- Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte (born December 1, 1943) is a Greek-American architect and computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also known as the founder of The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC).
- Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky, Ph.D (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, and a prolific author and lecturer. He is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century.
- Susan Hockfield
A graduate of the University of Rochester, Dr. Hockfield received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Georgetown University School of Medicine. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco, she joined the scientific staff at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1980.
- Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture , Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games .
- Kerry Emanuel
Kerry Emanuel is an American professor of meteorology currently working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. His work in atmospheric dynamics is well regarded among the meteorological community. In particular he has specialized in atmospheric convection and the mechanisms acting to intensify hurricanes. He was named one of Time's 100 Influential People of 2006.
- Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky is here critical of many current researchers in artificial intelligence researchers who he feels have gotten bogged down in theories of machine learning. He sees this as a crisis point in a time of an aging population that he feels will need help in performing many tasks. "We have a computer program that can beat a world chess champion, but we don’t have one that can reach for an umbrella on a rainy day, or put a pillow in a pillow case."
- Richard Lindzen
Richard Siegmund Lindzen, Ph.D., (born February 8, 1940) is an atmospheric physicist and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen is known for his research in dynamic meteorology, especially planetary waves. He has been a critic of some anthropogenic global warming theories and the political pressures surrounding climate scientists. He wrote an op-ed for the "Wall Street Journal" in April, 2006, …
- John Harbison
John Harris Harbison (born December 20, 1938 in Orange, New Jersey) is a composer, best known for his operas and large choral works. Harbison won the prestigious BMI Foundation's Student Composer Awards for composition at the age of sixteen in 1954. He studied music at Harvard University, where he sang with the Harvard Glee Club, and later at Princeton. He is an Institute Professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Daron Acemoglu
Daron Acemoglu, born on September 3, 1967 in Istanbul, Turkey, to Armenian parents, is a Turkish-American economist. He is currently Professor of Applied Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and winner of the 2005 John Bates Clark Medal. Acemoglu graduated in 1986 from the Galatasaray High School in Istanbul. He got his B.A. at the University of York, …
- Seymour Papert
Seymour Papert (born March 1, 1928 Pretoria, South Africa) is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and prominent educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language.
- Rodney Brooks
Rodney Allen Brooks (b. December 30, 1954 in Adelaide) is Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is Chief Technical Officer and sits on the Board of iRobot Corp. From July 1, 2003 until June 30, 2007, he was director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; prior to that, he was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
- Peter Senge
Peter Senge received a B.S. in engineering from Stanford University, an M.S. in social systems modeling and Ph.D. in management from MIT. He lives with his wife and their two children in central Massachusetts. Peter M. Senge is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Charles Stark Draper
Charles Stark Draper, Sc.D. is often referred to as "the father of inertial navigation." Born in Windsor, Missouri, he attended the University of Missouri in 1917, Stanford University, California in 1919, and MIT in 1922. While at MIT, he earned an S.B. in electrochemical engineering in 1926, and an S.M. and Sc.D. in physics in 1928 and 1938 respectively. While at MIT, he founded the Instrumentation Laboratory in the 1930s, …
- John McCarthy
John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts, sometimes known affectionately as Uncle John McCarthy), is a prominent computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence. He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. McCarthy championed mathematical logic for Artificial Intelligence.
- John McCarthy
John McCarthy (born 1953 in Medford, Massachusetts) is a linguist and professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a speciality in phonology and morphology. He was educated at Harvard University and MIT and was responsible, along with Alan Prince, for extending autosegmental phonology, and later Optimality Theory, to morphology.
- Olivier Blanchard
Olivier J. Blanchard (born December 27, 1948, Amiens, France) is currently the Class of 1941 Professor of Economics at MIT. Blanchard earned his Ph.D. in Economics in 1977 at MIT. He taught at Harvard University between 1977 and 1983, after which he returned to MIT as a professor. Between 1998 and 2003 Blanchard served as the Chairman of the Economics Department at MIT. He is also an advisor for the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston (since 1995) and New York (since 2004).
- Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener was an American theoretical and applied mathematician. He was a pioneer in the study of stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems. Wiener is perhaps best known as the founder of cybernetics, a field that formalizes the notion of feedback and has implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society.
- Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a clinical psychologist. Born in New York City, she has focused her research on psychoanalysis and culture and on the psychology of people's relationship with technology, especially computer technology and computer addiction.
- David Baltimore
David Baltimore (b. March 7, 1938) is an American biologist and one of the recipients of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He is currently the Robert A. Millikan Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he was the president from 1997 to 2006. He is also currently the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Baltimore was born in New York City.
- Eric Lander
Eric Steven Lander (b. February 3, 1957) is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a member of the Whitehead Institute, and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who has devoted his career toward realizing the promise of the human genome for medicine. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1974 and then attended Princeton University.
- Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum (Berlin, January 8, 1923) is a professor emeritus of computer science at MIT. Born in Berlin to Jewish parents, he escaped Nazi Germany in 1936, emigrating with his family to the United States. He started studying mathematics in 1941 in the US, but his studies were interrupted by the war, during which he served in the military. Around 1950 he worked on analog computers, and helped create a digital computer for Wayne State University.
- Carl Wunsch
Carl Wunsch (born May 5, 1941) is the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his early work in internal waves and more recently for research into the effects of ocean circulation on climate.
