The MIT School of Engineering is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Generally considered having one of the best engineering programs in the world[1][2][3], the school has eight academic departments and one interdisciplinary division and grants S.B., M.Eng, S.M., an engineer's degree, and the Ph.D. or Sc.D degrees. The current acting Dean of Engineering is Professor Cynthia Barnhart. The school is the largest at MIT as measured by undergraduate and graduate enrollments and faculty members.[4]
The Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Course XVI) was founded as a program within the Mechanical Engineering department in 1926 and became an independent department in 1939.
The Department of Biological Engineering (Course XX) was founded as a division in 1998 and became an independent department in 2005.
For more than two decades, the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics has been a world leader in supply chain management education and research. CTL has made significant contributions to supply chain logistics and has helped numerous companies gain competitive advantage from its cutting-edge research.
The Department of Chemical Engineering (Course X) was founded as a combined course of mechanical engineering and industrial chemistry in 1888 and became an independent department in 1920.
The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (Course I) offered classes in civil engineering since MIT's 1865 opening and was subject to repeated mergers with the departments of sanitary engineering and structural engineering before adopting its current name and organization in 1992.
The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Course VI) is the largest department in the School of Engineering. Electrical engineering was originally taught within the Department of Physics, but a new degree program was offered in 1882, and the department became independent in 1902.[5]
Founded in 1998, the Engineering Systems Division is an interdisciplinary division within the School of Engineering drawing on faculty from various engineering departments, as well as the Schools of Management and Science.
The Department of Materials Science and Engineering (Course III) can be traced back to a Department of Geology and Mining established at MIT's 1865 opening which later grew to encompass mining and metallurgy until the modern name was adopted in 1974.
The Department of Mechanical Engineering (Course II) was one of the original MIT departments. In 2004, the department adsorbed the Department of Ocean Engineering (Course XIII) which is now the Center for Ocean Engineering.
The Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (Course XXII) was established in 1958, making it one of the oldest programs of its kind in the nation.
The Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation was launched with an initial $20 million gift from Gururaj Deshpande and Jaishree Deshpande. The Center will award $15+ million in grants over next five years directly into MIT research, and is sponsoring research in broad range of areas, including Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Tiny Technologies. The center also partners with investors, entrepreneurs, and local industry to help commercialize MIT technology. The center will fund research on novel technologies in collaboration with the high technology and venture capital communities of New England and will support undergraduate education in engineering practice.
The Deshpande Center has partnered with the Entrepreneurship Center to select high-performance graduate-level student teams, or i-Teams, that evaluate commercial feasibility for five research projects selected each semester. Through the annual IdeaStream Symposium, faculty entrepreneurship workshops, and other events, the Center will help catalyze market-focused innovation and showcase new MIT technologies.
Ignition Forums bring together the MIT research and local business communities for a panel discussion and networking around specific industries. Open to the entire community. The annual invitation-only conference brings together top-name VCs, entrepreneurs, and MIT faculty to exchange ideas about innovation and entrepreneurship.
Initiated in 1999, iCampus is a research collaboration between Microsoft Research and MIT whose goal is to create and demonstrate technologies with the potential for revolutionary change throughout the university curriculum. The service was shut down in 2006.
Started in 2002 with a $50 million grant from the U.S. Army, the Institute works with a corsotium of firms, including Raytheon, DuPont and Brigham and Women's Hospital, to develop new technologies in support of the Future Force Warrior system.[6]
The Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity (LMP) is an interdepartmental laboratory in the School of Engineering. The stated goals of the LMP include the development of the fundamental principles of manufacturing systems, processes, and machines; the application of those principles to the manufacturing enterprise; and the education of engineering leaders.
Established in 1977, the laboratory now consists of 14 faculty and senior research staff, primarily drawn from the Mechanical Engineering Department. Current research areas include micro- and nano-scale manufacturing, manufacturing systems and information technology, and renewable energy and environmentally benign manufacturing. Research groups at the LMP include the Auto-ID Labs, the MIT Data Center, the Park Center for Complex Systems, the Center for Polymer Microfluidics, and the Precision Compliant Systems Laboratory.
The Leaders For Manufacturing program is a graduate program in which students receive an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and an MS in an engineering field of the student's choice.
MTL
The Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC) is an international community of scholars and practitioners who are focused on technology-leveraged higher education in emerging nations. MIT LINC shares best practices, helps make professional connections between and among participants and fosters innovative programmatic initiatives that can be formally evaluated for effectiveness. Its efforts are motivated by the needs of young people around the globe who reach college age and who face, with few exceptions, limited opportunities to receive quality tertiary education. MIT LINC describes itself as a ‘professional society with an entrepreneurial attitude’.[7]
To date MIT LINC has held four successful annual symposia in 2003, 2004, and 2005, and one international conference in 2007 bringing over 100 participants to Cambridge, Massachusetts and over 500 participants to the Dead Sea, Jordan and to Dubai. Participants in LINC symposia and conferences represent over 40 countries including, but not limited to, Algeria, Armenia, Canada, Chile, China, Ethiopia, France, Gaza, Hong Kong, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Lesotho, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, Syria, Turkey and Venezuela. Scholarly and practical results are equally important. MIT LINC does not seek to become a virtual university.