The Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is the

engineering school Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more speciali ...

within

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, offering degrees in engineering and applied sciences to graduate students admitted directly to SEAS, and to undergraduates admitted first to

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate college of Harvard University, an Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard College is the original school of Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher lea ...

. Previously the Lawrence Scientific School and then the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Paulson School assumed its current structure in 2007. Francis J. Doyle III has been its dean since 2015. SEAS is housed in Harvard's Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) in the Allston neighborhood of Boston directly across the

Charles River The Charles River ( Massachusett: ''Quinobequin)'' (sometimes called the River Charles or simply the Charles) is an river in eastern Massachusetts. It flows northeast from Hopkinton to Boston along a highly meandering route, that doubles b ...

from Harvard's main campus in Cambridge and adjacent to the Harvard Business School and Harvard Innovation Labs. In 2019, Harvard was ranked third worldwide for Engineering and Technology by ''Times Higher Education''.

History

Lawrence Scientific School

Harvard's efforts to provide formal education in advanced science and engineering began in 1847, when Massachusetts industrialist

Abbott Lawrence Abbott Lawrence (December 16, 1792, Groton, Massachusetts – August 18, 1855) was a prominent American businessman, politician, and philanthropist. He was among the group of industrialists that founded a settlement on the Merrimack River that ...

gave Harvard $50,000 () to form what became known as the Lawrence Scientific School. In making his gift, Lawrence asked: James Emmanuel Jr. was the first dean of the school, which hosted astronomers, architects, naturalists, engineers, mathematicians, and even philosophers. By the late 19th century, the School faced increasing competition from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT) and was constrained by the uncertain views about its role and status by the long-serving Harvard President

Charles William Eliot Charles William Eliot (March 20, 1834 – August 22, 1926) was an American academic who was president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909the longest term of any Harvard president. A member of the prominent Eliot family of Boston, he transfor ...

. Eliot was involved in at least five unsuccessful attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. As a result of such uncertainty, the Lawrence Scientific School became less of an independent entity, losing its influence and students to other parts of the university. In 1891, industrialist

Gordon McKay Gordon McKay (1821–1903) was an American businessman and philanthropist. Biography He was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was trained as an engineer, worked on a railroad, and then on the Erie Canal before he purchased a machine shop. ...

designated the Lawrence Scientific School his primary beneficiary; there are now 40 McKay professorships. In 1906, the Lawrence School's scientific and engineering programs were incorporated into

and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and it ceased to exist as an independent entity.

Re-establishment

In 1914, a merger of MIT and Harvard's Applied Science departments was formally announced and was to begin "when the Institute will occupy its splendid new buildings in Cambridge." However, in 1917, the merger with MIT was canceled due to a decision by the State Judicial Court, so Harvard President

Abbott Lawrence Lowell Abbott Lawrence Lowell (December 13, 1856 – January 6, 1943) was an American educator and legal scholar. He was President of Harvard University from 1909 to 1933. With an "aristocratic sense of mission and self-certainty," Lowell cut a large f ...

moved to establish the Harvard Engineering School independently instead.President's Reports for 1917-18 In 1934, the School began offering graduate-level and professional programs in engineering. During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

, Harvard participated in the

V-12 Navy College Training Program The V-12 Navy College Training Program was designed to supplement the force of commissioned officers in the United States Navy during World War II. Between July 1, 1943, and June 30, 1946, more than 125,000 participants were enrolled in 131 colleg ...

to provide training for commissioned officers. In 1942, the undergraduate Department of Engineering Sciences changed to the Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Physics to reflect an increased emphasis on applied physics. Harvard President James Bryant Conant created what was known as "Conant's Arsenal," a research hub for defense-related engineering projects including

radar jamming Radar jamming and deception is a form of electronic countermeasures that intentionally sends out radio frequency signals to interfere with the operation of radar by saturating its receiver with noise or false information. Concepts that blanket the ...

, night vision, aerial photography,

sonar Sonar (sound navigation and ranging or sonic navigation and ranging) is a technique that uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in submarine navigation) to navigate, measure distances (ranging), communicate with or detect objects on o ...

