IITian named director of MIT's largest interdisciplinary lab

An IIT Chennai and Stanford University alumnus, Agarwal will assume his new role on July 1.

A professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Agarwal succeeds Victor Zue, who served four years as CSAIL’s director.

The key appointment comes days after MIT named another Indian-origin professor Anantha Chandrakasan to lead the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the largest academic department in the institute.

Chandrakasan is Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT and will also be assuming his new role on July 1.

School of Engineering Dean Ian Waitz said he looked forward to Agarwal's "vision and enthusiasm as he takes on this important leadership role."

Agarwal is currently the leader of the Carbon Research Group at CSAIL, which is dedicated to researching and developing operating systems and  architectures for multicore and cloud computing.

Currently, he leads Project Angstrom, a multidisciplinary research endeavour uniting scientists from top universities and industry collaborators in an effort to develop a new multicore system.

Agarwal is a founder and chief technology officer of Tilera Corporation, where the Tile multicore processor was created.

CSAIL is MIT’s largest interdepartmental laboratory, with 900 members and more than 100 principal investigators coming from eight departments.

It includes approximately 50 research groups organised into three focus areas of artificial intelligence, systems and theory.

The research groups are supported by grants from US government agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation among others.