Dava J. Newman SM ’89, PhD ’92

INTERVIEWER: So this is the 150th MIT anniversary interview with Professor Dava Newman. I'm going to start out by asking where you were born and where you grew up.

NEWMAN: I was born in Helena, Montana. So I hail from the Northwest and my family bodes from all over the Northwest, so Helena, northern California; I also lived in Seattle. So home is kind of the Northwest.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me a little bit about your family.

NEWMAN: My mom and dad were both teachers, trained as teachers, although they did various things. But I think that's where I really got some of my love and desire to perhaps be a teacher myself. They taught the K-12 level, and then my father was also involved in politics.

INTERVIEWER: Were there any particular influences or events or experiences in your childhood which you think helped to shape your career path?

NEWMAN: The Apollo program was happening in the 1960s, when I was a child growing up in Helena, Montana. So it was pretty inspirational for me to see the Moon landings, even though I was only five years old, I remember it very succinctly, being in Helena, Montana, the broadcasts of the Apollo 11. So that was definitely a pretty influential moment, and opened up my mind in thinking about space travel, what could be in the future. So, I would say definitely the Apollo program made some of the first early impressions on me as a child to dream, think big, and even engage with the possibilities of human space travel.

Also had some exposure -- my father was a pilot, just a private pilot. So I had a little experience in taking a few trips. It turns out, actually, my grandmother from my mother's side, she actually got her private pilot's license way back in the '50s, and so that was pretty phenomenal for a female pilot. Just for fun, but I think those also were influences in my future aerospace engineering career.

INTERVIEWER: So you've been genetically programmed.

NEWMAN: I'm not sure. Genetically programmed probably for exploration, that's for sure, and that's my passion and love is looking at exploration by space, sea, earth. So all of my research and a lot of my teaching focuses around exploration, human exploration, of the unknown.

INTERVIEWER: Were you always good in sciences?

NEWMAN: I liked science and math -- I love school. So, I liked all the different disciplines, but I didn't know that I would end up majoring or pursuing science and engineering in particular as a career. That came later after high school, and really not even until my undergraduate career.

INTERVIEWER: So why did you pick Notre Dame, or Notre Dame?

NEWMAN: So, Notre Dame. It was I guess maybe a little bit by chance, also a little bit by selection. I had actually never really, from a kid from the west, and the Northwest in particular, I really had never been to the Midwest, but I did look at Notre Dame. I compared it to some other schools, and particularly in Montana or the West Coast. I was keen on thinking perhaps about technical education, but in a liberal arts environment. So, when searching for schools, to get a liberal arts training, as well as then being able to get some technical expertise was a perfect fit for me.

Now, half of the story about Notre Dame has to do with my aspiring athletic career. I played a lot of sports in high school and growing up, and also, frankly, I needed fellowships to afford my college education. I had it self-funded, and so I thought I would really at least give it a give a try to play Division 1 athletics in sports. So I was on the basketball team for a few years at Notre Dame. I thought that I really wanted to both be able to pursue academics, as well as athletics.

INTERVIEWER: So, how was playing basketball there?

NEWMAN: Oh, it was great. My teammates were phenomenal. That was back in the early '80s, so women's basketball from Notre Dame, they had just become Division 1. So we were just starting to climb up. We did pretty well. We broke into the top 20, maybe the top 10, actually, as well as we did. I was only on the team for two years, then I started coaching at a high school. So then I actually started coaching at a high school, which was a great experience, it was with inner city kids. I'm sure they taught me as much as I could help to coach them and mentor them.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think the playing of basketball, did that influence your interest in body mechanics and motion?

NEWMAN: Definitely. Being an athlete myself, I also pursued ski racing at a top level during my high school career, to the point of the Junior Olympics. So, my whole sports career and basketball or skiing, I just loved all sports. It could be softball -- just throw a sport at me and I usually love to perform it.

Now, interestingly enough, there wasn't a real crossover to my academics until further along in my graduate career when I started specializing in human performance. So, the engineering training that I got, I thought it was a nice problem-solving, good skills, but it really came full circle not until graduate school at MIT when the biomechanics energetics, which ended being some of my specialties, even for an aerospace engineer, that really then was informed by my earlier athletic career. So it was really nice to find that synergy later on and at the level of my graduate studies.

INTERVIEWER: So tell me how you wound up at MIT for grad school.

NEWMAN: So, I looked at a few places for graduate school. I'd loved Notre Dame, I spent four years there. It was a great place to grow up, as I say. But I was really ready to get to maybe to the west coast. I lived at Stanford, looked down in Texas, and looked at MIT. It turns out that MIT had the best aerospace engineering program, and I was fortunate to get in, and even in particular, Man Vehicle Lab, which now I'm a faculty member affiliated with, was the perfect place for me. Because all of a sudden I found all these like-minded folks that were studying astronaut performance, human performance in extreme environments.

