John Briscoe
Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Environmental Engineering and Health (joint with the Harvard School of Public Health)

An expert on water and economic development who most recently served as the World Bank’s senior water adviser and the country director for Brazil, John Briscoe has lived in his native South Africa as well as Bangladesh, Mozambique, India, and Brazil.

Briscoe’s cultural comfort has been his guide amid what he calls the “changing economic geography” of the world. However painful and disorienting the current financial crisis, he insists that the true mover and shaker of the planet has never been the markets. It is instead the ebb and flow of the oceans.

Yiling Chen
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

A veteran of the online giant Yahoo!, Yiling Chen’s research lies at the intersection of computer science and economics, encompassing algorithms, complexity, mechanism design, game theory, optimization, multi-agent systems, and machine learning.

She is interested in designing and analyzing social and organizational systems such as markets, information aggregation instruments, advertising mechanisms, and online communities, according to both computational and economic objectives.

Stephen Chong
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Stephen Chong's research aims to help programmers write trustworthy programs. He focuses on using programming language technologies (including type systems, dataflow analyses, and runtime mechanisms) to provide strong, practical, information security guarantees.

Prior to completing his doctoral work at Cornell, he was an Associate of RHE and Associates, in Sydney, Australia, working in financial services, and a Consultant at Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) in Wellington New Zealand, working in government.

David Clarke
Gordon McKay Professor of Materials Science

David Clarke pursues three primary areas of research: high temperature materials, including thermal barrier coatings; materials for electronics and MEMS devices; and electrical and piezoelectric properties of ceramics. The research includes the development and application of novel sensor for measuring stress and temperature with a focus on optical based methods.

Philippe Cluzel
Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Phillipe Cluzel seeks studies the behavior and bodily structure of cells and organisms by applying the principles of physics and engineering to biological systems.

He pioneered the macro-manipulation of individual molecules of DNA and examined the system governing migration of E. coli bacteria towards chemical attractants—a process known as chemotaxis—as a model for the study of other cellular signaling. Cluzel has also developed novel techniques to track single molecules, eavesdropping on the activity of individual living cells in real time.

Krzysztof Gajos
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

In July of 2009 Gajos joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor in Computer Science. His research interests are in human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence and applied machine learning.

The phrase "intelligent interactive systems" describes many of Gajos's interests: understanding how intelligent technologies can enable novel ways of interacting with computation and in the new challenges that human abilities, limitations and preferences create for machine learning algorithms embedded in interactive systems. In June 2008, he graduated from University of Washington and subsequently joined the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research for a one year post doc.

Evelyn Hu
Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering

Evelyn Hu's research focuses on high-resolution fabrication of compound semiconductor electronic and optoelectronic devices, candidate structures for the realization of quantum computation schemes, and on novel device structures formed through the heterogeneous integration of materials.

Recently her work has involved the interaction of quantum dots in high Q microdisk and photonic crystal cavities.

Daniel Needleman
Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and  Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology  (joint with Faculty of Arts and Sciences Center for Systems Biology

Daniel Needleman uses quantitative experimental techniques to study how the cooperative behaviors of molecules give rise to the architecture and dynamics of self-organizing sub-cellular structures.

His long-term goal is to use the knowledge of sub-cellular structures to quantitatively predict biological behaviors and to determine if there are general principles that govern these non-equilibrium steady-state systems.

Sharad Ramanathan
Assistant Professor of Systems Biology  (joint with Faculty of Arts and Sciences Center for Systems Biology)

Sharad Ramanathan’s research is directed towards answering two questions. How do cells and organisms process signals from their environment? How do the underlying molecular pathways evolve? To answer these questions he uses a combination of computational, theoretical and experimental tools.

Ramanathan’s experimental work has focused on specific pathways in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisae. These pathways are involved in responding to a variety of stimuli, including pheromones (in the mating process), glucose or nitrogen starvation (causing cells to invade the medium), and hyper- and hypo-osmolarity.