems, super-conductors, superfluids, and the general features of phase transitions, chaos, and turbu-lence.

Following in the footsteps of his two predecessors, theo-retical physicists John Van Vleck and Harvey Brooks, Martin became dean of the Division in 1977. At the time, the Division of Engineer-ing and Applied Physics was facing some financial (and philosophical) issues. The faculty had voted to change the name to the Division of Applied Sciences, suggesting a commitment to engineer-

Institutional memory resides in individuals. Those wanting a firsthand account of the mod-ern journey of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard need only a quick word with Paul

Martin or Frederick “Fred” Abernathy. Over the past five decades, Martin, the John H. Van Vleck Professor of Pure and Applied Physics, and Abernathy, the Gordon McKay Professor of Mechani-cal Engineering and Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering, have played critical roles in shaping the lives of students, faculty, and staff. Both will become nonteaching faculty members at the end of the 2007–2008 term. Those at SEAS, however, know that the lessons taught by these two will continue to help illuminate (in an energy-efficient way, of course) the path forward.

Paul Martin: Student leader, administrative shaper

Paul Martin held was dean of DEAS for 22 years, the longest deanship held to date.

ing was ambivalent at best. “The steadfast contributions of a few faculty, including Fred Abernathy and Vic Jones, were critical in reversing this trend,” says Martin.

Under Martin’s leadership, the Division recruited key faculty—especially in com-puter science, material sci-ences, and atmospheric sciences. During his dean-ship the construction of the hallmark Maxwell-Dworkin building was begun. By serv-ing concurrently as an Asso-ciate Dean, he worked closely with three deans of the Fac-ulty of Arts and Sciences on science planning, research, and research policy to help strengthen connections be-tween disciplines.

“The Division has tradition-ally been the hub of multidis-ciplinary research activities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and of joint pro-grams with Harvard’s other Schools,” he explained. “We also were the home of two major programs across New England—the New England Consortium for Undergradu-ate Science Education, which sponsored and nurtured proj-ects and programs at 12 New England colleges and four universities, and the north-eastern home of the National Institute for Global Environ-mental Change.”

In recent years Martin has enjoyed teaching graduate students again, in the areas of dynamical systems, electro-magnetic theory, many-body theory, and solid-state phys-ics. As he takes on the next phase of his academic career, Martin will leave the office that holds decades of memo-ries of academic discovery to move one floor up, “closer to heaven” —but still grounded at Harvard.


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In the late 1970s, after deciding to try to help the troubled U.S. textile/ap-

parel industry, Professor Fred Abernathy visited a suit factory and asked the plant manager, “Do you have a book giving the details of how to make suits?” When Abernathy confessed that it was his first visit to such a factory, the manager said, “And you’re going to save our industry?”

This challenge, however unusual, was standard for Abernathy. “It’s important to have the courage to jump into a new pool,” he says. “Some people are like a record, playing the same song over and over again, but I think it’s important to always learn new things.”

Abernathy had served on Harvard’s fac-ulty for nearly 20 years when he chose to apply his mechanical engineering background to the task of automat-ing apparel manufacturing. This work

led to the creation of a company, [TC]2, which Abernathy ran for three years before determining that robotic sewing could not compete with low-cost labor overseas—but the nonprofit organiza-tion still exists today, providing tech-nical help to the textile, apparel, and retail industries.

“If I see a job that can be done and no else seems to do it, I’ll do it,” says Abernathy. When the Faculty of Arts and Sciences hit financial difficulties in the 1970s and energy costs were at record-high levels, Abernathy stepped in to analyze and de-crease the University’s energy consump-tion. Storm windows, roof insulation, automatic lights, energy-saving devices, and other measures decreased the Divi-sion’s energy use by a factor of three for a savings of more than $3 million per year in 1979 dollars, according to Abernathy. In fact, to this day, Abernathy makes it a

habit to turn off hallway lights, replace standard bulbs with more efficient ones, and kindly remind people about how to downsize their environmental foot-print.

When not finding practical solutions to problems at Harvard or in industry, Ab-ernathy has taught courses on a range of topics, including fluid dynamics, heat transfer, applied physics, electronics, design, and mechanics. Looking back over his work with undergraduates, Abernathy is particularly proud of ad-vancing the Capstone Project. With col-leagues Vic Jones and Woody Yang, he implemented the seminal project course for junior SB candidates, introducing the element of working with outside clients. For about 25 years he has enjoyed help-ing students solve real-world problems related to things as divergent as sewer systems, cell-phone towers, library sys-tems, and Harvard’s Allston campus.

