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In 2026, MIT granted tenure to 10 faculty members across the School of Engineering. This year’s tenured engineers hold appointments in the departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) — which reports jointly to the School of Engineering and MIT Schwarzman College of Computing — and Mechanical Engineering, as well as within the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES).
“I’m delighted to congratulate the 10 newest tenured faculty members in the School of Engineering. This major career milestone reflects not only their impact and excellence in research, but their deep commitment to education and mentoring the next generation of engineers. I am so excited to see what new developments, innovations, and technologies will come next from this incredibly accomplished group,” says Paula T. Hammond ’84, PhD ’93, dean of engineering, Institute Professor, and professor of chemical engineering.
This year’s newly tenured engineering faculty include the following:
Jacob Andreas is an associate professor in EECS and is affiliated with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His work is in natural language processing, and more broadly in AI. He aims to understand the computational foundations of language learning, and to build intelligent systems that can learn from human guidance.
Zachary Cordero is the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the associate director of the MIT Gas Turbine Laboratory. His research seeks to enable frontier aviation and space platforms through advanced materials, manufacturing, and structures, with a particular focus on high-temperature systems.
Christina Delimitrou is the KDD Career Development Professor in Communications and Technology and an associate professor in EECS. She is also affiliated with CSAIL. Her research sits at the intersection of computer architecture and computer systems; specifically, she is one of the first systems researchers to apply machine learning techniques to design and management problems in the cloud.
Sili Deng is the Doherty Career Development Professor in Ocean Utilization and an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her group develops scientific machine learning and experimental approaches to understand, predict, and engineer chemically reacting systems for sustainable energy, advanced materials manufacturing, and climate-resilient technologies.
David Des Marais is the Amgen Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He leads the Des Marais Lab, whose primary focus of research is to understand the mechanisms of plant-environment interaction, using tools from molecular, quantitative, and population genetics to identify the physiological basis of plant response to environmental cues.
Carmen Guerra-Garcia is the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the director of the Aerospace Plasma Group. Her work lies at the intersection of aerospace engineering, low-temperature plasma technologies, and gas discharge physics. It addresses two aviation challenges — reducing emissions, and ensuring safety of next-generation aircraft — through three interconnected thrusts: advancing the fundamental science of electrical discharges in flowing gases and nonuniform media, applying that science to plasma-assisted combustion and chemical conversion, and developing physics-based approaches to lightning protection.
Laura Lewis is the Athinoula A. Martinos Associate Professor in EECS and IMES. Her research aims to develop methods to analyze and interpret multi-modal neuroimaging data in order to enable measurement of previously undetectable aspects of brain function. She has a particular interest in fast fMRI, EEG, and PET, and is applying those methods to study sleep.
Tami Lieberman is the Hermann L. F. von Helmholtz Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and IMES. She leads the Lieberman Lab, which seeks to understand how ecology and evolution shape the personalized communities of the human microbiome, and the role of this personalization on human health.
Kevin O’Brien is an associate professor in EECS and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He leads the Quantum Coherent Electronics Group. His research efforts focus on developing tools, techniques, and devices to enhance the measurement of quantum systems, most notably superconducting quantum computers.
Wim van Rees is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Leonardo Career Development Professor in Engineering. His research advances high-order, high-fidelity numerical methods for efficiently simulating interactions between fluid flows and moving or deforming bodies, with methodologies spanning applications from wake vortex dynamics to bio-inspired propulsion and morphing structures.
