Venkatesh Narayanamurti

"Dick Tracy we've gone beyond," says Harvard's new dean of the division of engineering and applied sciences. Widely known as Venky, he is an expert in materials physics and teaches a course titled, somewhat dauntingly, "Experimental Condensed Matter: Ballistic Transport in Semiconductors, Nanostructures, and Tunneling Microscopy." "It's simple," he says with a friendly laugh. "A semiconductor acts under certain conditions as an insulator, like glass, and under certain conditions as a conductor, like copper. That makes it a switch." Transistors are switches for computer chips, and these have been shrinking, famously, with a commensurate doubling in computing power every 18 months. "About 10 years from now, transistors will be a thousandth the size of a human hair, and such things are called nanostructures." The future will see an increasing array of applications for such transistors in our daily lives, says the dean, former vice president of research at Sandia National Laboratories and director of solid-state electronics at Bell Labs (where he hired two physicists whose Nobel Prize-winning research was conducted, one wrote, "under Lord Venky's rule"). His recreational loves are running, squash, and his cottage on Cape Cod, where he relaxes by reading, catching up on physics, and listening to music. At Harvard, "the goal is to build a small but absolutely preeminent school of engineering in a liberal-arts environment." While he plots the division's future course, a vessel to house it goes up nearby, the gift of two of the division's most famous students: applied math concentrators Steve Ballmer '77 and Bill Gates '77.

Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs