WPI Research is the research magazine of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It contains news and features about graduate research in the arts and sciences, business, and engineering, along with notes about new grants, books, and faculty achievements.
Issue link: http://wpiresearch.epubxp.com/i/229254
> M E SSAGE FRO M THE O FFI CE O F THE PROVOS T GO, TEAM! The great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden knew something about building a winning team. His Bruins won 10 NCAA national championships in the 12 years between 1963 and 1975, a feat as yet unduplicated. Wooden was aware that to be successful as a coach you have to dedicate yourself to recruiting highly talented players. But he also believed that talent can take you only so far. To get the rest of the way, and build a winning program that endures, you must create an environment where talented people know they will thrive. As you'll read in the story beginning on page 24, WPI has, in recent years, made an extraordinary investment in talent, recruiting more than 90 new tenured and tenure-track faculty members since 2006 (or close to 30 percent of our current full-time faculty). These are men and women with impressive academic and scholarly credentials — CAREER Awards, notable postdoctoral and academic appointments, well-established and well-funded research programs, and distinguished honors. Landing these rising stars, who were also being wooed by other top universities, often required a full-court press, complete with negotiations over start-up packages, laboratory space, and so on. While it is true that our ability to offer these amenities can make a big difference when recruiting new talent, it is the environment new faculty members fnd when they arrive and the character of our scholarly community that ultimately convinces them to stay on and achieve their career aspirations at WPI. Among the most important qualities of that community are the ease with which research collaborations can cross disciplinary boundaries and the importance our researchers place on doing work that not only expands our understanding of the universe, but helps create a better, safer, healthier, and more sustainable world. Winning takes talent; to repeat takes character. — John Wooden This issue of Research at Worcester Polytechnic Institute is bristling with examples of what happens when smart, accomplished, and passionate educators and researchers join this dynamic community. Take, for example, Luis Vidali and Erkan Tüzel (page 30). Members of the new faculty class of 2009, they quickly developed a productive research partnership that blends their complementary disciplines of biology (Vidali) and physics (Tüzel). Studying the inner machinery of the cell through laboratory work and computer modeling, they have won wide acclaim and attracted signifcant funding, including an NSF CAREER Award (Vidali) and an NIH R01 grant (Tüzel). Then there is our growing strength in cybersecurity research and education, which has been bolstered over the last two years through four strategic hires: Thomas Eisenbarth and Lifeng Lai in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Craig Shue and Krishna Venkatasubramanian in Computer Science (you'll meet them in a story starting on page 36). Through collaborations with each other, and with faculty in multiple disciplines across campus, they are establishing WPI as a center for high-impact work in this emerging feld, bringing in new awards, forging collaborations with industry and government, and producing scholarship that is earning recognition from their peers. We could point to many other success stories that have resulted from our unprecedented investment in new faculty talent. They include remarkable tales of individual achievement, of course. But just as important are the countless products of wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary faculty collaborations. For it may just be that the most important and satisfying outcome of our recent success in faculty recruiting is that we have been able to fnd so many people who understand the rewards and the power of working together with like-minded colleagues on important and meaningful research. We think it is safe to say they would wholeheartedly agree with John Wooden, who once said that "the main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team." Michael B. Manning, PhD Vice Provost for Research 2 > wpi.edu/+research Eric W. Overström, PhD Provost and Senior Vice President