Help Us Find a New MIT Media Lab Director | Hacker News Reader

Help Us Find a New MIT Media Lab Director

director.media.mit.edu

28 pointspx13 comments

Funny, 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_caree...

I assumed the same thing. I bet you read Wired magazine in the 90s too, right?

Of course! What impressionable, geeky teenager didn't? :)

Who was the old one? What happened to him or her?

http://www.media.mit.edu/about/organization

Frank Moss

More about him on

http://www.media.mit.edu/people/fmoss

pg: this could be a job for him

This 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.

Some 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. ;-)

pg has a PhD from Harvard.

Huh, 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.

Related, Negroponte does not have a PhD.

True, 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).

Sounds like James Cameron to me.

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