, explosives, napalm, and atomic bomb research. One notable project from this era was the Harvard Mark I computer; one of the first programs to run on the Mark I was initiated on March 29, 1944, by

John von Neumann John von Neumann (; hu, Neumann János Lajos, ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest cove ...

, who worked on the

Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...

at the time, and needed to determine whether implosion was a viable choice to detonate the atomic bomb that would be used a year later. By 1945, Harvard income from government contracts was $33.5 million, the third highest among U.S. universities.

Later history

Between 1946 and 1949, the Graduate School of Engineering merged its faculty with the Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Physics into the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences within the

Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) is the largest of the ten faculties that constitute Harvard University. Headquartered principally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and centered in the historic Harvard Yard, FAS is the only faculty respon ...

. In 2007, the Harvard Corporation and Overseers voted for the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences to change its name to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). In 2015, Francis J. Doyle III, former director of the

Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies The Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB) is a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) primarily funded by the United States Army. Headquartered at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and in collaboration with MIT, ...

, was appointed dean. That year, the school was also renamed the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences following a $400 million gift by Harvard Business School alumnus John A. Paulson.

Academic overview

Undergraduates can pursue programs in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

(AB and as a secondary field), engineering sciences (AB and SB), biomedical engineering (AB), electrical engineering (SB), environmental science and engineering (AB), mechanical engineering (SB), and

applied mathematics Applied mathematics is the application of mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a combination of mathemati ...

(AB and as a secondary field). SB options for environmental science and engineering as well as biomedical engineering are also available through the engineering sciences program; ABET accreditation is offered for all of the traditional engineering disciplines. Prospective undergraduates must apply to

(Harvard's undergraduate college encompassing all concentrations): once enrolled, Harvard College students may declare a SEAS concentration in their sophomore year. At the graduate level, the School offers master's and PhD degrees in areas including applied mathematics, applied physics, bioengineering, data science,

chemical engineering Chemical engineering is an engineering field which deals with the study of operation and design of chemical plants as well as methods of improving production. Chemical engineers develop economical commercial processes to convert raw materials int ...

, computational science and engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, design engineering, applied computation, environmental science and engineering, as well as materials science and

mechanical engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, an ...

. In addition, graduate students may pursue collaborative options such as Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (with Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology) and Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology (with

Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools in the United States and is consi ...

). As of January 2020, the School had 148 faculty members. The faculty has particularly close ties (including joint appointments) with the FAS departments of Physics, Earth and Planetary Science, as well as Chemistry and Chemical Biology. The campus provides of interconnected labs, classrooms, clusters, and offices in six buildings. In 2020 and 2021, SEAS is expected to expand into the new Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) in Allston, across the Charles River from Harvard's main location in Cambridge. The SEC will be adjacent to the Enterprise Research Campus in synergy with Harvard Business School and Harvard Innovation Labs to encourage technology- and life science-focused startups as well as collaborations with mature companies. Areas of significant research focus include applied mathematics, applied physics, bioengineering, geophysics, computer science, electrical engineering, artificial intelligence, mechanical engineering, and computational neuroscience.

Research highlights

Early 20th century

*1919 –

George Washington Pierce George Washington Pierce (January 11, 1872 – August 25, 1956) was an American physicist. He was a professor of physics at Harvard University and inventor in the development of electronic telecommunications. The son of a Texas cattle rancher, h ...

