Stephen Senturia

Stephen D. Senturia joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science immediately after completing his education (Harvard, B.A. in Physics, summa cum laude, 1961, and MIT, Ph.D. in Physics, 1966), initially as Research Scientist, then as Assistant Professor in 1967, with subsequent promotions up the ranks. From 1992 to 2002, he held the Barton L. Weller Chair in Electrical Engineering. He has been involved in microsensor and MEMS research since the early 1970’s. For a number of years, his research focused on developing material-property measurement methods and CAD tools for MEMS. The work on MEMCAD led to the spin-out from his group of the two companies that lead this commercial field: IntelliSense, and Coventor. He was a co-founding Editor, and later Senior Editor, of the ASME/IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, and he has been active in the leadership of the IEEE International Conference on Solid-State Sensors and Actuators, serving as Technical Program Chair in 1997 and as Local Arrangements Chair for the 2003 meeting in Boston. In 2000, he published Microsystem Design, a graduate textbook in MEMS modeling and design. Most recently, he was part of the team developing the Polychromator. After retiring from MIT in 2002, Dr. Senturia has served as Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Polychromix, Inc., Wilmington, MA, a company he founded to adapt the Polychromator technology for commercial use. Honor and professional societies include the National Academy of Engineering, the IEEE (Fellow), Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi. In addition to serving on several academic and industrial Advisory Boards, Dr. Senturia is President of the Transducer Research Foundation, a non-profit organization that sponsors conferences in the MEMS fields and uses the proceeds to support student travel grants.