Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T) Participating Departments

University of Astana
                      Partnership Development Tour
         Kazakhstan-World Bank Joint Economic Research Program

             Brief biographies of individuals whom
                the delegates will meet on the PDT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T)

Participating Departments
Department of Physics: http://web.mit.edu/physics/
MIT Teaching and Learning Labrotory: http://web.mit.edu/tll/index.html
MIT-Cambridge Partnership: http://www.cambridge-mit.org/
School of Engineering: http://engineering.mit.edu/
Singpore-MIT Alliance: http://sma-webtools.mit.edu/directory/view.php
Dean for Graduate Education: http://web.mit.edu/odge/dean/index.html
Dean for Undergraduate Education: http://web.mit.edu/due/

John Belcher, Professor of Physics and MacVicar Faculty Fellow, Department of Physics

Address: Room 37-695, Department of Physics, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue
         Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617- 253-4285
Email: jbelcher@mit.edu
Weblink: http://web.mit.edu/physics/facultyandstaff/faculty/john_belcher.html

Professor Belcher was born in Louisiana in 1943, and graduated from Odessa High
School in West Texas in 1961. He attended Rice University in Houston, graduating with a
double major in math and physics in 1965, summa cum laude. He then went to Caltech
for graduate school where he earned his Ph.D. in Physics in 1971.
Professor Belcher came to MIT in 1971, to work with Professors Herbert Bridge and Alan
Lazarus, who had the plasma probe on board Mariner 5. Just after he arrived, the Space
Plasma Group wrote a proposal for the Voyager mission to Jupiter and Saturn. After
reaching these two planets, as well as Uranus and Neptune, Voyager is still going
strong. In its most recent incarnation, it is refered to as the Voyager Interstellar Mission.
Within the next twenty years, it is probable that the MIT plasma instrument on Voyager 2
will make measurements in the interstellar medium.

Professor Belcher has twice received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal,
once for contributions to the understanding of the plasma dynamics of the Jovian
magnetosphere, in 1980, and once for his role as principal investigator on the Plasma
Science Experiment on Voyager during the Neptune encounter, in 1990. In 2004, the
Institute awarded Belcher with the Class of '22 professorship, designed to honor "a
tenured faculty member with a record of excellence in education, with respect to both
curriculum development and classroom teaching." In July 2007, Prof. Belcher was named
Division Head for Astrophysics.

Lori Breslow, Director, Teaching & Learning Laboratory

Address: Building 5-122, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-253-2850
Email: lrb@mit.edu
Weblink: http://web.mit.edu/tll/about-tll/breslow.html

Lori Breslow, Ph.D., has been the Director of the Teaching & Learning Laboratory since
its inception in 1997. She is responsible for setting policy and priorities for TLL,
developing and managing TLL’s research agenda in STEM teaching and learning, and
overseeing programming and services.

Dr. Breslow is also a Senior Lecturer in the Sloan School of Management where she
teaches courses in professional and managerial communication. In addition, she
teaches a doctoral-level course on teaching science and engineering in the university,
and an intercultural communication course within MIT’s Department of Foreign
Language and Literatures.

She is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Engineering Education,
MIT OpenCourseWare’s Assessment and Evaluation Advisory Board, and MIT’s Council
on Educational Technology. She has been a visiting scholar at Cape Peninsula University
of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa, and the Center for New Designs in Learning
and Scholarship, Georgetown University.

Dr. Breslow's research interests are in interdisciplinary education and the dissemination
of educational innovation. Her doctorate is in communication from New York University,
and her B.A. is in history from Indiana University.

Melanie Parker, Executive Director of the Global Education and Career Development
Center, Supervisor of Cambridge- MIT Partnership

Address: Building 12-170, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-253-7519
Email: mlparker@mit.edu
Weblink: http://web.mit.edu/career/www/aboutus/staff.html#p

Melanie Parker received her Master of Education from Mississippi State University and
her Bachelor of Sciences in Business Administration from the University of Maryland.
Prior to coming to MIT she served as the Executive Director of Career Services &
Experiential Learning at the University of Central Florida. She has worked in university
career services for nearly 20 years, including progressively responsible positions at
Mississippi State University and the University of Florida. Additional experiences include
human resources positions and corporate career development consulting.

Dick Yue, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Director, Singapore-MIT Alliance

Address: Room 5-321, MIT School of Engineering, 77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-253-6823
Email: yue@mit.edu
Weblink: http://mit.edu/yue/www/homepage.html - Link does not work

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Dr. Subra Suresh, Dean of the School of Engineering and the Ford Professor of
Engineering

Address: Room 1-206, MIT School of Engineering, 77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617- 253-3291
Email: ssuresh@mit.edu
Weblink: http://engineering.mit.edu/about/deans_office/subra_suresh.php

