New Dean to Fuel Harvard Engineering School Growth with $400-Million Donor Infusion
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., has named Francis J. "Frank" Doyle as dean of its John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), effective in July. He had been associate dean for research at the University of California, Santa Barbara College of Engineering, launching a major push into bioengineering, according to Harvard.
Doyle will lead new growth for the school, which was renamed for Paulson last month, following the billionaire hedge-fund manager's $400-million bequest—the largest in university history. A 1980 Harvard business school graduate, he founded Paulson & Co., a hedge fund that manages $19.5 billion in individual and pension fund investments, says The New York Times.
According to Harvard officials, Paulson donated to SEAS as a university "priority." Harvard says Paulson's gift "comes at a time of great opportunity for SEAS," which has been a separate school since 2007 and had 832 undergrads and 439 graduate students as of last year in six concentrations, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and environmental sciences and engineering. The school will expand into Harvard's new Allston campus in Boston, which now is under construction and will include its business school and Innovation Lab. "In Allston, SEAS will be at the center of a community of entrepreneurs and innovators in an emerging research enterprise zone," says the university. Venkatesh Narayanamurti, who led SEAS from 1998 to 2008, said the donation "will put [Harvard] engineering on the map." SEAS and Harvard's Graduate School of Design plan to launch a joint master's degree in engineering design.
In a June 17 interview with the Harvard Gazette, Doyle said that successful engineering schools "will be the ones that break out of the mold of traditional siloed departments." He said SEAS "has gone to the even further extreme of not having departments at all. I think that has to be the future of engineering education and engineering research."
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