(PhD, 1900), Rumford Professor of Physics and director of Harvard's Cruft High-Tension Electrical Laboratory invented an oscillator that enabled a given radio station to stay "fixed" at a proper frequency and allowed multiple telephone calls to occur over a single line. *1938 – A

cyclotron A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest O. Lawrence in 1929–1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and patented in 1932. Lawrence, Ernest O. ''Method and apparatus for the acceleration of ions'', filed: Jan ...

was constructed at the Graduate School of Engineering's Gordon McKay Engineering Laboratory to support research in biology and medicine as well as physics. It was projected to be the world's largest such facility. In 1942, it was sent to Los Alamos for work on the

to develop an atomic bomb. *1944 – Howard Aiken '37 (PhD) developed the

Mark I Mark I or Mark 1 often refers to the first version of a weapon or military vehicle, and is sometimes used in a similar fashion in civilian product development. In some instances, the Arabic numeral "1" is substituted for the Roman numeral "I". " ...

series of computers, the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the U.S. Around the same time, a new generation of technically trained students began to share their knowledge well beyond Harvard's campus. Alumnus and donor Allen E. Puckett SB '39, SM '41 created an endowed professorship at SEAS, went on to define modern aerodynamics, served as CEO of Hughes Aircraft Company, and won the National Medal of Honor in Technology. *1952 –

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a physical phenomenon in which nuclei in a strong constant magnetic field are perturbed by a weak oscillating magnetic field (in the near field) and respond by producing an electromagnetic signal with a ...

(NMR), the scientific foundation for MRI (used in modern medical imaging systems), was pioneered by

Nicolaas Bloembergen Nicolaas Bloembergen (March 11, 1920 – September 5, 2017) was a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate, recognized for his work in developing driving principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy. During his career, he was a p ...

, Edward Purcell, and

Robert Pound Robert Vivian Pound (May 16, 1919 – April 12, 2010) was a Canadian-American physicist who helped discover nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and who devised the famous Pound–Rebka experiment supporting general relativity. He became a tenured ...

. Purcell won the 1952

Nobel Prize in Physics ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...

for this discovery.

1995 to 2006

*Stopping light –

Lene Hau Lene Vestergaard Hau (; born November 13, 1959) is a Danish physicist and educator. She is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at Harvard University. In 1999, she led a Harvard University team who, by use of a Bose–E ...

and her colleagues created a new form of matter, a Bose-Einstein Condensate, to slow light to 17 meters per second and later to bring a light beam to a complete stop, then restart it again. *Unbreakable hyper-encryption –

Michael O. Rabin Michael Oser Rabin ( he, מִיכָאֵל עוזר רַבִּין; born September 1, 1931) is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist and a recipient of the Turing Award. Biography Early life and education Rabin was born in 1931 in ...

embedded messages in rapidly moving streams of random digital bits in ways that cannot be decoded, even with unlimited computing power. *Black silicon –

Eric Mazur Eric Mazur (born November 14, 1954) is a physicist and educator at Harvard University, and an entrepreneur in technology start-ups for the educational and technology markets. Mazur's research is in experimental ultrafast optics, condensed matter p ...

's group created a new material that efficiently traps light and has potential use in solar cells, global warming sensors and ultra-thin television screens. *The mathematics of nature – L. Mahadevan and colleagues discovered how the Venus flytrap snaps up its prey in a mere tenth of a second by actively shifting the curved shape of its mouth-like leaves. *Atmospheric modeling – Loretta J. Mickley, Dan Jacob and colleagues found that the frequency of cold fronts bringing cool, clear air out of Canada during the summer months declined by about 20 percent. These cold fronts are responsible for breaking up the hot, stagnant air that builds up regularly in summer, generating high levels of ground level ozone pollution. *High speed nanowire circuits – Donhee Ham and

Charles Lieber Charles M. Lieber (born 1959) is an American chemist, a pioneer in nanoscience and nanotechnology. In 2011, Lieber was named the leading chemist in the world for the decade 2000–2010 by Thomson Reuters, based on the impact of his scientific p ...

made robust circuits from minuscule nanowires that align themselves on a chip of glass during low-temperature fabrication, creating rudimentary electronic devices that offer performance without high-temperature production or high-priced silicon. *Double emulsions – A new microfluidics-based device made by David A. Weitz and colleagues at Harvard University and

Unilever Unilever plc is a British multinational consumer goods company with headquarters in London, England. Unilever products include food, condiments, bottled water, baby food, soft drink, ice cream, instant coffee, cleaning agents, energy dri ...

makes precisely controlled double

emulsion An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally immiscible (unmixable or unblendable) owing to liquid-liquid phase separation. Emulsions are part of a more general class of two-phase systems of matter called colloids. Altho ...

s in a single step. Double emulsions, or droplets inside droplets, could be useful for encapsulating products such as drugs, cosmetics, or food additives.

