About the Committee

Each year the James R. Killian, Jr., Faculty Achievement Award Selection Committee chooses one member of the MIT faculty to be the Killian Award Lecturer for the following academic year. The Award was established in the spring of 1971 as a permanent tribute to Dr. James R. Killian, Jr., President of the Institute from 1948 to 1959 and Chairman of the MIT Corporation from 1959 to 1971. Considered a lifetime achievement award, the objectives of the Award are to recognize extraordinary professional accomplishments by full-time members of the MIT faculty and to communicate these accomplishments to members of the MIT community. The recipient of the Killian Award holds the title of Killian Award Lecturer for one academic year and during the course of this year presents one or more lectures to the MIT community on his or her own professional activities. Killian Award recipients have come from all five of MIT’s Schools. Examples from recent years include John Joannopoulos (2024-25; Science/Physics); Paula Hammond (2023-24; Engineering/Chemical Engineering); Peter Shor (2022-23; Science/Math), Robert Merton (2021-22; MIT Sloan), Susan Solomon (2020-21; Science/EAPS), and Susan Silbey (2019-20; SHASS/Anthropology, MIT Sloan).

The Selection Committee consists of five faculty members, one from each School: four are elected by vote of the Faculty from a slate prepared by the Committee on Nominations, and the chair is appointed by the Chair of the Faculty from the previous year’s elected members.

The 2024-2025 Call for Nominations will be sent to all faculty on January 6, 2025. The nomination process now involves two stages, the first of which is much less time-consuming than putting together a full nomination packet. The components needed for the first stage (a preliminary nomination) are:

(1) A 500-word rationale for nominating a particular faculty member
(2) The faculty member’s CV

The committee will review the preliminary nominations and, for the second stage, the committee will invite a subset of nominators to submit full nomination packets, details to be provided at that time.

Please note that self-nominations are not accepted.

Deadline for 2024-2025 Preliminary NominationsJanuary 27, 2025, by email to Dr. Tami Kaplan. Please direct questions to Dr. Kaplan.