Most of the graduate students who worked closely with Abernathy have gone on to have successful careers in industry. “I always hoped to get graduate students interested in something other than their theses and to have the confi-dence in their intellectual competence to go off and do new things,” he says.

In the coming years, Abernathy plans to continue to do research and hopes to write a book about industrialization and energy. As always, the challenges he takes on will be dictated by his intuition. “I think you ought to follow your stomach in making decisions,” he says. J

Fred Abernathy: Idea sower, energy saver

Bow-tied and bespectacled, Fred Abernathy has spent nearly 50 years at Harvard.

110 years at HarvardMartin received his A.B. in 1951 and his Ph.D. three years later, working on quantum electrodynamics and nuclear physics. Martin has served on the faculty for 20 years, spending three as chair of the Physics Depart-ment. After 22 years as Dean of DEAS, Martin contin-ued as Dean for Research and IT in FAS until 2005.

Abernathy received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Newark College of Engineering in 1951 and his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1959 and thereafter joined the Har-vard faculty. He spent a few years away to start and run [TC]2 and to serve as director of the Engineering Divi-sion and Energy Office of the NSF. He is now evaluating how to increase the construction efficiency of building single-family homes.


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Innovation in the AirI’s on the prize

The Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH) launched the inaugural Harvard College In-novation Challenge this year in col-laboration with its affiliated student group, the Harvard College Entrepre-neurship Forum, and Harvard Student Agencies Inc.

The challenge, dubbed I3—“Imagine-Invent-Impact”—drew 55 teams and over 150 undergraduate participants from over 20 different concentrations. All three SEAS concentrations were represented. In fact, SEAS concentra-tors led three of the six winning teams. Team projects ranged from local social entrepreneurship initiatives and global health interventions to technology start-ups and campus service ventures.

The challenge provided students with a centralized high-profile activity to complement the experiential and inno-vation education that TECH has been developing through courses, seminars, training, and networking opportuni-ties. Moreover, I3 brought together the broader Harvard community, as faculty and alumni served as mentors, speakers, and judges. Reflecting the spirit of inno-vation, several members participated from a distance via an online proposal review platform.

SEAS received founding and lead sup-port for the competition thanks to a gift

to TECH from Tom McKinley ’74 and Sara McKinley ’03, HBS ’07. “The McKin-ley family has provided a tremendous new catalyst for student innovation,” noted Paul Bottino, TECH’s co-founder and Executive Director who conceived and managed the novel I3 collabora-tion. “We are very grateful for the gift and the vote of confidence it carries for the efforts SEAS has made to embrace innovation and entrepreneurship on campus.”

Winners, announced at an April 9 gala event, received awards worth over $60,000 in grants and $30,000 in ser-vices:

The McKinley Family Grant for Innova-tion and Entrepreneurial Leadership in Commercial Enterprise: Cookie Crumbs, a notepad interface for cell phone users (Jason H. Gao ’10, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Timothy H.

Hsieh ’10, Physics/Math and Computer Science); Groupseak, a city-based online chat network (Christopher R. Clayton ’09, Sociology, and Jovan Jester ’09, Eco-nomics and Psychology).

The McKinley Family Grant for Inno-vation and Entrepreneurial Leadership in Social Enterprise: VoteGopher.com, comprehensive monitoring of presi-dential elections (William M. Ruben ’10, Economics, and Alexander J. Lavoie ’10, Economics).

The TECH Innovative Student Startup Award for outstanding Internet ven-ture: PaperG, a self-serve local advertis-ing network (Roger R. Lee ’08, Applied Math, and Tyler W. Bosmeny ’09, Ap-plied Math).

The TECH Innovative Student Startup Award for outstanding social venture: UniThrive, a tuition lending network that deploys peer-to-peer technology to connect students and alumni (Joshua Kushner ’08, Government, Nimay Meh-ta ’09, Economics).

The Harvard Student Agencies Campus Venture Award: Rover, a customized cell-phone content delivery platform for student travel guides (Alex Bick ’10, Engineering Sciences, Winston Yan ’10, Physics).

Additional sponsorship for I3 was gener-ously provided by Polaris Venture Part-ners; Morse Barnes-Brown Pendleton; Highland Capital Partners; Advanced Technology Ventures; DE Shaw & Co.; and StudentBusiness.com. JFor more information see: http://i3.seas.harvard.edu

The TECH Innovative Student Startup Award for outstanding Internet venture: PaperG, a self-serve local adver-tising network. The entry of Roger R. Lee ’08 (left) and Tyler W. Bosmeny ’09 (center) with Howard Zaharoff, Esq.