2007 and beyond

*Applied physicist

caused a light pulse disappeared from one cold cloud then was retrieved from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. *A research team led by Mike Aziz and Earth and Planetary Sciences' Kurt House invented an engineered weathering process that might mitigate climate change. *Bioengineers including David Edwards collaborated with public health researchers at the

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the public health school of Harvard University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. The school grew out of the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers, the nation's first ...

to develop a novel spray-drying method for delivering a

tuberculosis Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, i ...

vaccine that could help prevent the related spread of

HIV/AIDS Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a retrovirus. Following initial infection an individual ...

in the developing world. *Working with a team of Dutch researchers and software developers, SEAS computer scientists used a novel peer-to-peer video sharing application to explore a model for e-commerce that uses bandwidth as a global currency. *Rob Wood's team launched a robotic fly that could be used in everything from surveillance to chemical sensing. *MIT's ''

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

'' named the creation of light-focusing optical antennas (that could lead to DVDs that hold hundreds of movies) as one of their Top 10 emerging technologies for 2007. *Kit Parker's lab found that an elastic film coated with a single layer of cardiac muscle cells can semi-autonomously engage in lifelike gripping, pumping, walking and swimming. *Nan Sun and Donhee Ham built what may be the smallest complete nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) system to date in a package. *Engineers and applied physicists demonstrated the first room-temperature electrically pumped

semiconductor laser The laser diode chip removed and placed on the eye of a needle for scale A laser diode (LD, also injection laser diode or ILD, or diode laser) is a semiconductor device similar to a light-emitting diode in which a diode pumped directly with e ...

source of terahertz (THz) radiation, also known as T-rays. *A team composed of Harvard students and alumni was among the winners of the World Bank's Lighting Africa 2008 Development Marketplace competition, held in Accra, Ghana. The innovation,

microbial fuel cell Microbial fuel cell (MFC) is a type of bioelectrochemical fuel cell system that generates electric current by diverting electrons produced from the microbial oxidation of reduced compounds (also known as fuel or electron donor) on the anode to oxid ...

-based lighting systems suitable for Sub-Saharan Africa, netted the group a $200,000 prize. *In collaboration with SiEnergy Systems, materials scientists at SEAS have demonstrated the first macro-scale thin-film solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC). *An interdisciplinary research effort investigated digitized

text corpus In linguistics, a corpus (plural ''corpora'') or text corpus is a language resource consisting of a large and structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). In corpus linguistics, they are used to do statistical ...

es containing about 4% of all books ever printed in English, between 1800 and 2000. It was co-founded and co-directed by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, whose prototype was instrumental in creating

Google Ngram Viewer The Google Ngram Viewer or Google Books Ngram Viewer is an online search engine that charts the frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in printed sources published between 1500 and 2019 in Google's text co ...

Notable alumni

Howard H. Aiken Howard Hathaway Aiken (March 8, 1900 – March 14, 1973) was an American physicist and a pioneer in computing, being the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer. Biography Aiken studied at the University of Wisconsi ...

(AM '37, PhD '39) - computer scientist and designer of the Harvard Mark I *

Hardy Cross Hardy Cross (1885–1959) was an American structural engineer and the developer of the moment distribution method for structural analysis of statically indeterminate structures. The method was in general use from c. 1935 until c. 1960 when it was ...

