Kit Parker and Todd Zickler granted tenure

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - May 13, 2011- Kevin Kit Parker and Todd Zickler, both faculty members at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), have been granted tenure, effective, July 1, 2011.

Kevin Kit Parker

Parker, most recently the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Applied Science and Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering is the director of the Disease Biophysics Group (DBG).

The team's research focuses on mechanotransduction in neural and cardiovascular systems and is developing particular expertise in understanding the molecular mechanisms of traumatic brain injury (TBI) with the aim of developing effective therapeutic solutions.

Parker is also a Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard and a member of the Systems Biology Program at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program.

He received his B.S. from Boston University in Biomedical Engineering, his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Vanderbilt University.

He was a postdoctoral fellow in Pathology at Children’s Hospital Boston and in Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

In addition to his academic role, Parker is anArmy major who has served three tours in Afghanistan. In the spring of 2011 Harvard President Drew Faust selected him to help lead the University's ROTC implementation committee.

Todd Zickler

Zickler, who joined SEAS in 2004 and is currently Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences.

He received his B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from McGill University in 1996 and his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Yale University in 2004 under the direction of Peter Belhumeur.

He is the Director of the Harvard Computer Vision Laboratory and member of the Graphics, Vision and Interaction Group. His research is focused on modeling the interaction between light and materials, and developing systems to extract scene information from visual data.

Zicker's work is motivated by applications in face, object, and scene recognition; image-based rendering; image retrieval; image and video compression; robotics; and human-computer interfaces.

He is has received the National Science Foundation Career Award and a Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, and the Office of Naval Research.

Zickler, who spent a year as an elementary school teacher at the Honour International School, in Vientiane, Loas, has remained active in enhancing the pedagogy at SEAS.

He revamped Engineering Sciences 50: Introduction to Electrical Engineering, teaching the course from 2005-2008; helped to create Engineering Sciences 51: Introduction to Engineering Sciences; and offered upper-level courses on computer vision.