The Harvard Student Agencies Campus Venture Award: Rover, a customized cell-phone content delivery platform for student travel guides. The entry of Alex Bick ‘10 (right), Winston Yan ‘10 (center), with Tom Caputo of Advanced Technology Ventures.


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EventsVisit www.seas.harvard.edu/newsandevents for the latest details, dates, and times for SEAS events. Here are some highlights from the past months:

The SEAS industrial partnerships program hosted a workshop on materials and struc-tures for energy in May. The event brought together faculty, students, and profes-sionals from industry and government to investigate the development and application of materials designed to increase energy efficiency and mitigate the negative envi-ronmental impact of technologies ranging from chips to laptops. Jennifer Casasanto, Director of Industrial Outreach and Community Relations said, “Our goal is to find ever more specific ways to link our research with critical, up-to-the-minute problems, like energy consumption, that a particular industry faces.”

In March, famed Princeton engineering educator David Billington, Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor of Engineering, shared tales about the design of some of the world’s most famed bridges, such as the elegant Salginatobel Bridge in Switzerland (literally hugged in place by two mountainsides) and Boston’s own Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, the widest cable-stayed bridge in the world. Billington’s aim was to illustrate the criti-cal role of aesthetics in well-designed structures. After all, a well-built bridge will be trod for many decades, if not centuries, to come.

In February, NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson ’88 came in for a second landing. Wil-son, who is now a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, has completed two shuttle flights in less than two years (rare for any astronaut). At the packed lecture, in addition to some deeply philosophical questions (from “Do you believe there is other intelligent life in the universe?” to “Should we go to back to the moon and on to Mars?”—to which she answered yes both times), an audience member asked an eminently practical, if not personal, one (“So how do you go to the bathroom [aboard the shuttle]?” to which she answered, “It’s very similar to what happens on an air-plane”).

In December, Kathryn Hollar, Director of Educational Programs, and Howard Stone, Vicky Joseph Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics and Associate Dean for Academic Programs, once again hosted the Holiday Lecture. This time they headed into the kitchen, exploring the science behind one of America’s favorite foods: pizza.

More Bright IdeasThe Crimson named Engineer-ing Sciences concentrator Jackie Stenson ’08 as one of its top 15 most interesting seniors: “She said her senior project … came from her expe-rience traveling in South Afri-ca. She is currently designing a chimney for thatched-roof huts that would provide heat and reduce the indoor air pol-lution that results from using wood fires to cook food in-doors.” Stenson also serves as the founding president of the Harvard College chapter of Engineers Without Borders.

Ashkan Vaziri, a postdoctoral scholar, reported on a novel phenomenon: direct irra-diation of an InGaN substrate with a focused ion beam, which provides a technique for the fabrication of single-crystal indium nanowires at a rate that is much higher than other available tech-niques. “We envision that these composite nanowires will have versatile applica-tions in electronics and opto-electronic devices. Other uses include building biosensors, solar cells, electrodes, and even memory devices. With additional work we could create nanoneedles and nano-pipettes for delivering mole-cules or drugs such as nucleic acids in the next generation of nanosurgery devices.”

Students in ES-147, “Idea Translation,” presented pro-jects to the Harvard com-munity that tackled some intriguing questions: Can remote sensing elevate mu-seum experiences? Are lumi-nous polymers the keys to lighting Africa? Are gourmet aerosols the next big thing in the culinary arts? Can your biological information

be used to enhance virtual worlds? The answers may well realized, especially since the lighting project for Af-rica has received seed fund-ing. The audience, however, seemed less than enthusiastic about the thought of breath-ing rather than eating their victuals.

XEconomy.com reported on InCytu, a firm that hopes to make tissue engineering succeed in the marketplace. The startup “draws on new technology from Harvard bioengineer David Mooney’s lab. InCytu is developing a suite of ‘smart’ materials that help the body grow new tis-sues and repair itself—using its own stem cells right in the body—rather than requir-ing that cells be harvested, treated in a lab, and then re-turned to the patient … The company’s initial aim is to create simpler products such as dressings that can coax new blood vessels to grow into skin badly damaged by diabetes and injectable gels to help repair hernias and perhaps even shrapnel or bul-let wounds.” JJackie Stenson ’08, installing one of her chimneys on a thatched-roof hut.

Stephanie Wilson ’88, A veteran of two space flights, poses with the rest of the crew of the STS-120.


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Shih Choon Fong ’73University 101

Try to imagine Harvard before, well, it was Harvard. At one point the famed

Ivy was merely the intention of a 1636 vote of the general court of Massachu-setts (the colony, not the state) and the famed Yard was merely an expanse of former cow pasture interrupted by a single house.

