Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
The Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is the engineering school within Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). It offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering and applied sciences (though its undergraduates are officially enrolled in Harvard College). Previously the Lawrence Scientific School and then the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the School assumed its current structure in 2007. Francis J. Doyle III has been the School's dean since 2015.

In 2020 and 2021, SEAS will expand into the new Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) in Allston, across the Charles River from the main campus of Harvard. The SEC will be adjacent to the Enterprise Research Campus in synergy with Harvard Business School and Harvard Innovation Labs.

Recent investments have enlarged the School's faculty and upgraded its facilities. In 2019, Harvard was ranked third worldwide for Engineering and Technology by Times Higher Education. The School has produced numerous research discoveries and many distinguished alumni.

History

The formation of the Lawrence Scientific School in 1847 marked Harvard's first major effort to provide a formal, advanced education in science and engineering.

The school was named for Massachusetts industrialist and entrepreneur Abbott Lawrence, who donated $50,000 (a then-unprecedented sum) to create the institution. While he did not attend Harvard, he had a long personal history with key faculty members such as Louis Agassiz and understood the value of science and engineering. In the letter that accompanied his gift, Lawrence explained his rationale for forming a school:

James Emmanuel Jr. was the first dean and the early School hosted astronomers, architects, naturalists, engineers, mathematicians, and even philosophers.

The School's initial success did not escape the notice of other institutions, leading William Greenleaf Eliot, president of Eliot Seminary (later renamed Washington University) to declare in 1854:

By the late 19th century, the School faced increasing competition from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was constrained by the uncertain views about its role and status by the long-serving Harvard President Charles William Eliot. Eliot was involved in at least five unsuccessful attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. As a result of such uncertainty, the Lawrence Scientific School became less of an independent entity, losing its influence and students to other parts of College and University.

In 1891, industrialist Gordon McKay designated the Lawrence Scientific School his beneficiary. In 1906, before the first payment from his bequest, Lawrence's scientific and engineering programs were incorporated into Harvard College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The School ceased to exist as an independent entity. Today, McKay's gift supports over 40 endowed professorships.

In 1914, a merger of MIT and Harvard's Applied Science departments was formally announced
and was to begin "when the Institute will occupy its splendid new buildings in Cambridge." However, in 1917, the merger with MIT was canceled due to a decision by the State Judicial Court, so Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell moved to establish the Harvard Engineering School independently instead.

In 1934, the School began offering graduate-level and professional programs in engineering. During World War II, Harvard participated in the V-12 Navy College Training Program to provide training for commissioned officers. In 1942, the undergraduate Department of Engineering Sciences changed to the Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Physics to reflect an increased emphasis on applied physics. Harvard President James Bryant Conant created what was known as "Conant's Arsenal," a research hub for defense-related engineering projects including radar jamming, night vision, aerial photography, sonar, explosives, napalm, and atomic bomb research. One notable project from this era was the Harvard Mark I computer; one of the first programs to run on the Mark I was initiated on March 29, 1944, by John von Neumann, who worked on the Manhattan Project at the time, and needed to determine whether implosion was a viable choice to detonate the atomic bomb that would be used a year later. The Mark I also computed and printed mathematical tables, which had been the initial goal of British inventor Charles Babbage for his "analytical engine."

By 1945, Harvard income from government contracts was $33.5 million, the third highest among U.S. universities. Between 1946 and 1949, the Graduate School of Engineering merged its faculty with the Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Physics into the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences within the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In 2007, the Harvard Corporation and Overseers voted for the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences to change its name to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). In 2015, Francis J. Doyle III, former director of the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, was appointed dean. That year, the school was also renamed the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences following a $400 million gift by Harvard Business School alumnus John A. Paulson.

Academic overview
Undergraduates can pursue programs in computer science (AB and as a secondary field), engineering sciences (AB and SB), biomedical engineering (AB), electrical engineering (SB), environmental science and engineering (AB), mechanical engineering (SB), and applied mathematics (AB and as a secondary field). SB options for environmental science and engineering as well as biomedical engineering are also available through the engineering sciences program; ABET accreditation is offered for all of the traditional engineering disciplines. Prospective undergraduates must apply to Harvard College (Harvard's undergraduate college encompassing all concentrations): once enrolled, Harvard College students may declare a SEAS concentration in their sophomore year.

At the graduate level, the School offers master's and PhD degrees in areas including applied mathematics, applied physics, bioengineering, data science, chemical engineering, computational science and engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, design engineering, applied computation, environmental science and engineering, as well as materials science and mechanical engineering. In addition, graduate students may pursue collaborative options such as Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (with Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology) and Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology (with Harvard Medical School).