(MCE '11) - American structural engineer and developer of the

moment distribution method The moment distribution method is a structural analysis method for statically indeterminate beams and frames developed by Hardy Cross. It was published in 1930 in an ASCE journal. The method only accounts for flexural effects and ignores axia ...

for structural analysis of

statically indeterminate In statics and structural mechanics, a structure is statically indeterminate when the static equilibrium equations force and moment equilibrium conditions are insufficient for determining the internal forces and reactions on that structure. Math ...

structures * Howard Wilson Emmons (PhD '38) - mechanical engineer considered "the father of modern fire science" for his contribution to the understanding of flame propagation and fire dynamics, helped design the first supersonic wind tunnel, identified a signature of the transition to

turbulence In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is fluid motion characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and flow velocity. It is in contrast to a laminar flow, which occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between ...

boundary layer In physics and fluid mechanics, a boundary layer is the thin layer of fluid in the immediate vicinity of a bounding surface formed by the fluid flowing along the surface. The fluid's interaction with the wall induces a no-slip boundary cond ...

flows (now known as "Emmons spots"), and was the first to observe

compressor stall A compressor stall is a local disruption of the airflow in the compressor of a gas turbine or turbocharger. A stall that results in the complete disruption of the airflow through the compressor is referred to as a compressor surge. The severity of ...

in a gas turbine compressor *

Simon Newcomb Simon Newcomb (March 12, 1835 – July 11, 1909) was a Canadian–American astronomer, applied mathematician, and autodidactic polymath. He served as Professor of Mathematics in the United States Navy and at Johns Hopkins University. Born in N ...

(SB 1858) - Rear Admiral in the United States Navy and a leader in mathematical astronomy *

Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for t ...

(SB 1862) - known as the "father of

pragmatism Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. ...

" *

Trip Adler John R. "Trip" Adler III is an American entrepreneur. He is the CEO and co-founder of Scribd, a digital library and document-sharing platform, which has 80 million users. Background and early career Adler grew up in Palo Alto, California and ...

(AB '06) - CEO and co-founder of digital library and document sharing platform

Scribd Scribd Inc. is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing platform. The company was founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikh ...

* Robert Berger (PhD '65) - invented the first

aperiodic tiling An aperiodic tiling is a non-periodic tiling with the additional property that it does not contain arbitrarily large periodic regions or patches. A set of tile-types (or prototiles) is aperiodic if copies of these tiles can form only non- peri ...

Fred Brooks Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. (April 19, 1931 – November 17, 2022) was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the O ...

(PhD '56) -

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in comput ...

winner, managed the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the

OS/360 OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB ...

software support package, and wrote about the process in the well-regarded book ''

The Mythical Man-Month ''The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering'' is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a ...

'' *

Don Coppersmith Don Coppersmith (born 1950) is a cryptographer and mathematician. He was involved in the design of the Data Encryption Standard block cipher at IBM, particularly the design of the S-boxes, strengthening them against differential cryptanalysi ...

(SM '75, PhD '77) - developed

Coppersmith-Winograd algorithm Because matrix multiplication is such a central operation in many numerical algorithms, much work has been invested in making matrix multiplication algorithms efficient. Applications of matrix multiplication in computational problems are found in m ...

for rapid

matrix multiplication In mathematics, particularly in linear algebra, matrix multiplication is a binary operation that produces a matrix from two matrices. For matrix multiplication, the number of columns in the first matrix must be equal to the number of rows in the s ...

* Danny Cohen (PhD '69) - internet pioneer, developed the first real-time visual flight simulator and the Cohen-Sutherland

line clipping In computer graphics, line clipping is the process of removing (clipping) lines or portions of lines outside an area of interest (a viewport or view volume). Typically, any part of a line which is outside of the viewing area is removed. There a ...

algorithm * E. Allen Emerson (PhD '81) -

winner for developing model checking * John Fawcett (AB '99) - entrepreneur and co-founder of

hedge fund A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction, and risk management techniques in an attempt to improve performance, such as s ...

software companies

Tamale Software SS&C Advent (formerly Advent Software) is a business unit of SS&C Technologies. Advent Software was founded in 1983 by Steve Strand and Stephanie DiMarco. DiMarco served as president and CEO until June 2012, at which point she stepped down and w ...

and Quantopian * Danielle Feinberg (AB '96) - cinematographer and Director of Photography for Lighting at

Pixar Animation Studios Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californ ...

