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Amitava 'Babi' Mitra
linkedin.com/in/babimitra|+1-617-324-8131 | babi@mit.edu

Dr. Amitava ‘Babi’ Mitra is the founding Executive Director of the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program at MIT. His expertise and interest are in setting up and leading innovative ‘start-up’ educational initiatives; he has over twenty-five years’ experience in institution building, higher education, corporate e-learning, and distance education. He was the founding Dean of Engineering, BML Munjal University, Gurgaon, India where he launched “Joy of Engineering”, a first-year project-based course designed to get students engaged with engineering, the Senior Vice-President, Knowledge Solutions Business Unit, NIIT, Inc., Atlanta. , and founding Chief, Distance Learning Programs Unit, BITS, Pilani, India. Dr. Mitra is a Guest Editor, ASEE’s journal, Advances in Engineering Education, and the keynote speaker/panelist at engineering education conferences in Lisbon, Portugal; Aalborg University, Denmark; Bengaluru, India; ITA, Brazil and Higher Colleges of Technology, United Arab Emirates. He volunteers as a board member, Arbor Creek Montessori Academy, Dallas, Texas, and was a member, National Advisory Board, SPIC MACAY (Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth), India; founding member, Sakai Project Board, USA, and; founding member, Council of Governors, Pan-Himalayan Grassroots Development Foundation, an NGO based in Kumaon, India. Dr. Mitra earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from BITS, Pilani, India. He was ranked All-India 36th as a National Science Talent Scholar and graduated from St. Columba’s School, New Delhi, India. He loves food, music, the intersects across people and technology, growing up with his children, and playing squash.

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Dr. Timothy Kassis completed his postdoctoral training under Profs. Linda Griffith (BE) and David Trumper (MechE) at MIT. Prior to that, Dr. Kassis obtained a Ph.D. in Bioengineering and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA, and a B.Eng. in Electronic and Communications Engineering from the University of Nottingham, UK. Dr. Kassis has lived for extended amounts of time in the Philippines, Canada, UK, Lebanon, Syria, and since 2008, the United States. Dr. Kassis has been a lead instructor at MIT since 2017.

Dr. Kassis is currently the lead instructor for the School of Engineering's New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) Living Machines (LM) thread and is also the instructor for 20.051, 20.052 and 20.053 which are the three classes entitled 'Living Machines' required by all students participating in the LM thread.

Dr. Kassis' research interests lie at the convergence of engineering, biology, and computation. He is particularly interested in creating engineering tools to answer difficult biological questions. Dr. Kassis has worked on a variety of interdisciplinary research projects from elucidating the role of lymphatics in lipid transport to designing organ-on-chip microfluidic models to developing deep convolutional networks for biomedical image processing.

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Justin Lavallee graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2010 with a Master in Architecture. After working as a researcher studying novel applications for industrial robots in custom manufacturing processes, he joined the MIT Department of Architecture in 2011 as an instructor and eventually director of the MIT Architecture Shops. He joined the MIT New Engineering Education Transformation as a lead technical instructor in 2019. Throughout his time at MIT he has focused on developing and teaching courses at the intersection of design, technology, and making, while also participating in a number of research projects focusing on new fabrication techniques.

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Gregory L. Long, PhD is currently the Lead Technical Instructor for NEET's Autonomous Machines thread at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a broad range of engineering design, prototype fabrication, and manufacturing experience, and he has taught mechanical engineering design, robotics, control of mechanical systems, and a variety of mathematical topics for over 20 years before joining the faculty at MIT. He has published scholarly articles on robot mechanics and control, and he has a textbook titled “Fundamentals of Robot Mechanics''.

Greg received his bachelors of science degree in chemical engineering from Stanford University, his masters of science and doctorate degrees in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania, and his masters of liberal arts degree in mathematics for teaching from Harvard University. ​

Address: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 35-316, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139
Phone: 617-253-5575 Email: longg@mit.edu

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Rea Lavi is Lecturer and a Curriculum Designer with the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program in the School of Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. He leads the incorporation of 21st century skills into the NEET program curriculum and teaches thinking skills to undergraduate students. Rea received his Ph.D. degree from the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. His research interests in STEM education involve the fostering and assessment of thinking skills involved in complex problem-solving, with special focus on systems thinking, creative thinking, and metacognition. His doctoral research systems thinking assessment received several awards, including the Zeff Fellowship for Excelling First-year Ph.D. Students and the Miriam and Aaron Gutwirth Fellowship for Excelling Ph.D. Students. Rea is also the inventor of the SNAP Method® for structured creative problem-solving (US and UK trademarks).

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