New Dean Sees Ambitious Agenda for DEAS

Venkatesh Narayanamurti took up his duties as Dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences in mid-September. Narayanamurti came to Harvard from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he was dean of the college of engineering. He also has directed the solid state electronics research laboratory at AT&T Bell Laboratories and was vice president of research and exploratory technology at Sandia National Laboratories. An expert in solid state physics, Narayanamurti is Gordon McKay Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. One month into his appointment, the new dean spoke to the Gazette about Harvard's strengths, his interest in pairing academe with industry, the role of government in scientific research, and his hope that the 21st century will see a marriage of material and life sciences.

What do you hope to accomplish at Harvard?

I would like to build innovative centers with a critical mass of faculty bridging disciplines so as to have greater impact both within Harvard and externally. Right now the Division is a bit too small; we don't have quite enough faculty to have critical mass in certain areas. But even modest growth -- perhaps a dozen faculty members -- can make a huge difference. Then we can excel in areas where we build up that critical mass, consistent with Harvard's traditions of a broad education.

The future of engineering education and computer science is going to be much broader than in the past. That's what's happening in the global economy. The global information economy requires students who can span disciplines, who are adaptable, who are flexible. And so we want to frame the broader, more flexible engineering future. Harvard can excel at that. So I would like to use Harvard's exceptional record in undergraduate and graduate student education to really foster new paradigms of engineering education.

Have you thought about the ways the curriculum may have to change?

We need nonscientists to understand technology. It behooves us to be able to explain it in "their" terms, layman's terms. And the reverse may be true, that the engineers and the computer scientists might need to have an even broader education, because that appreciation is very important. I have not looked at the Harvard curriculum in any detail, so I'm no expert -- I've been here all of a few weeks -- but I do see these, broadly, as opportunities.

In the graduate arena, we will continue to foster interdisciplinary education and research, including exploring entirely new areas of collaboration with Harvard's professional schools, such as medicine and business.

Forging links among industry, government, and education was a specialty of yours at Santa Barbara. Is that a priority for you at Harvard?

Yes. We're in a large community, Boston-Cambridge. But after being here only for a few weeks [I see that] Harvard is a very important part of the community, so what Harvard does has a profound impact. We need to do it with care, but I think it behooves us to be connected at least to the technological community, which makes sense for engineering and the applied sciences. Most high-tech industry has to be closely tied to science and engineering, and vice versa, by its very nature.

The end of the Cold War has made a huge difference as to how engineering and applied sciences should operate. During the height of the cold war, military defense was the paramount concern. Military might is now replaced more strongly by economic might.

That doesn't mean we become slaves of industry. The role of the university still is the education of students and the creation of knowledge. But we need to prepare those students so that they can function in the global information economy. And of course we have to create the knowledge for the benefit of society. We can say we live in an ivory tower, but the fact of the matter is that we do rely a lot on the public for support.

What one should do is several-fold. One needs to make sure one has a strong dialogue with leading people in the world of business and technology.

Entrepreneurship is very important. Maybe the next Bill Gates, etc., will still come from Harvard, but instead of founding companies in Seattle, maybe some of them would stay right here.

If appropriate, I would be very comfortable teaming with M.I.T. I think teaming is a very important element of the future. Perhaps we can team with them and with the other educational institutions around us, and leverage that cooperation for the community. Again, some of this is already going on, but perhaps more can be done.

How does the government come into this?

There's always debate about whether government should be involved in industrial policy. I think that, in the early stages, government support is still very important to seed ideas.

Again, with the decline of the defense industry, we still as a nation have to think hard as to what are the long-term things we need to nurture. So I believe the proper role of government is what I like to call "precompetitive generic research," which might have industrial applications. If the research is precompetitive, there are far fewer problems in terms of intellectual property. Otherwise, who owns what becomes a very serious issue.

Hopefully this country will do that right. Otherwise there will be some other country that will get ahead of us.

Any predictions on that score?

I believe that the age of the American civilization is not yet over, and it is tied to the fact that we have always brought in fresh ideas. Within the global economy I think we probably have the best chance, simply because we are by far the most diverse society.

The second thing that I think made America special was that it was entrepreneurial, so it allowed all of these things to flower without too many constraints.

When people talk about diversity we don't realize how important the management of diversity, in its best sense -- of utilizing human talents to their fullest -- is. There is talent out there that you let blossom and flower and you bring together.

This country also attracted innovators, people who were willing to take risks. I, for instance, could have been much safer. I could have been a nice bureaucrat in India. But I took the risk to come to America, and I'm not the only one. That's what made America from day one.

America is not perfect, but it probably is the most forward-looking country. But we need to keep renewing ourselves. If you don't renew yourself you will decay.

What do you think is most critical for the Division in the near future?

For this Division, it is a time for renewal. Many faculty will be retiring, we have a new building coming. The real drawback we face is that we are still [at] sub-critical [mass] in some areas. Again, I would like the sum to be much greater than the individual parts, and you always need a few people, a handful, in any discipline, to make an impact.

Never forget that Harvard can, hopefully, always attract the very best talent, and so we always want to get that faculty -- be it in applied physics or computer science or engineering or whatever -- because you want to leave that option open to those people who will be the inventors and discoverers of the future. The important thing is that they don't grow completely in isolation, they are always connected. Especially for a division such as this -- applied sciences and technology and engineering -- you try to make this basic research blossom, but not when it is totally isolated.

Because of Harvard's intrinsic excellence, I hope we can always get the brightest students and the brightest faculty, which still is more important than anything else I do.

Are there any areas you need to recruit in faster than others?

We currently don't have critical mass in computer science, information technology, and systems engineering. Given their ever-increasing importance, it is clear they must grow. But I think even in the areas where Harvard has critical mass, like applied physics, there are a whole bunch of new areas, e.g., materials studies at the mesoscale (a region intermediate between atomistic and macroscopic realms) and so-called "soft materials," where physics is coming closer to biology.

The 21st century will see the age of biology and the age of understanding the human condition -- health care and all those areas. Physical and life sciences each have important roles to play in that future.

Physical sciences and engineering have a lot in common, because engineering is based on physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Life sciences grew more independently. The two cultures must begin to interact. Certain things that the physical scientists and engineers have done -- man-made, artificial -- have been superb. But nature did certain things very well, too -- such as self-assembly, how each one of us was made. And perhaps there is something for us to learn from life scientists and there is something for life scientists to learn from what physicists, mathematicians, and engineers have done.

That interplay will have to occur. There's a balance between the reductionist approach and the integrative approach in the understanding of complex systems. They need to come together.

The early part of the 21st century is probably still going to be dominated by communications and computing. In the Industrial Age we had steel, and the locomotives and the turbines came along. Now we have in the Information Age communications/computing superhighways just being formed. I don't know where exactly this will lead, but I see it as pervasive.

Computers have become so powerful, and with large databases, you can do analysis of very complex systems. Biocomputing, for example, is an emerging discipline in its own right. There are also new opportunities in materials science, where you can imagine synthesizing through self-assembly, making new things the way life scientists do.

We need people who will think creatively across boundaries. And engineering, putting things together, is therefore going to be extremely important in the future.