As of January 2020, the School had 148 faculty members. The faculty has particularly close ties (including joint appointments) with the FAS departments of Physics, Earth and Planetary Science, as well as Chemistry and Chemical Biology. The campus provides  of interconnected labs, classrooms, clusters, and offices in six buildings. In 2020 and 2021, SEAS is expected to expand into the new Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) in Allston, across the Charles River from Harvard's main location in Cambridge. The SEC will be adjacent to the Enterprise Research Campus in synergy with Harvard Business School and Harvard Innovation Labs to encourage technology- and life science-focused startups as well as collaborations with mature companies.

Areas of significant research focus include applied mathematics, applied physics, bioengineering, geophysics, computer science, electrical engineering, artificial intelligence, mechanical engineering, and computational neuroscience.

Research highlights

Early 20th century
1919 – George Washington Pierce (PhD, 1900), Rumford Professor of Physics and director of Harvard's Cruft High-Tension Electrical Laboratory invented an oscillator that enabled a given radio station to stay "fixed" at a proper frequency and allowed multiple telephone calls to occur over a single line.
1938 – A cyclotron was constructed at the Graduate School of Engineering's Gordon McKay Engineering Laboratory  to support research in biology and medicine as well as physics. It was projected to be the world's largest such facility. In 1942, it was sent to Los Alamos for work on the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb.
1944 – Howard Aiken '37 (PhD) developed the Mark I series of computers, the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the U.S. Around the same time, a new generation of technically trained students began to share their knowledge well beyond Harvard's campus. Alumnus and donor Allen E. Puckett SB '39, SM '41 created an endowed professorship at SEAS, went on to define modern aerodynamics, served as CEO of Hughes Aircraft Company, and won the National Medal of Honor in Technology.
1952 – Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), the scientific foundation for MRI (used in modern medical imaging systems), was pioneered by Nicolaas Bloembergen, Edward Purcell, and Robert Pound. Purcell won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery.

1995 to 2006
Stopping light – Lene Hau and her colleagues created a new form of matter, a Bose-Einstein Condensate, to slow light to 17 meters per second and later to bring a light beam to a complete stop, then restart it again.
Unbreakable hyper-encryption – Michael O. Rabin embedded messages in rapidly moving streams of random digital bits in ways that cannot be decoded, even with unlimited computing power.
Black silicon – Eric Mazur's group created a new material that efficiently traps light and has potential use in solar cells, global warming sensors and ultra-thin television screens.
The mathematics of nature – L. Mahadevan and colleagues discovered how the Venus flytrap snaps up its prey in a mere tenth of a second by actively shifting the curved shape of its mouth-like leaves.
Atmospheric modeling – Loretta J. Mickley, Dan Jacob and colleagues found that the frequency of cold fronts bringing cool, clear air out of Canada during the summer months declined by about 20 percent. These cold fronts are responsible for breaking up the hot, stagnant air that builds up regularly in summer, generating high levels of ground level ozone pollution.
High speed nanowire circuits – Donhee Ham and Charles Lieber made robust circuits from minuscule nanowires that align themselves on a chip of glass during low-temperature fabrication, creating rudimentary electronic devices that offer performance without high-temperature production or high-priced silicon.
Double emulsions – A new microfluidics-based device made by David A. Weitz and colleagues at Harvard University and Unilever makes precisely controlled double emulsions in a single step. Double emulsions, or droplets inside droplets, could be useful for encapsulating products such as drugs, cosmetics, or food additives.

2007 and beyond
Applied physicist Lene Hau caused a light pulse disappeared from one cold cloud then was retrieved from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light.
A research team led by Mike Aziz and Earth and Planetary Sciences' Kurt House invented an engineered weathering process that might mitigate climate change.
Bioengineers including David Edwards collaborated with public health researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to develop a novel spray-drying method for delivering a tuberculosis vaccine that could help prevent the related spread of HIV/AIDS in the developing world.
Working with a team of Dutch researchers and software developers, SEAS computer scientists used a novel peer-to-peer video sharing application to explore a model for e-commerce that uses bandwidth as a global currency.
Rob Wood's team launched a robotic fly that could be used in everything from surveillance to chemical sensing.
MIT's Technology Review named the creation of light-focusing optical antennas (that could lead to DVDs that hold hundreds of movies) as one of their Top 10 emerging technologies for 2007.
Kit Parker's lab found that an elastic film coated with a single layer of cardiac muscle cells can semi-autonomously engage in lifelike gripping, pumping, walking and swimming.
Nan Sun and Donhee Ham built what may be the smallest complete nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) system to date in a  package.
Engineers and applied physicists demonstrated the first room-temperature electrically pumped semiconductor laser source of terahertz (THz) radiation, also known as T-rays. 
A team composed of Harvard students and alumni was among the winners of the World Bank's Lighting Africa 2008 Development Marketplace competition, held in Accra, Ghana. The innovation, microbial fuel cell-based lighting systems suitable for Sub-Saharan Africa, netted the group a $200,000 prize.
In collaboration with SiEnergy Systems, materials scientists at SEAS have demonstrated the first macro-scale thin-film solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC).
An interdisciplinary research effort investigated digitized text corpuses containing about 4% of all books ever printed in English, between 1800 and 2000. It was co-founded and co-directed by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, whose prototype was instrumental in creating Google Ngram Viewer.

