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Corporate relations names two

In response to President Charles M. Vest's call for stronger relationships with industry, staffing changes in the Office of Corporate Relations have been announced. Thomas Moebus, director of corporate relations, has appointed Bruce N. Anderson as the new director of industrial liaison. Mr. Moebus (SB '70) has held both directors' positions since 1992.

Mr. Anderson earned the SB (1969) in aeronautical and astronautical engineering, the BArch (1970), and the MArch (1973). He was a leader in the solar energy field and founded an environmental services firm, T.E.A., which he operated until 1985.

He served for two terms on the Visiting Committee of the Department of Architecture in the 1970s and was assistant director of MIT's Center for Environmental Health Sciences. He joined the Office of Corporate Relations as an industrial liaison officer in 1995.

Mr. Anderson will be in charge of the Industrial Liaison Program, which was founded in 1948 to build mutually beneficial relationships between corporations and MIT. It has a membership of 215 corporations worldwide and a staff of 12 liaison officers and six support staff, all of whom will report to Mr. Anderson. He will be responsible for assuring the quality of ILP member relationships and increasing the overall revenues (fees, research and gifts) coming to MIT from these companies.

The Office of Corporate Relations was created in 1988 in recognition of MIT's need to expand the ILP's mission beyond that of generating fees based on services to corporations. In recent years, there has been a shift of resources toward building significant corporate partnerships, supporting faculty-led initiatives aimed at corporations and building new corporate linkages, as well as recruiting and serving ILP member companies.

In addition to ILP, the Office of Corporate Relations includes the corporate development unit headed by Karl Koster, new business development headed by Cynthia Bloomquist and operations headed by Susan Shansky. Mr. Moebus will now focus on creating new corporate partnerships, supporting MIT initiatives such as building educational technology for MIT's future, and strengthening faculty relations.

The Office of Corporate Relations also announced the appointment of Sarah Bancroft as associate director of corporate development. She will report to Mr. Koster and will supervise the corporate research group, working with the corporate relations staff in preparing documentation for MIT senior administrators' corporate interactions, as well as having responsibility for a number of individual corporate development prospects.

Dr. Bancroft has held financial services positions with American Express/IDS, the accounting firm of BDO Seidman, and most recently as director of practice management at Commonwealth Equity Services. Before that, she spent 13 years in various business planning and corporate marketing positions. She holds the the BA from Swarthmore College and the MA and PhD from Princeton University.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 29, 1997.

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