So I love spacecraft and aircraft, but I didn't know if I was going to spend my career thinking about the spacecraft design, if you will. I had worked for Boeing in the summers. My summer jobs were out in Seattle working for Boeing. But when I thought, wow, I can really study actually humans, human performance, apply my engineering expertise, but to more physiological musculoskeletal problems, that really was where my passion lied. So I knew I had found the right school in MIT, and the right research lab to pursue my interests.

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember what your first impressions were when you got here? What did you think of the MIT culture and the students? It must have been sort of different than what you were accustomed to.

NEWMAN: It was a really different culture. I distinctly remember coming to visit my first trip to MIT. I was very excited to come to Boston and see Cambridge. I was maybe a little bit intimidated, and I wondered are there going to be like-minded folks, are people all going to be nerds, and are they going to be well-rounded? Turns out, of course, in graduate school I met a whole bunch of like-minded people, and I met some of my best friends. So it all worked out. But that trepidation, maybe a little intimidation when I first approached MIT, I remember quite well.

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel like you could describe what the culture was like when you first showed up? How it was different than Notre Dame?

NEWMAN: So, the culture was quite different from, again, my liberal arts training with engineering on top where we might sit around over dinner and definitely talk about philosophy or talk about is there a such thing as a just war or not. So, those were very typical conversations we would engage in. I wondered well, at MIT what will I find out. Definitely, the conversations tended maybe to be more technical, more engineering and science based, which I quite thrived on, but I didn't have as much experience at, again, sitting at a table talking about maybe more of a physics problem.

Then I also found to my great surprise, a lot of folks that were still interested in, again, let's say more of the world problems and challenges and discussing these things over, usually over dinner or drinks. But then in the daytime, really spending the majority of our time in classes or in the lab focused on our engineering problems.

INTERVIEWER: So, can you walk me through your Master's and PhD here, and how your interests sort of evolved over that period?

NEWMAN: So, I came to MIT, first to pursue my graduate work and for initially my Master's in aeronautics and astronautics, and found myself just affiliated with a wonderful project. It was a project that was a space flight experiment. So I had the opportunity, really from day one, to participate as a graduate researcher in an experiment that was going to fly on the Space Shuttle. Now you never pinpoint your graduation date to a Space Shuttle experiment, because you may never graduate. That might be the world's longest Master's, let alone PhD.

So the experience was great. It turns out I did get to see that experiment fly. But during my Master's work, was affiliated with, it was called the mental workload and performance experiment. So we were looking at astronauts, and we were looking at their short-term memory, as well some of their anthropometrics and body positions, if you will.

Fortuitously, actually it was sitting in my first graduate course with Professor Tom Sheridan, who really taught me a lot, became a mentor, ended up becoming a member of my PhD, my doctoral committee. But it was in sitting in Professor Sheridan's class, kind of to the back row, I have to admit, with my colleague Mike Massimino who now is an astronaut. We're friends, and he was telling me about this wonderful Technology and Policy Program he was in.

Wow -- he was doing a dual Master's in mechanical engineering and TPP. It turns out, well, I wanted to do that. I was in aerospace engineering and I loved that. So I had joined the Technology and Policy Program. I had to apply and meet the founding director, Professor Richard de Neufville, and started that my second term at MIT. So from then on, I was a dual Master's student, pursuing both technology and policy, as well as the aerospace engineering.

A few years later, then I had gone through my doctoral exams and just pursue my doctoral work. My doctoral work was very multidisciplinary. Actually, it was interdisciplinary. I was housed in the Aero-Astro Department. But since I was pursuing biomedical engineering -- my PhD is actually in aerospace biomedical engineering. So, I was able to take some of the Harvard -MIT health, science, technology course work. As an aerospace engineer, I didn't know much about physiology, so I needed to learn more about physiology, muscles and bones. And my great mentor was Professor Tom McMahon from Harvard University, who had done his PhD work at MIT. So he was a real friend of MIT, as well as at Harvard. He was an incredible mentor for my doctoral work.

INTERVIEWER: Can you talk a little bit about -- you've mentioned two mentors now. How did they help you? Why was that such an important thing to have those mentors?

NEWMAN: My faculty mentors were critical in my development, and also encouragement. I was proposing, especially at the doctoral level. I had my own fellowship funding and I was proposing some grandiose ideas -- we have to figure out how astronauts are going to walk on the surface of the Moon and Mars. At NASA we weren't quite sending people, definitely not to Mars, but I really wanted to do something that no one had done before and to take a look at the bowel mechanics and energetics. I got a lot of support from my mentors in terms of intellectual support, and also just that maybe some of my crazy ideas were, I should pursue them and go forward with those.

So, the great thing about some encouragement, and no one ever saying no, you can't do that, that's maybe too outlandish or it won't be fruitful. I got some support, say go with your passion and try to solve some of these challenging -- ask the questions and then solve perhaps some of the challenging problems that we didn't really know much about.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it's important for people to go out and find mentors for themselves?

