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Two named to professorships

Two faculty members have been appointed to named professorships.

Assistant Professor Frank B. Gertler of biology is the next Whitehead Career Development Professor. He has been on the MIT faculty since 1997 after serving as a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he earned the BS (1985) in zoology and the PhD (1992) in oncol-ogy. His research looks at ways in which signaling pathways modulate cell motility and morphology by directing remodeling of the actin-based cytoskeleton.

Assistant Professor Paul Viola of electrical engineering and computer science is the next Jamieson Career Development Professor. The chair was established in 1992 and named for J. Burgess Jamieson, an EECS alumnus (SB 1952) and a member of the department's Visiting Committee.

Dr. Viola is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's Learning and Vision group. His research focuses on statistical models of images and the underlying structures that create them, and he has published in fields including neurobiological vision, medical imaging, mobile robotics, machine learning and automated drug design. Professor Viola recently developed a new approach to solving computer vision problems based on entropy. He earned the SB from MIT in 1988 and the PhD in the AI Lab in 1995, and was appointed to the MIT faculty in 1996.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 21, 1998.

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