Notable alumni

Howard H. Aiken (AM '37, PhD '39) - computer scientist and designer of the Harvard Mark I
 Hardy Cross (MCE '11) - American structural engineer and developer of the moment distribution method for structural analysis of statically indeterminate structures
Howard Wilson Emmons (PhD '38) -  mechanical engineer considered "the father of modern fire science" for his contribution to the understanding of flame propagation and fire dynamics, helped design the first supersonic wind tunnel, identified a signature of the transition to turbulence in boundary layer flows (now known as "Emmons spots"), and was the first to observe compressor stall in a gas turbine compressor
 Simon Newcomb (SB 1858) - Rear Admiral in the United States Navy and a leader in mathematical astronomy
 Charles Sanders Peirce (SB 1862) -  known as the "father of pragmatism"
Trip Adler (AB '06) - CEO and co-founder of digital library and document sharing platform Scribd
Robert Berger (PhD '65) - invented the first aperiodic tiling
Fred Brooks (PhD '56) - Turing Award winner, managed the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package, and wrote about the process in the well-regarded book The Mythical Man-Month
Don Coppersmith (SM '75, PhD '77) - developed Coppersmith-Winograd algorithm for rapid matrix multiplication
 Danny Cohen (PhD '69) - internet pioneer, developed the first real-time visual flight simulator and the Cohen-Sutherland line clipping algorithm
 E. Allen Emerson (PhD '81) - Turing Award winner for developing model checking
John Fawcett (AB '99) - entrepreneur and co-founder of hedge fund software companies Tamale Software and Quantopian
Danielle Feinberg (AB '96) - cinematographer and Director of Photography for Lighting at Pixar Animation Studios
Shih Choon Fong (PhD '73) - founding president of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
 Paul Graham (SM '88, PhD '90) - Y Combinator cofounder, introduced the Blub paradox
Martha Crawford Heitzmann (PhD '97) - former head of research at French nuclear power conglomerate Areva, senior vice president of research at L'Oréal
Tony Hsieh (AB '95) - internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist, CEO of online shoe and clothing shop Zappos
 Marco Iansiti (AB '83, PhD '88) - microelectronics engineer and Harvard Business School professor
Kenneth E. Iverson (PhD '54) - Turing Award winner for developing the APL programming language
Richard M. Karp (AB '55, PhD '59) - Turing Award winner for contributions to the theory of NP-completeness
Iris Mack (PhD '86) - applied mathematician in quantitative finance, MIT professor, and author
Marvin Minsky (AB '50) - Turing Award winner for co-founding the field of artificial intelligence
Robert Tappan Morris (AB '87, SM '93, PhD '99) - creator of the Morris Worm, the first computer worm on the internet and first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, co-founded Y-Combinator, professor at MIT
Dennis Ritchie (AB '63, PhD '68) - Turing Award winner, created the C programming language and Unix operating system
 Don Ross (PhD '53) - recipient of the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award, made important developments in reduction of submarine noise
Donald Rubin (SM '66, PhD '70) - statistician known for the Rubin Causal Model 
Steven Salzberg (PhD '89) - computational biologist who made significant contributions to gene finding and sequence alignment bioinformatics algorithms, notably GLIMMER, MUMmer, and Bowtie
Alfred Spector (AB '76) - co-founder of Transarc, former vice president of research at Google, and CTO of Two Sigma Investments
 Richard Stallman (AB '74) - founder of the Free Software Foundation
 Guy L. Steele Jr. (AB '75) - made significant contributions to the design and documentation of several programming languages
Marius Vassiliou (AB '78) - computational physicist known for introducing Rokhlin's fast multipole method to computational electromagnetics
An Wang (PhD '48) - invented magnetic core memory
Stephanie Wilson (SB '88) - NASA astronaut
Jane Willis (AB '91, JD '94) - member of the MIT Blackjack Team
Tai Tsun Wu (SM '54, PhD '56) - physicist known for significant contributions in high-energy nuclear physics and statistical mechanics
Harold Zirin (SB '50, PhD '53) - astrophysicist known as "Captain Corona"

See also
Engineering
Glossary of engineering

References

External links
SEAS homepage
"Engineering the Harvard Engineer" (IEEE Spectrum, April 2008)
"Harvard Turns a Corner" (ASEE's PRISM, February 2008)
SEAS Launch and Celebration Archive
SEAS Q&A
Proposal of the name change
FAS (Faculty of Arts and Sciences) speech on the future of engineering

Engineering schools and colleges in the United States
Engineering universities and colleges in Massachusetts
Educational institutions established in 1847
Engineering
Universities and colleges in Cambridge, Massachusetts
University subdivisions in Massachusetts
1847 establishments in Massachusetts