In 2025, MIT awarded tenure to 11 faculty members throughout the School of Engineering. The newly tenured engineers this year are affiliated with the departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) — which jointly reports to the School of Engineering and MIT Schwarzman College of Computing — Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Nuclear Science and Engineering.
“I am extraordinarily proud to extend my congratulations to the 11 latest tenured faculty members within the School of Engineering. Their commitment to furthering their disciplines, mentoring emerging innovators, and fostering a dynamic academic community is genuinely motivating,” states Anantha Chandrakasan, chief innovation and strategy officer, dean of engineering, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who will take on the title of MIT provost on July 1. “This achievement not only acknowledges their accomplishments, but also signifies the promise of even more significant contributions in the future.”
The engineering faculty members who have recently received tenure include:
Bryan Bryson, the Phillip and Susan Ragon Career Development Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, engages in research on infectious diseases and immunoengineering. His interest lies in creating new tools to analyze the intricate dynamics of bacterial infection on different levels, from individual cells to infected organisms, by employing both the perspectives of immunologists and microbiologists.
Connor Coley serves as the Class of 1957 Career Development Professor and associate professor of chemical engineering, with a joint appointment in EECS. His research team develops innovative computational strategies that merge artificial intelligence with chemistry, particularly focusing on small molecule drug discovery, chemical synthesis, and elucidation of structures.
Mohsen Ghaffari is the Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Professor and an associate professor in EECS. His research delves into the theory surrounding distributed and parallel computing. He has made significant contributions to various algorithmic challenges, including generic derandomization techniques for distributed and parallel computing, enhanced distributed solutions for graph-related problems, and algorithmic assessments for massively parallel computation.
Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, the Paul M. Cook Development Professor and associate professor of materials science and engineering, operates at the convergence of machine learning and atomistic simulations. He utilizes computational resources to approach the design of materials within complex combinatorial search spaces, including organic electronic materials, polymers and molecules for energy storage, and heterogeneous (electro)catalysts.
Song Han, an associate professor in EECS, is a trailblazer in model compression and TinyML. His innovations encompass essential areas such as pruning quantization, parallelization, KV cache optimization, long-context learning, and multi-modal representation learning, all aimed at reducing generative AI costs. He also designed the first hardware accelerator (EIE) to capitalize on weight sparsity.
Kaiming He, the Douglass Ross (1954) Career Development Professor of Software Technology and an associate professor in EECS, is renowned for his contributions to deep residual networks (ResNets). His research explores the development of computer models capable of learning representations and achieving intelligence that interact with the complex world, with the long-term aim of enhancing human intelligence through advanced artificial intelligence.
Phillip Isola, the Class of 1948 Career Development Professor and associate professor in EECS, investigates computer vision, machine learning, and AI. His studies seek to uncover foundational principles of intelligence, particularly focusing on how models and representations of the environment can be obtained through self-supervised learning, utilizing raw sensory experience devoid of labeled data.
Mingda Li holds the Class of 1947 Career Development Professor position and is an associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. His research centers on characterization and computation.
Richard Linares serves as an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His research centers on astrodynamics, space systems, and satellite autonomy. Linares devises advanced computational tools and analytical approaches to tackle issues related to space traffic management, space debris mitigation, and space weather modeling.
Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, an associate professor in EECS, has developed tools ranging from visual effects for films to the Halide programming language, which is widely utilized in industry for photo editing and processing. His research is concentrated on high-performance computer graphics and accelerated computing, intersecting graphics with programming languages, systems, and architecture.
Arvind Satyanarayan is an associate professor in EECS. His research domains encompass data visualization, human-computer interaction, alongside artificial intelligence and machine learning. He leads the MIT Visualization Group, which employs interactive data visualization as a testing ground to explore intelligence augmentation—how computation can effectively enhance human cognition and creativity while respecting our autonomy.