Senior Investigators

Jamie Peraire is the H.N. Slater Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. His research interests include computational aerodynamics — he is also the director of the Aerospace Computational Design Lab — as well as simulation-based design and numerical analysis. His work has applications in the areas of computational compressible-fluid dynamics and other multidisciplinary problems in aeronautics. Several software products based on Peraire’s research — in particular, the FELISA suite of codes — are used throughout the aerospace industry.

Charles E. Leiserson is a professor of computer science and engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. His research centers on the theory of parallel computing, especially as it relates to engineering reality. He co-authored the first paper on systolic architectures. He invented the re-timing method of digital-circuit optimization and developed the algorithmic theory behind it. On leave from MIT at Thinking Machines Corporation, he designed and led the implementation of the network architecture for the Connection Machine Model CM-5 Supercomputer. This machine was the world’s most powerful supercomputer in the early 1990’s and it incorporated the“universal” fat-tree interconnection network he developed at MIT. Fat-trees are now the preferred interconnect strategy for Infiniband technology. He introduced the notion of cache-oblivious algorithms, which exploit the memory hierarchy near optimally while containing no tuning parameters for cache size or cache-line length. He developed the Cilk multi-threaded programming language and runtime system, which featured the first provably efficient work-stealing scheduler. He led the development of several Cilk-based parallel chess-playing programs, including Socrates and Cilkchess, which won numerous prizes in international competition. On leave from MIT as Director of System Architecture at Akamai Technologies, he led the engineering team that developed a worldwide content-distribution network with tens of thousands of Internet servers. He founded Cilk Arts, Inc., which developed the Cilk++ multi-core concurrency platform. Intel Corporation acquired Cilk Arts in 2009, and Cilk technology is available in many compilers today.

Heather J. Kulik is an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. Her work has been recognized by a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface (2012-2017), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2018), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2018), AAAS Marion Milligan Mason Award (2019-2020), NSF CAREER Award (2019), the Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research “Class of Influential Researchers”, the ACS COMP Division OpenEye Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty in Computational Chemistry, the JPCB Lectureship (ACS PHYS), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship (2020), MSDE Outstanding Early-Career Paper Award (2021), and a Sloan Fellowship (2021).

Asegun Henry is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT where he directs the Atomistic Simulation & Energy (ASE) Research Group. His primary research is in heat transfer, with an emphasis on understanding the science of energy transport, storage, and conversion at the atomic level, along with the development of new industrial scale energy technologies to mitigate climate change. Prof. Henry has made significant advances and contributions to several fields within energy and heat transfer, namely: solar fuels and thermochemistry, phonon transport in disordered materials, phonon transport at interfaces, and he has developed the highest temperature pump on record, which used an all-ceramic mechanical pump, to pump liquid metal above 1400°C. This technological breakthrough, which is now in the Guinness Book of World Records, has opened the door for new high temperature energy systems concepts, such as methane cracking for CO2 free hydrogen production, and a new grid level energy storage approach affectionately known as “Sun in a Box,” that is slated to be cheaper than pumped hydro.

Saman Amarasinghe leads the Commit compiler research group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, which focuses on programming languages and compilers that maximize application performance on modern computing platforms. He is a world leader in the field of high-performance domain-specific languages. Prof. Amarasinghe’s group developed the Halide, TACO, Simit, StreamIt, StreamJIT, PetaBricks, MILK, Cimple, and GraphIt domain-specific languages and compilers, all of which combine language design and sophisticated compilation techniques to deliver unprecedented performance for targeted application domains such as image processing, stream computations, and graph analytics. He also pioneered the application of machine learning for compiler optimizations, from Meta optimization in 2003 to OpenTuner extendable autotuner today. With Prof. Anant Agarwal, he co-led the Raw architecture project, which did pioneering work on scalable multicores.