Eric Grimson is the Bernard Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He also has the privilege of currently serving as the Department Head, meaning that he has the pleasure of monitoring roughly 130 faculty members, 900 graduate students, and 700 undergraduate majors - a lot like herding cats.

Eric's primary research area is computer vision; he and his students have designed systems to recognize objects, to find images on the Web, and to build 3D models from images. For the past decade, he and his students have been applying vision methods to medical image analysis; they have built systems used to help neurosurgeons plan and execute minimally-invasive surgeries, and they have designed methods to measure changes in brain structures due to diseases like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's.

Eric typically lectures in 6.001, MIT's first course on computation and programming, and has taught more than 8,000 students in this subject over the past 25 years (he doesn't admit to remembering all of the faces). You can ask current or former students about his reputation for telling really bad jokes during class. He was honored to receive the Bose Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the School of Engineering in 2001.

In addition to having witnessed thousands of students flow through MIT, Eric has also seen the admissions process from other viewpoints. In addition to having read undergraduate and graduate applications for many years, his older son is a freshman in college, so he can appreciate what you and your parents are currently experiencing first hand.

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