Dear Alumni/ae and Friends of NSE:
After the rigors of last winter this has been an unusually eventful
spring in the Department. I’m delighted to announce that four of our
faculty have recently received well-deserved promotions. Professor
Jacopo Buongiorno has been promoted to the rank of full professor,
Professor Ben Forget and Professor Anne White have been promoted to the
rank of associate professor with tenure, and Professor Emilio Baglietto
has been promoted to the rank of associate professor without tenure. You
can read more about the work of these excellent colleagues
here.
These advances continue a remarkable record of achievement by our
outstanding young faculty. In the last few years, seven young NSE
professors have earned a total of 12 promotions, including four awards
of tenure (a fifth young colleague was brought here with tenure.) A few
years ago we were the oldest faculty (on average) in MIT’s School of
Engineering. Today we are the youngest. For the older folks on the
faculty like me, time’s arrow has magically seemed to be going
backwards. Our cohort of future NSE leaders is strong.
I am also very pleased to announce that Kord Smith, the KEPCO Professor
of the Practice of Nuclear Science and Engineering, will remain a member
of our faculty at least through the end of the decade. Since his
arrival in 2011 Kord, who is widely regarded as the world’s leading
computational reactor physicist, has combined with Associate Professor
Ben Forget to build a reactor analysis group that has put the Department
once again at the forefront of one of the most important branches of
nuclear science and engineering.
In other news, last month the Department held the second
Rising Stars
in Nuclear Science and Engineering Symposium. This symposium series,
which is organized by NSE Professors Paola Cappellaro, Anne White, and
Bilge Yildiz, addresses one of the biggest challenges facing nuclear
science and engineering: how to encourage outstanding young women
scientists and engineers to enter and to remain in our field. Rising
Stars contributes to this goal by providing an opportunity to celebrate
the research accomplishments of a new generation of women doctoral and
post-doctoral researchers from around the country, and to create new
professional networks that will support the progress of these
outstanding young women throughout their careers. The Rising Stars
symposium centered on research talks given by the attendees, with topics
ranging from material science to radiation detection, reactor physics,
and high performance computing. As NSE PhD student Mareena
Robinson-Snowden observed, “The quality of this symposium is top
par…we’re all getting to know each other and I’m very appreciative of
these types of events. I just wish they didn’t have to be only every two
years!” In this regard, I was very pleased to see that our colleagues
at the University of Michigan are planning to hold a similar event soon.
There will be further celebrations in the Department next month as we
conduct our annual commencement exercises. I hope that some of you will
be able to join us on June 4 for the annual NSE reception for alumni and
graduating students. You’ll be receiving an invitation with details
early next week.
Finally, it is with mixed emotions that I’m letting you know that this
will be my last letter to you as head of NSE. Last week I informed our
faculty that after six years I will step down as Department Head on July
1 and will take up a new appointment as Associate Provost for
International Activities.
This has been a very exciting period in NSE. I’ve greatly enjoyed my
time in this office, and we have made much progress. We have redefined,
strengthened, and broadened the intellectual core of our field, and we
have become a more cohesive department as a result. We have implemented
the most far-reaching changes to our doctoral program in many decades —
changes that have introduced greater transparency, flexibility, and
learning efficiency for our students. We have developed and implemented a
new graduate core curriculum, and now a reform of our undergraduate
program is underway. We have laid the foundations for a strong nuclear
security program. Our
Science-Systems-Society
educational triad is robust. We have significantly upgraded the quantity
and quality of our communications, both within MIT and externally. We
have introduced a new NSE Communication Lab, based on a student
peer-counseling model, that already in its first semester has served
more than a third of our students. Our research volume has more than
doubled in the last four years. We have added several new endowed
graduate fellowships. The Department is a recognized leader in concept
development, entrepreneurship, and policy innovations for advanced
nuclear power systems. And beyond all this, for me what has been most
gratifying has been to see the rapid development of our exceptional
young faculty.
There is still much to do, of course. But today NSE is a strong
department in a strong school, and I believe we are well-positioned to
lead our field — and MIT — into an exciting new era of nuclear research
and education. Nuclear science and technology will play a vital role in
addressing the 21st century’s greatest challenges — in climate and
energy, water, human health, environmental quality, and national and
international security — and in the coming decades new applications of
nuclear phenomena will be developed that we cannot even imagine today.
NSE’s mission — to prepare the next generation of leaders of the global
nuclear enterprise — has never been more important, and our future is
bright.
Several years ago, when I first started writing to you with news of NSE,
my hope was that these letters would help promote a sense of community
among the Department’s alums and friends. Judging by all your emails and
letters, I think this has happened. I want to thank you most sincerely
for your support and your engagement with the Department, and I hope
that in the coming years this will not only continue but grow even
stronger. NSE is a jewel. Let us treasure it.
With best wishes,
-- Richard
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