Like many kids, Amir Hirsch ’06, SM ’07 grew up playing with LEGOs. But unlike many adults, is still playing with them as part of his job as CEO and co-founder of Flybrix. Started in 2015, the company sells kits for children and adults alike to build their own reusable drones out of the popular plastic building bricks. Learning opportunities abound. Builders gain insight into the aerodynamics of the drone’s fan, the electromechanics necessary to control a motor, and flight basics including balance and feedback. Hirsch, who double-majored in mathematics and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) for his bachelor's and earned a master's in EECS, says such concepts become much clearer when actually flying a drone built by hand. “Most of the time when I’m flying something, people ask that I crash it into the wall,” said Hirsch who earned his degrees in electrical engineering and computer science as well as mathematics. “Because they all want to see it shatter into a lot of pieces.”...

Twelve new faculty members have been invited to join the ranks of the School of Engineering at MIT. Drawn from institutions and industry around the world, and ranging from distinguished senior researchers to promising young investigators, they will contribute to the research and educational activities of six academic departments in the school and a range of other labs and centers across the Institute. “This year we are welcoming another exceptionally strong group of new faculty to engineering,” says Ian A. Waitz, Dean of the School of Engineering. “They are remarkably accomplished, and their research spans some of the most important and pressing challenges in the world. I can’t wait to see what they do.” Mohammad Alizadeh will join the faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in September 2015. He was a principal engineer at Cisco, which he joined through the acquisition of Insieme Networks in 2013. Alizadeh completed his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at Sharif University of Technology and received his PhD in electrical engineering in 2013 from Stanford University, where he was advised by Balaji Prabhakar. His research interests are broadly in the areas of networked systems, data-center networking, and cloud computing. His dissertation focused on designing high-performance packet-transport mechanisms for data centers. His research has garnered significant industry interest: The Data Center TCP congestion control algorithm has been integrated into the Windows Server 2012 operating system; the QCN algorithm has been standardized as the IEEE 802.1Qau standard; and most recently, the CONGA adaptive load-balancing mechanism has been implemented in Cisco’s new flagship Application Centric Infrastructure products. Alizadeh is a recipient of a SIGCOMM best-paper award, a Stanford Electrical Engineering Departmental Fellowship, the Caroline and Fabian Pease Stanford Graduate Fellowship, and the Numerical Technologies Inc. Prize and Fellowship....

Messages pour in from amputees seeking prostheses and from media outlets pursuing interviews. Then there are students looking to join Herr’s research group. “The technology inspires young people to get into the field, which is wonderful,” Herr says. It’s a mark of the groundbreaking work Herr has done at the MIT Media Lab over the past two decades. An amputee himself, Herr has been designing (and wearing) bionic leg prostheses that, he says, “emulate nature” — mimicking the functions and power of biological knees, ankles, and calves. Last month, Herr’s TED talk made headlines, as Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a professional dancer whose leg was partially amputated after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, used one of his prostheses to rumba on stage. Most of these prostheses have reached the world through Herr’s startup, BiOM (originally called iWalk). Since 2010, the company has brought the world’s first bionic foot-and-calf system to more than 900 patients worldwide, including some 400 war veterans....