- Wolfgang Ketterle
Dr. Ketterle received a master's degree from the Technical University of Munich (1982), and a PhD in physics from the University of Munich (1986). After postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, at the University of Heidelberg and at MIT, in 1993 he joined the physics faculty at MIT, where he is now the John D. MacArthur Professor.
- Robert Solow
Robert Merton Solow (born August 23, 1924) is an American economist particularly known for his work on the theory of economic growth. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal (in 1961) and the 1987 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
- Seth Lloyd
Seth Lloyd is a Professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. He refers to himself as a "quantum mechanic". Lloyd was born on August 2, 1960, received his AB from Harvard College in 1982, his Math.Cert. and M.Phil. from Cambridge University in 1983 and 1984, and his Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1988 (advisor Heinz Pagels) for a thesis entitled "Black Holes, Demons, and the Loss of Coherence: How complex systems get information, …
- Dan Ariely
Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioural Economics at Duke University and a visiting Professor at MIT's Media Lab. He is an expert on how people actually act (irrationally)-and why they act-in all kinds of business and economic environments, and what this means for business innovation, strategy and marketing. Ariely is the author of the New York Times Best Seller Predictably Irrational . Few heavy thinkers are as funny or as engaging as he is.
- Hal Abelson
Harold (Hal) Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a Fellow of the IEEE. He holds an A.B. degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from MIT. He joined the MIT faculty in 1973. In 1992, Abelson was designated as one of MIT's six inaugural MacVicar Faculty Fellows, in recognition of his significant and sustained contributions to teaching and undergraduate education.
- Marilee Jones
Marilee Jones (born June 12, 1951) is a former dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the co-author of the popular guide to the college admission process, "Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond" (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2006). The book received critical acclaim and Jones was featured on CBS, National Public Radio and in "USA Today", …
- Franco Modigliani
Franco Modigliani (June 18, 1918 - September 25, 2003) was an Italian-American economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and MIT Department of Economics, and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1985. Born in Italy, he left Italy for the US in 1939 because of his Jewish background and antifascist views. In 1944 he obtained his Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research working under Jacob Marschak.
- Susumu Tonegawa
Susumu Tonegawa is a Japanese scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for "his discovery of the genetic principle for generation of antibody diversity." Although he won the Nobel Prize for his work in immunology, Tonegawa is a molecular biologist by training. In his later years, he has turned his attention to the molecular and cellular basis of memory formation.
- Maria Zuber
Maria T. Zuber is the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she also leads the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. Zuber has been involved in more than half a dozen NASA planetary missions aimed at mapping the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and several asteroids. She received her B.A. in astrophysics from the University of Pennsylvania and Sc.M. and Ph.D. in geophysics from Brown University.
- John Maeda
John Maeda is a Japanese-American graphic designer, computer programmer, university professor, and author. He is currently a professor at the MIT Media Lab. He was inspired early in his career by Paul Rand.
- Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist and essayist. He first achieved fame with his second novel, "Midnight's Children" (1981), which won the Booker Prize. Much of his early fiction is set at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the long, rich and often fraught story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the East and the West.
- Alan Guth
Alan Harvey Guth (born February 27, 1947) is a physicist and cosmologist. Guth has researched elementary particle theory (and how particle theory is applicable to the early universe). As a junior particle physicist, Guth first developed the idea of inflation in 1979 at Stanford University after attending a Big Bang lecture by Robert Dicke. In 1981, Guth formally proposed the idea of cosmic inflation, …
- Sara Seager
Sara Seager is a Canadian-American astronomer who is currently a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and known for her work on extrasolar planets. She was born in Toronto, Canada. In 1994, she earned a Bachelors in Science in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto. In 1999, Sara was granted a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University. Her doctoral thesis explored atmospheres on extrasolar planets.
- Gilbert Strang
Gilbert Strang was an undergraduate at MIT and a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. His doctorate was from UCLA and since then he has taught at MIT. He has been a Sloan Fellow and a Fairchild Scholar and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Professor of Mathematics at MIT and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College.
- Ron Rivest
Professor Ronald Lorin Rivest (born 1947, Schenectady, New York) is a cryptographer, and is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Computer Science at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (CSAIL). He is most celebrated for his work on public-key encryption with Len Adleman and Adi Shamir, specifically the RSA algorithm, for which they won the 2002 ACM Turing Award.
- Theodore Postol
Theodore A. Postol (1946 -) is a Professor of Science, Technology, and International Security at MIT and a prominent critic of the effectiveness of missile defense. He received both his undergraduate degree in physics as well as his PhD in nuclear engineering from MIT. Postol worked at Argonne National Laboratory, where he studied the microscopic dynamics and structure of liquids and disordered solids using neutron, x-ray and light scattering, …
- N. Gregory Mankiw
Nicholas Gregory Mankiw (born February 3, 1958) is a macroeconomist. From 2003 to 2005, Mankiw was the chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors. Mankiw was born in Trenton, New Jersey. In his youth, he attended the prestigious Pingry School. Later graduating from Princeton University "summa cum laude" in 1980 with an AB in Economics, …
- Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933) is an American physicist. He was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics (with colleagues Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow) for combining electromagnetism and the weak force into the electroweak force.