Funny things can happen when email programs fill in the rest of a name for you after the first few letters. My advisor was trying to send an email to me and instead of getting Chuck "Eesley" he got the email for Charles M. Vest president of MIT from 1990 until December 2004. He chaired the President's Advisory Committee on the Redesign of the Space Station and has served as a member of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the Massachusetts Governor's Council on Economic Growth and Technology, and the National Research Council Board on Engineering Education. He chairs the U.S. Department of Energy Task Force on the Future of Science Programs and is vice chair of the Council on Competitiveness and immediate past chair of the Association of American Universities (AAU). He sits on the board of directors of both IBM and E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co.
Apparently my advisor gave him an update on our research and he's interested in seeing the various papers as
they are ready for circulation and/or comment! I also was surprised to see that Vest was born in Morgantown, W.Va., on Sept. 9, 1941. He earned his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from West Virginia University in 1963 and both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan in 1964 and 1967, respectively. Dr. Vest's research interests are in the thermal sciences and the engineering applications of lasers and coherent optics.
Friday turned out to be a good day as I got to meet and chat with Joe Hadzima, the current Chairman of the Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum, which my advisor co-founded. Joe is a really nice guy and there might be some interesting research to be done on what he is doing with the NSF and the Enterprise Forum to attempt to build "entrepreneurial ecosystems".