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Venkatesh "Venky" Narayanamurti

Benjamin Peirce Professor of Technology and Public Policy; Professor of Physics, Harvard; Director, Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program; Co-Principal Investigator, Energy Research, Development, Demonstration, and Deployment Policy Project

Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

Contact:
Telephone: 617-495-1464
Fax: 617-495-8963
Email: venky@seas.harvard.edu

Experience

"Venky" Narayanamurti is the Director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).  He is also the Benjamin Peirce Professor of Technology and Public Policy and a Professor of Physics at Harvard.  He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University in 1965.  He also has an Honorary Doctorate from Tohoku University. He spent much of his scientific career at Bell Laboratories where he became Director of Solid State Electronics Research in 1981.  From 1987–1992, he served as Vice President for Research at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At Sandia, he oversaw a research portfolio of $250 million which spanned its missions in defense, energy, environment, and economic competitiveness. From 1992–1998, he served as Richard Auhll Professor and Dean of Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). During his tenure there, the number of faculty elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in the UCSB College of Engineering grew from three to nineteen.  In 2005, through the generosity of an anonymous donor, an endowed chair in his name was established at UCSB.  From 1998–2008, he served as Dean of the Division and then School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.  At Harvard, he saw the renewal of Engineering and Applied Sciences through a greatly enlarged faculty and the creation in 2007 of the first new school in seventy years.  During his tenure as Dean, twenty-two endowed chairs were raised, research funds doubled to approximately $40m, and new linkages with industry were established.  During 2003–2006, he was concurrently Dean of Physical Sciences at Harvard.  Several enhancements to the physical infrastructure including a new 90,000 squarefoot Laboratory for Interface Science and Engineering were undertaken. Narayanamurti has published widely in the areas of low temperature physics, superconductivity, semiconductor physics, electronics, and photonics.  He is the author or co-author of more than two hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications.

Narayanamurti is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.  He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the IEEE, and the Indian Academy of Sciences. Over the years he has served on numerous advisory boards of the federal government, research universities, national laboratories, and industry.  This service has included Chair of the DOE's Inertial Confinement Fusion Advisory Committee, Chair of the Committee of Visitors of NSF's Division of Materials Research, Chair of the NRC Panel on the Future of Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, member of the President's Council for the UC Managed National Laboratories, and member of the Governing Board of Brookhaven National Laboratory.  He currently serves on the Engineering Dean's Councils of Cornell and Brown Universities, the Governing Board of the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, Sandia National Laboratories, the Public Policy Committee of the Engineering Dean's Council, the Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) of the National Academy of Sciences, as Chair of the NSF Panel on Future Light Source Facilities, and as Chair Elect of the APS Panel on Public Affairs.  In addition to his duties as Professor, Narayanamurti lectures widely on solid state, computer, and communication technologies, and on the management of science, technology, and public policy.

Administrative Coordinator: Karin Vander Schaaf
Tel: 617-496-5584; Email: karin_vander_schaaf@harvard.edu

Photo by Eliza Grinnell