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Math department head appointed new dean of science

Math department head appointed new dean of science

Professor Michael Sipser, the head of the math department since 2004, will serve as the new dean of the School of Science, MIT announced last week.

Sipser has served as interim dean since the previous dean of science, Marc Kastner, stepped down last December after being nominated to lead the Office of Science in the U.S. Department of Energy.

Sipser has been a member of CSAIL since 1979 and a member of the MIT faculty since 1980.

He is the author of the widely used textbook Introduction to the Theory of Computation. He has been the head of the math department since 2004.

In an email to the MIT community last Thursday, Provost Martin A. Schmidt PhD ’88 praised Sipser for his ability to seek facts when problem solving and “arrive at balanced solutions.”

Schmidt also wrote that Sipser was “instrumental in working with donors to raise the funds to renovate Building 2.”

Sipser said in an statement last week that “our community of faculty, students, and staff in the School of Science is extraordinary, and I’m honored to serve our people as dean.”

—Alexandra Delmore