Chancellor for Academic Advancement, MIT

W. Eric L. Grimson, the Bernard M. Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has served as the Chancellor for Academic Advancement at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since fall 2013. As one of the Institute’s senior academic officers, Professor Grimson is a central advisor to President Rafael Reif on the Institute’s fundraising campaign’s shape and strategy, and serves as his representative to alumni, parents, students and Institute partners.

A member of the MIT faculty since 1984, Professor Grimson previously served as Chancellor of MIT. In this role, he had oversight responsibility for graduate and undergraduate education at MIT, student life, student services, curricular developments, and other areas that impact student experience. Together with the Provost, he acted as advisor to the President in areas of strategic planning, faculty appointments, resource development, and Institute resources and buildings. Professor Grimson has also served as Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is internationally recognized for his research in computer vision, especially in applications in medical image analysis.

Professor Grimson has been actively engaged with students throughout his career. For 25 years he lectured 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and more recently, 6.00 (and 6.00X, the MITx online MOOC) Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, and 6.01 Introduction to EECS. He has also taught undergraduate subjects in computer architecture, software engineering, and signal processing. He is now engaged in teaching 6.01, Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science to reflect this spring’s effort. In all, Professor Grimson has taught some 11,000 MIT undergraduates and served as the thesis supervisor to almost 50 MIT PhDs.

Professor Grimson is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and holds a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) from Dalhousie University.