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Help Us Find a New MIT Media Lab Director
- gsivil 16y agopg: this could be a job for him
- gsivil 16y agoThis is the job description: manage a highly creative, unconventional, and extremely diverse research organization; set strategic directions; raise support from corporations, governments, and philanthropic organizations; and serve as the leading public voice for the Media Lab and its vision.
- _delirium 16y agoSome of it fits, but the Media Lab also wants cred in academia, and there's already some feeling that it's a little too commercialized/PR-based. Hiring someone from Silicon Valley angel-investing culture with no experience in research is not likely to push that perception in the right direction. A director not from the research world and without a PhD would also find it harder to get the professors and researchers in the lab to follow his direction. Their main problem is that they really want Negroponte to run it again. ;-)
- frisco 16y agopg has a PhD from Harvard.
- _delirium 16y agoHuh, somehow I had completely missed that. I think that would probably still not be enough, though, since he hasn't been involved in research culture (either in academia or at a research lab like IBM's or Microsoft's) for a long time. But it seems unlikely to matter either way, since my guess is that "leave YC to direct an academic research lab full-time" isn't high on Graham's list of priorities.
- maxawaytoolong 16y agoRelated, Negroponte does not have a PhD.
- _delirium 16y agoTrue, but he was a professor and/or academic researcher for about 20 years before founding the Media Lab. Partly it's because he was originally in architecture, and art/design fields didn't used to insist on professors having PhDs as strongly as they now do (masters or MFA used to be sufficient, and MFAs sometimes still are).
- MurkyPast 16y agoSounds like James Cameron to me.
- naz 16y agoWho was the old one? What happened to him or her?
- gsivil 16y agohttp://www.media.mit.edu/about/organization http://www.media.mit.edu/about/organization Frank Moss More about him on http://www.media.mit.edu/people/fmoss http://www.media.mit.edu/people/fmoss
- aaronbrethorst 16y agoFunny, I'd just been assuming that Nicholas Negroponte was still in charge there. Turns out he stepped down 10 years ago[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Negroponte#Later_career http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Negroponte#Later_caree...
- mpk 16y agoI assumed the same thing. I bet you read Wired magazine in the 90s too, right?
- aaronbrethorst 16y agoOf course! What impressionable, geeky teenager didn't? :)