First Woman to Become Dean of Science School at MIT
For the first time in its 159 year-long history, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is appointing a woman, Nergis Mavalvala to serve as the Dean of their Science School.
Yesterday, on August 17th, the institute announced that the Dean of their sciences department Michael Sipser would be stepping down after 6 years and that he would now begin working as the Donner Professor of Mathematics. Nergis Nergis Mavalvala would begin serving as Dean as the first woman in the university’s history on September 1st, 2020.
Nergis Mavalvala is a Curtis & Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics, the associate head of the physics department at MIT since 2015, and a Pakistani-American. Mavalvala is known for her work with LIGO where she is a leading member. She has been honored with multiple awards for her research and teaching.
She was born in Lahore, Pakistan and lived in Karachi where she gravitated to tinkering by nature and then math and physics early on. She earned a Bachelor’s in Physics and Astronomy at Wellesley College, and a PhD in Physics at MIT in 1990. She began work with her advisor Rainier Weiss on developing a gravitational-wave detector for her PhD thesis, an idea that took shape as LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, a historic discovery using twin 4-kilometer-long interferometers that won Weiss and others the 2017 Nobel Physics Prize.
Over the course of her career at MIT, Mavalvala oversaw department academic programming, student well-being, implementation of new, flexible doctoral requirements and exams, and introduced a mentor program and changes to the department advising at both university levels, undergraduate and graduate among numerous other duties and achievements. She also co-founded the Physics Values Committee alongside the head of department Peter Fisher to develop the department’s value statement – a model that got adopted at MIT and other universities too.
“We’re in this moment where enormous changes are afoot… We’re in the middle of a global pandemic and economic challenge, and we’re also in a moment, at least in U.S. history, where the imperative for racial and social justice is really strong. As someone in a leadership position, that means you have opportunities to make an important and hopefully lasting impact.” says Mavalwava about her appointment as the Dean.
Credits: MacArthur Foundation/Harvey Mudd College
