Faculty teaching and research
MIT’s world-class faculty—which includes seven Nobel laureates, roughly 450 members of one or more of the national academies, and countless winners of national teaching awards—has made a habit of changing the world.
MIT must uphold the tradition of brilliant work produced by our faculty—in the laboratory, in the lecture hall, and in the seminar room. From professorships—intended to recruit and retain accomplished scholars, and in some cases allow mid-career explorations—to support for innovative new ideas and projects: every kind of funding for faculty strengthens the foundations of the Institute, and paves the way for continued innovations that will transform our world.
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The $100,000 notion
Prof. Samuel Ting
Pursuing new areas of education and research before the rest of the
world realizes their value is at the heart of Institute philosophy. Indeed,
our faculty—and our students—have made a habit of changing the world
in precisely this way.
So that their most promising ideas might have a chance to be explored,
and so that the worthiest ideas among them might become reality, MIT
has traditionally made support for its faculty one of its top funding
priorities.
The rewards can be huge. Case in point:
In September 1994, an MIT physics professor walked into his dean’s
office with a research idea so “out there”—literally
and figuratively—that no standard funding organization would
gamble on it. On the other side of the desk, the dean of science listened
as Dr. Samuel Ting described his plan for a particle physics experiment
that would shed light on how the universe was formed. The notion was
risky and expensive. The experiment had to be performed outside of our
atmosphere—someday, Ting hoped, from the International Space
Station.
It seemed a very worthy idea. But he needed $100,000 to get it off
the ground.
Luckily for the world, then Dean of Science Robert Birgeneau was able
to fund Sam Ting’s “$100,000 notion.” And with that
seed money, Ting subsequently launched the alphamagnetic spectrometer
(AMS) project—now the premier science experiment on the International
Space Station. The $100 million multi-national collaboration he now heads
stands poised to identify antimatter particles and dark matter in space.*
*Today, Samuel Ting is the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Physics
at MIT.
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