Shih Choon Fong Shih Choon Fong (; born 1945) is a Singaporean college administrator and fracture mechanics expert who served as the founding president of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) between 2008 and 2013. Prior joining KAUS ...

(PhD '73) - founding president of the

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST; ar, جامعة الملك عبد الله للعلوم و التقنية ') is a private research university located in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. Founded in 2009, the university provid ...

* Paul Graham (SM '88, PhD '90) -

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...

cofounder, introduced the Blub paradox * Martha Crawford Heitzmann (PhD '97) - former head of research at French

nuclear power Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced ...

conglomerate Areva, senior vice president of research at

L'Oréal L'Oréal S.A. () is a French personal care company headquartered in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine with a registered office in Paris. It is the world's largest cosmetics company and has developed activities in the field concentrating on hair color, ...

Tony Hsieh Anthony Hsieh ( ; December 12, 1973November 27, 2020) was an American internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He retired as the CEO of the online shoe and clothing company Zappos in August 2020 after 21 years. Prior to joining Zappos, ...

(AB '95) - internet entrepreneur and

venture capitalist Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

, CEO of online shoe and clothing shop

Zappos Zappos.com is an American online shoe and clothing retailer based in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. The company was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn and launched under the domain name Shoesite.com. In July 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos in an ...

* Marco Iansiti (AB '83, PhD '88) - microelectronics engineer and Harvard Business School professor * Kenneth E. Iverson (PhD '54) -

winner for developing the

APL programming language APL (named after the book ''A Programming Language'') is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent mos ...

* Richard M. Karp (AB '55, PhD '59) -

winner for contributions to the theory of

NP-complete In computational complexity theory, a problem is NP-complete when: # it is a problem for which the correctness of each solution can be verified quickly (namely, in polynomial time) and a brute-force search algorithm can find a solution by trying ...

ness * Iris Mack (PhD '86) - applied mathematician in

quantitative finance Mathematical finance, also known as quantitative finance and financial mathematics, is a field of applied mathematics, concerned with mathematical modeling of financial markets. In general, there exist two separate branches of finance that require ...

, MIT professor, and author *

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...

(AB '50) -

winner for co-founding the field of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

Robert Tappan Morris Robert Tappan Morris (born November 8, 1965) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the Morris worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet. Morris was prosecuted for releasing the ...

(AB '87, SM '93, PhD '99) - creator of the Morris Worm, the first computer worm on the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

and first person convicted under the

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA) is a United States cybersecurity bill that was enacted in 1986 as an amendment to existing computer fraud law (), which had been included in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. The law pro ...

, co-founded

Y-Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Stripe ...

, professor at MIT * Dennis Ritchie (AB '63, PhD '68) -

winner, created the C programming language and

Unix operating system Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and o ...

* Don Ross (PhD '53) - recipient of the

Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award {{infobox military award , name = , image = DON Distinguished Civilian Service.png , image_size = 100px , caption = Department of the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Medal , presenter = Depart ...

, made important developments in reduction of submarine noise *

Donald Rubin Donald is a masculine given name derived from the Gaelic name ''Dòmhnall''.. This comes from the Proto-Celtic *''Dumno-ualos'' ("world-ruler" or "world-wielder"). The final -''d'' in ''Donald'' is partly derived from a misinterpretation of the ...

(SM '66, PhD '70) - statistician known for the

Rubin Causal Model The Rubin causal model (RCM), also known as the Neyman–Rubin causal model, is an approach to the statistical analysis of cause and effect based on the framework of potential outcomes, named after Donald Rubin. The name "Rubin causal model" was ...

Steven Salzberg Steven Lloyd Salzberg (born 1960) is an American computational biologist and computer scientist who is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, where he is als ...