Subra Suresh is Dean of the School of Engineering and the Ford Professor of Engineering
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds joint faculty appointments in
Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Biological Engineering, and
Health Sciences and Technology. He began his tenure as Dean of Engineering in July
2007.
The former head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Suresh's
current research focuses on the mechanical responses of single biological cells and
molecules, and the implications of these responses for human health and diseases. His
prior and ongoing work has also led to seminal contributions in the area of nano- and
micro-scale mechanical properties of engineered materials. He is the author of over 210
research articles in international journals, co-editor of five books, and co-inventor on
fourteen U.S. and international patents. More than 100 students, post-doctoral
associates, and research scientists who trained in his group occupy prominent positions
in academe, industry, and government throughout the world. He has authored or co-
authored three books: Fatigue of Materials, Fundamentals of Functionally Graded
Materials, and Thin Film Materials.
He is the recipient of the 2007 European Materials Medal, the highest honor conferred
by the Federation of European Materials Societies, and the 2006 Acta Materialia Gold
Medal. In 2006, Technology Review magazine selected Suresh's work on
nanobiomechanics as one of the top 10 emerging technologies that "will have a
significant impact on business, medicine or culture."
Suresh is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering; the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences; the Indian National Academy of Engineering; the Academy of
Sciences of the Developing World, TWAS, Trieste, Italy; and the German Academy of
Sciences Leopoldina. He is also an honorary fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences,
Bangalore, and an honorary member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences. He has
been elected a fellow or honorary fellow by all major materials societies in the U.S. and
India, including the American Society for Materials International; The Minerals, Metals
and Materials Society; the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; the American

Ceramic Society; the Indian Institute of Metals; and the Materials Research Society of
India.
Suresh received his Bachelor of Technology degree in first class with distinction from the
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1977; his M.S. from Iowa State University in
1979; and his Sc.D. from MIT in 1981. After conducting post-doctoral research at the
University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, he joined the
faculty at Brown University in 1983. He came to MIT in 1993 as the R. P. Simmons
Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

Dean Steven R. Lerman, Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental
Engineering and Dean of Graduate Students

Address: Room 3-138, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-253-1957
Email: lerman@mit.edu
Weblink: http://web.mit.edu/odge/dean/biography.html

Steven R. Lerman received his SB in Civil Engineering in 1972 and his SM and PhD in
Transportation Systems in 1973 and 1975, all from MIT. In 1975, he joined the MIT
faculty as an assistant professor of civil engineering and currently holds the Class of
1922 Professorship in Civil and Environmental Engineering.

In addition to serving as MIT's Dean for Graduate Education, Professor Lerman directs
the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives, an interdepartmental research center
devoted to studying the application of computational and communication technologies
in education. He is also the acting co-director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance. This is
MIT's largest distance learning initiative, involving five graduate degree programs and
large scale, collaborative research with the National University of Singapore and
Nanyang Technological University. Before becoming acting director of this program in
2006, he served for four years as deputy director.

Professor Lerman chairs the Faculty Advisory Committee of the MIT OpenCourseWare
initiative and chaired the Interim Management Board during that program's startup
phase. He also chaired the Academic Media Productions Services Faculty Advisory Board
from the time that unit was created until it moved to the MIT Libraries in spring 2007.

He is co-principal investigator (with Professor Jesus del Alamo) of the iLabs project that
is developing open source software to enable the sharing of laboratory equipment
throughout the world. Initially funded under the Microsoft iCampus program, this
project now has funding from the Carnegie Corporation.

He won his department's teaching award twice, in 1977 and 2005, as well as a Graduate
Student Council Teaching Award, in 1978. Currently, he teaches an introductory subject
on computational methods for undergraduate and graduate students.

Professor Lerman was chair of the MIT Faculty in 2006-2007 and from 2000 to 2002,
serving as associate chair/chair elect during the two preceding years. Previously, he was
the director of the Intelligent Systems Lab and head of the Transportation Systems
Division in the Department of Civil Engineering.

From 1983 to 1988, Professor Lerman was the first director of MIT's Project Athena, a
campus-wide distributed system of advanced computer workstations that still serves as
the basis for campus computing at MIT.

Dean Daniel E. Hastings, Dean of Undergraduate Education

Address: Room 4-110, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-253-0906
Email: hastings@mit.edu
Weblink:http://esd.mit.edu/FACULTY_PAGES/HASTINGS/HASTINGS.HTM

Dr. Hastings, who earned a Ph.D. and an S.M, from MIT in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1980
and 1978 respectively, received a B.A. in Mathematics from Oxford University in England in 1976.
He joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1985, advancing to associate professor in
1988 and full professor in 1993. Dr. Hastings served ESD as Associate Director from July 2001 -
April, 003, Co-Director from May, 2003 - June, 2004, and Director from July 2004 - December
2005.

As Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems, Hastings has
taught courses and seminars in plasma physics, rocket propulsion, advanced space
power and propulsion systems, aerospace policy, technology and policy, and space
systems engineering.

Dr. Hastings served as chief scientist to the U.S. Air Force from 1997 to 1999. In that
role, he served as chief scientific adviser to the chief of staff and the secretary and
provided assessments on a wide range of scientific and technical issues affecting the Air
Force mission. He led several influential studies on where the Air Force should invest in
space, global energy projection, and options for a science and technology workforce for
the 21st century.

Dr. Hastings’ recent research has concentrated on issues of space systems and space
policy, and has also focused on issues related to spacecraft-environmental interactions,

space propulsion, space systems engineering, and space policy. He has published many
papers and a book in the field of spacecraft-environment interactions and several
papers in space propulsion and space systems. He has led several national studies on
government investment in space technology.

Dr. Hastings is a Fellow of the AIAA and a member of the International Academy of
Astronautics. He is serving as a member of the National Science Board, the Applied
Physics Lab Science and Technology Advisory Panel, as well as the chair of Air Force
Scientific Advisory Board. He is a member of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Advisory
Committee and is on the Board of Trustees of the Aerospace Corporation. He has served
on several national committees on issues in National Security Space. Dr. Hastings was
elected as a Fellow of INCOSE (the International Council on System Engineering) in June
2007.