At least Shih Choon Fong ’73 has the benefit of a Website (www.kaust.edu.sa) to give form to such imaginings in his new university. In February, Shih was appointed as the first president of the newly founded King Abdullah Univer-sity of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

Shih earned his Ph.D. in applied math-ematics from Harvard in 1973. After Shih spent seven years leading Fracture Research at the GE Corporate Research Lab, he returned to an Ivy setting, serv-ing as a professor at Brown University for nearly 15 years. In 2000, he returned home, serving as the President of the National University of Singapore.

Despite the awesome responsibility of running a new university, in his ac-ceptance letter Shih said that he plans to keep his composure by using some lessons from his childhood: “Early on as a child, my greatest pleasure was to explore the longkangs (ditches) of Singa-pore, looking for fishes and frogs. Curi-osity, and the joy when that is fulfilled, has led me to a lifelong quest of pursu-ing scientific knowledge, the interplay of inquiry and reasoning.”

In February 2008 The New York Times ran the following headline: “U.S. Uni-versities Rush to Set Up Posts Abroad.”

In the 21st century, to extend their global brands, and sometimes for rev-enue reasons, some universities began setting up overseas satellite campuses. These universities often brought their own intellectual and cultural DNA to the outposts. Sometimes, but not often enough, the best of the satellite cam-puses would engage with indigenous organizations, leading to the exchange

of intellectual and cultural DNA, thus enriching the entire system. However, more often than not, there was only one-way flow to the advantage of the parent institution, with little benefit to the host society.

KAUST, however, is being built by and for Saudi Arabia.

To take on the grand challenges of our times, I believe universities in the 21st century must engage in meaningful col-laboration in research and education that serves society and fosters responsi-ble global citizenship. KAUST will be re-sponsive to the world while responsible to Saudi Arabia, a global university with a national character.

Do you view KAUST as rekindling the long legacy of Arabic invention and discovery?

Intellectual inquiry was an integral part of the Arabic world for more than two millennia. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdul-lah has shared his vision for KAUST as “a new House of Wisdom, a forum for science and research, and a beacon of knowledge for future generations” and holding the promise of contributing to the Kingdom’s development towards a knowledge and innovation-driven society. At the heart of KAUST is an enlightened spirit, which seeks knowl-edge not only for its own sake but also for its promise of the betterment of the human condition.

What is your “grandest dream” for the influence KAUST might have across the globe?

Like the best institutions around the world, KAUST recognizes that the mea-sure of global excellence in research and education is in making a difference to a discipline or field, in contributing to society’s well-being, and in shaping public opinion and policy. Working to-wards these goals, KAUST would have gone some way towards rekindling the legacy of the Renaissance, which itself was built upon the Islamic Golden Age.

(left) In January 2088 King Abdullah University of Science and Technology named Shih Coon Fong ’73 Founding President.


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the pioneers honored with the 2007 A. M. Turing Award for model checking (first de-veloped at Harvard in 1981).

The Turing Award is consid-ered the Nobel Prize of com-puter science.

P.S. Krishnaprasad ’77 (Ph.D., Engineering Sciences), Pro-

fessor of Electrical and Com-puter Engineering at the University of Maryland, was awarded the 2007 IEEE Con-trol Systems Society Hendrik W. Bode Prize.

The prize was developed to recognize distinguished con-tributions to control systems science or engineering.

David E. Keyes ’84 (Applied Mathematics), Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Math-ematics, won the 2007 Sidney Fernbach Award.

Choon Fong Shih ’73 has been appointed the first president of the KAUST in Saudi Arabia (see p. 18 and above).

Be part of the Renaissance...The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences thrives because of institu-tional, government, industrial, and alumni support. Such financial generosity, intel-lectual guidance, and enthusiasm will enable us to continue to enhance education and research and to better society. To learn more about giving opportunities, please contact Linda Fates, Associate Dean for Resource Development, at [email protected].

What does it mean to be an engineering school for the 21st century?

As Theodore von Kármán, Caltech’s Provost during its formative years, once said: “Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was.” Of course, the optimists seek scientific solutions for these new problems, as well they should; but the realists are not wrong to wonder if even more problems will in turn be created. Thus, von Kármán’s statement needs elaboration: The world that technol-ogy has transformed begs to be shaped by values, values which can promote and sustain life in the 21st century. The 21st-century engineering school—in-deed, the 21st-century university—has a civilizing mission: developing indi-viduals who know how, among other qualities, to mingle easily with diverse cultures as well as to be conversant on global issues.