(PhD '89) -

computational biologist Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

who made significant contributions to

gene finding In computational biology, gene prediction or gene finding refers to the process of identifying the regions of genomic DNA that encode genes. This includes protein-coding genes as well as RNA genes, but may also include prediction of other functio ...

and sequence alignment bioinformatics algorithms, notably

GLIMMER In bioinformatics, GLIMMER (Gene Locator and Interpolated Markov ModelER) is used to find genes in prokaryotic DNA. "It is effective at finding genes in bacteria, archea, viruses, typically finding 98-99% of all relatively long protein coding g ...

MUMmer Mummers' plays are folk plays performed by troupes of amateur actors, traditionally all male, known as mummers or guisers (also by local names such as ''rhymers'', ''pace-eggers'', ''soulers'', ''tipteerers'', ''wrenboys'', and ''galoshins''). ...

, and

Bowtie The bow tie is a type of necktie. A modern bow tie is tied using a common shoelace knot, which is also called the bow knot for that reason. It consists of a ribbon of fabric tied around the collar of a shirt in a symmetrical manner so that t ...

Alfred Spector Alfred Zalmon Spector is an American computer scientist and research manager. He is a visiting scholar in the MIT EECS Department and was previously CTO of Two Sigma Investments. Before that, he was Vice President of Research and Special Initiati ...

(AB '76) - co-founder of

Transarc Transarc Corporation was a private Pittsburgh-based software company founded in 1989 by Jeffrey Eppinger, Michael L. Kazar, Alfred Spector, and Dean Thompson of Carnegie Mellon University. Transarc commercialized the Andrew File System (AFS), ...

, former vice president of research at

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

, and CTO of

Two Sigma Investments Two Sigma Investments is a New York City-based hedge fund that uses a variety of technological methods, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and distributed computing, for its trading strategies. The firm is run by John Overdec ...

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

(AB '74) - founder of the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft (" ...

Guy L. Steele Jr. Guy Lewis Steele Jr. (; born October 2, 1954) is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages and technical standards. Biography Steele was born in Missouri ...

(AB '75) - made significant contributions to the design and documentation of several

programming languages A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

Marius Vassiliou Marius Vassiliou (born 1957) is an American computational scientist, geophysicist, and aerospace executive. He is also an authority on the history of petroleum. Vassiliou is of Greek Cypriot descent and was educated at Harvard University and t ...

(AB '78) - computational physicist known for introducing Rokhlin's

fast multipole method __NOTOC__ The fast multipole method (FMM) is a numerical technique that was developed to speed up the calculation of long-ranged forces in the ''n''-body problem. It does this by expanding the system Green's function using a multipole expansion, w ...

to computational electromagnetics *

An Wang An Wang (; February 7, 1920 – March 24, 1990) was a Chinese–American computer engineer and inventor, and cofounder of computer company Wang Laboratories, which was known primarily for its dedicated word processing machines. Wang was an impo ...

(PhD '48) - invented

magnetic core memory Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random-access computer memory for 20 years between about 1955 and 1975. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core. Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magneti ...

* Stephanie Wilson (SB '88) -

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

astronaut * Jane Willis (AB '91, JD '94) - member of the

MIT Blackjack Team The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and ex-students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and other leading colleges who used card counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at bla ...

Tai Tsun Wu Tai Tsun Wu (, September 1, 1933) is a Chinese-born American physicist and applied physicist well known for his contributions to high-energy nuclear physics and statistical mechanics. Born in Shanghai, he studied electrical engineering at Univ ...

(SM '54, PhD '56) - physicist known for significant contributions in

high-energy nuclear physics High-energy nuclear physics studies the behavior of nuclear matter in energy regimes typical of high-energy physics. The primary focus of this field is the study of heavy-ion collisions, as compared to lighter atoms in other particle accelerator ...

and statistical mechanics * Harold Zirin (SB '50, PhD '53) - astrophysicist known as "Captain Corona"

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Harvard School Of Engineering And Applied Sciences Engineering universities and colleges in Massachusetts Educational institutions established in 1847

Universities and colleges in Cambridge, Massachusetts University subdivisions in Massachusetts 1847 establishments in Massachusetts Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences