Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences

From Freepedia

The Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences (DEAS) is a unit of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University responsible for research, as well as undergraduate and graduate education in applied mathematics, computer science, engineering, and technology. The faculty of the division comprise approximately forty tenured professors, twenty untenured associate and assistant professors, and various lecturers. Some 363 undergraduates in Harvard College pursue concentrations or majors in the division. The division's faculty also supervise the instruction of 253 masters and doctoral candidates in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Last year, DEAS received $28 million in research grants from the federal government and private foundations.

History

Although DEAS was only formally created in 1950, engineering and applied science education at Harvard dates to the founding of the Lawrence Scientific School in 1847. Formed at the bequest of prominent industrialist, Abbott Lawrence, the Lawrence Scientific School received significant funding in 1891, from industrialist Gordon McKay. For the next decade and a half, the Scientific School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences existed as co-equal faculties (or schools) within Harvard. In 1906, however, the Harvard Corporation decided to abolish the Lawerence Scientic School and to incorporate its faculty, students, and degree programs into FAS as the "Graduate School of Engineering." By the 1930s, the school offered both undergraduate and graduate degrees and benefits from periodic grants from the Gordon McKay Bequest. In the 1930s and 1940s, Harvard University president James Bryant Conant sought to completely integrate the School of Engineering (and the McKay money) into FAS. In early 1949, the Corporation approved a plan to merge the faculty of Engineering into FAS as the "Division of Applied Sciences" (DAS). The name of the unit changed several times over the next few decades, before the current title, "Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences" in the 1990s.