As you know, Harvard recently launched SEAS. Do you have any advice?

I believe that SEAS has a particular responsibility because of Harvard’s prominence at the forefront of global knowledge institutions. It can offer op-portunities for fruitful conversations outside the boundaries of science and engineering in order to sharpen the in-tellectual life and heighten the cultural sensitivity of SEAS students. It is vital that SEAS establishes a no-walls culture of openness, promoting collaboration and discovery across disciplines and institutions, as well as across communi-ties, cultures, and continents. This is one step towards ensuring a thriving and successful future.

You’ve said that you went from being a mediocre student to attending Harvard. What inspired you to push forward?

Today, much of university education is driven by extrinsic factors, such as liv-ing out parental dreams, making lots of money, and going for a straight and easy path to success. To do well in en-gineering, there needs to be intrinsic motivation—love of science and curios-ity to discover how the world works. To sustain students’ interest in engineering, professors have a big part to play. Their excitement and enthusiasm can be infec-tious, drawing out a love for the subject and helping students find fulfillment in learning and discovery.

Alumni Accomplishments

What do you think has enabled your own success?

I am fundamentally drawn to the chal-lenge of transforming the seemingly im-possible into a possible. A curiosity for how things work and a love of adventure have also driven me to seek out exciting and meaningful pursuits. At the same time, always in my heart are the words of my devout Buddhist mother: “You must not be so attached to something that you can’t do without it.” I think of life more as a never-ending and ever-changing journey of learning and discovery. Hu-mility, humanity, and humor also make good traveling companions. JNote: An unabridged version of this interview is available on www.seas.harvard.edu.

Because several alumni asked to share their successes with the wider SEAS community, we decided to pass along the praise. Please feel free to send any of your own accomplish-ments our way: [email protected].

E. Allen Emerson ’81 (Ph.D., Applied Math) was among

KAUST campus rendering. (View from under the rotunda of the of the main entrance and Administration Building.)


Feedback loopWe welcome and appreciate your comments, suggestions, and corrections. Please send feedback to [email protected] or call us at 617-496-3815. This newsletter is published biannually by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Communications Office.

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Pierce Hall 29 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138

Managing Editor/Writer Michael Patrick Rutter

Additional Writers Abigail Adair; Andrew Arcieri

Designer, Producer, Photographer Eliza Grinnell

Copy Editor Darlene Bordwell, Ambient Light

Proofreader James Clyde Sellman, PhD ’93

This publication, including past issues, is available on the Web at www.seas.harvard.edu

Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Teaching it Forward

Lynn Andrea Stein ’86, (A.B., Computer Science) was there when the Olin College of Engineering

campus existed only as a computer-rendered fly-through—rotund neoclassical buildings floating in a sea of black. Among the first wave of faculty mem-bers at Olin, Stein worked with student partners to build the college’s curriculum from the ground up.

This past year, she brought her course reengineer-ing skills to bear at SEAS. As a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at SEAS she introduced CS 179, “Design of Usable Interactive Systems.” The class, a mix of studio (“hands-on”) elements and tradi-tional seminars, focuses on understanding and applying the lessons of human interaction to the design of usable systems.

Stein cleverly took over a corner of the third floor of 60 Oxford Street to form a classroom that could go with the flow. As the photos show, students are able to sprawl themselves—and their project ma-terials—across any and every available surface. J

1 Brian Young ’09, Mark Van Middlesworth ’10, and-Frances Yun ’10 present their concept for a video rental kiosk.

2 Sabrina Chou ’09 takes notes as Lynn Stein offers suggestions on presentation techniques.

3 Sally Rinehart ’09 (seated), Alex Komoroske ’08, Matt Di Pasquale ’09, and Jana Lepon ’08 (not pic-tured) run a usability test on an interface for grill or-dering system that they will be piloting at Harvard’s Winthrop dining hall.

4 Ian Malott ’09, Randy Ryan ’09, Jacob Rus ’09, and Samir Paul ’10 (not pictured) use sketches to develop interface design ideas for their course shopping tool.

5 Storyboard of a calendaring interaction for an wear-able calendaring device being developed by Sabrina Chou ’09, David Kosslyn ’11, Hannah Ma ’08, and Alan Ramos ’10.

6 Rachel Popkin ’08, Josh Montana ’10, Alex Komoroske ’08, Hannah Ma ’08, and Jana Lepon ’08 listen as Liesje Hodgson ’08 poses a question to the group.

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harvard seas, newsletter, spring 2008

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