School of Engineering
Deans of the School of Engineering
| Vannevar Bush | 1932-1938 |
| Edward Leyburn Moreland | 1938-1946 |
| Thomas Kilgore Sherwood | 1946-1952 |
| Edward Lull Cochrane | 1952-1954 |
| Carl Richard Soderberg | 1954-1959 |
| Gordon Stanley Brown | 1959-1968 |
| Raymond Lewis Bisplinghoff | 1968-1971 |
| Alfred H. Keil | 1971-1977 |
| James D. Bruce | 1977-1978, Acting Dean |
| Robert C. Seamans | 1978-1981 |
| Gerald L. Wilson | 1981-1991 |
| Joel Moses | 1991-1995 |
| Robert A. Brown | 1996-1999 |
| Thomas L. Magnanti | 1999-2007 |
| Subra Suresh | 2007-2010 |
| Cynthia Barnhart | September 2010 – February 2011, Acting Dean |
| Ian A. Waitz | 2011-2017 |
| Anantha P. Chandrakasan | 2017- |
The School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was established in 1932 as part of the reorganization of the Institute recommended by President Karl Taylor Compton. As the largest of MIT’s three schools and two divisions at that time, the School of Engineering brought together the Department of Building Engineering and Construction (which became part of the Department of Civil and Sanitary Engineering in 1934); the Department of Business Engineering and Administration (which in 1950 separated from the school to become the School of Industrial Management); the Department of Chemical Engineering; the Department of Civil and Sanitary Engineering (which in 1961 became the Department of Civil Engineering and in 1992 changed its name to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering); the Department of Electrical Engineering (which in 1975 became the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science); the Department of Mechanical Engineering; the Department of Mining and Metallurgy (which split in 1936 into two departments: Mining Engineering, which was discontinued in 1940, and Metallurgy, which became the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science in 1967, and then the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in 1974); the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering (which became the Department of Ocean Engineering in 1971, later merged into the Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2005); the Department of General Sciences and Engineering (which was discontinued in 1957); and the Department of Nuclear Engineering (which was established in 1958 and in 2004 changed its name to the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering). The School of Engineering added the Department of Aeronautics in 1939 (it became the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1959) and two interdisciplinary divisions: Bioengineering and Environmental Health and the Engineering Systems Division in 1998. The latter division was renamed Biological Engineering in 2002 and became a department in 2007.
On July 1, 2012, the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science was launched, with Arup K. Chakraborty as director. IMES is based administratively in the School of Engineering, but includes participation from across MIT. The Institute for Data, Systems, and Society was officially established on July 1, 2015, with Munther Dahleh as its first director. IDSS is also based in the School of Engineering, but spans all five MIT schools and offers a range of cross-disciplinary academic programs.
Prepared by the Department of Distinctive Collections, MIT Libraries
January 1996; updated July 2007, June 2012, June 2016, April 2020