NEWMAN: Absolutely. I think the whole mentor -- that's one of the reasons, one of the top reasons, actually, I became a faculty member myself. I think it does have to do with my background from athletics, the coaching. It wasn't that I was going to be the knower of all knowledge and stand in front and lecture. It was more engaging in teamwork and helping shape the next generation. I benefited from that, of course, from some of the mentors that I worked with, and that really gives me a lot of motivation to mentor students now in my faculty life at MIT.

To me it has more to do with coaching and steering, letting folks find their own voice. So, again, it's much more coaching and assisting along the way, and learning. The most wonderful thing about being an MIT faculty member is that when students have better ideas than I do, and we talk about them and we go back and forth. You kind of live for those moments really, again, that your students then all of a sudden become peers and challenge you and you challenge them, and we always come out with maybe better ideas and solutions then anyone would individually.

INTERVIEWER: Since you were here as a student and then you became a faculty member, can you talk a little about the difference between being a student here and a faculty member?

NEWMAN: Sure. I got some great advice by Dave Akin, a former chair of my doctoral committee, who's now at the University of Maryland. I think I was struggling with some of my PhD work, and he said, "Don't you want to be a faculty member?" And I said, "Absolutely, that's what I'm doing all this hard work for." He said, "OK, well, let me tell you something, when you're an assistant professor, you're never going to work so hard. You're going to look back on these PhD days and think they were great." He was right. The multitasking, multiplexing. I was a doctoral student here.

My first faculty job was down in Texas. So that was actually really great for me to leave the MIT environment to go to a big state school and have to develop my own courses. It was in a mechanical engineering department and I was hired to bring in some of the aerospace components. I was close to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

So working on that new curriculum and design was a great experience for me. I really moved for personal reasons to be with my sweetheart and partner, so it was great. So it was a good personal move to go to Texas. It was also a good career move because that was my early, let's say, formative -- to get your PhD it's one thing. But then the next thing you know you're a faculty member and you're having to teach all the material. And the multi-tasking, if you will, because you're teaching, you're pursuing research, you're putting in proposals, and you're advising and mentoring students, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. So there was a lot to learn in the first few years of being a faculty member.

INTERVIEWER: So how did you wind up moving from Texas back to MIT?

NEWMAN: Well, I have to thank my partner, Gui Trotti for that, because he said he would make the move back to New England. The MIT environment was so wonderful -- stimulating. The students that you get to work with are the world's best, as well as the colleagues. So, it was really the people and the intellect and the challenging questions and solutions that I thought maybe we could work on was what really drew me to come back to New England and to MIT.

INTERVIEWER: Did MIT approach you?

NEWMAN: They did. I had a faculty offer, but I said, well, I'm going to go down to Texas, also for personal reasons, as well as career. So I had an MIT faculty offer. You get different stories depending on if I tell it or if Guy tells it. The phone would ring and say, hey, are you coming back to MIT? And I said, well, I don't know. It worked out well. I did come back.

INTERVIEWER: So let's talk about what your research and career has focused on. Probably the best way to do this is maybe if you could just sort of talk to me -- walk me through the progression of your interests.

NEWMAN: OK. And you can tell me when it's -- I'm sure it'll be too much or enough. You can tell me to be more succinct. Feel free.

In my research, the overarching goal is really to try to assess human performance across the spectrum of gravity. So for space flight, I start with a micro-gravity environment where the astronauts are floating freely around, and we take a look. As an engineer I try to quantify their performance and model it. Then we perhaps come up with better understanding, and that leads to even better designs for things like spacesuits or inside, in terms of IVA, Inter Vehicular Activity. So really trying to first quantify, model the astronaut performance.

But again, as I mentioned, the spectrum of gravity. So I go from micro-gravity, zero gravity, to the Moon and Mars are 1/6 and 3/8 gravity. So how does humans perform in these partial gravity or reduced gravity environments. It kind of goes full circle all the way up to 1G -- those are more my Earth applications and more of my biomedical engineering.

My biomedical device research work is, of course, here. It has applications for 1G. Currently, I have a very interesting project kind of miniaturizing a -- putting on a wearable technology and assessment, if you will, quantifying the kinematics, or the motions. All of that to assess children with cerebral palsy. Can we use some of my spacesuit design work to kind of shrink it down. Can I make a great little suit or pants to assist in locomotion for kids here on Earth. So it really goes from the space environment to the 1G environment.

So, again, overall I'm really trying to look at human performance -- adults and children now, across the spectrum of gravity.

Research I can break down the research. So the major themes of my research have been looking at astronaut performance in a few different ways. Some of it is actually just looking at musculoskeletal deconditioning. We have very significant musculoskeletal deconditioning for astronauts in long duration, meaning multiple months in the micro-gravity environment. So the International Space Station, and before that, the Space Shuttle. And I also had the chance to fly my experiment with the Russians for two years, from 1996 to 1998.

So, a few decades of looking at astronaut performance in this beautiful micro-gravity environment. What do we learn? Well, it's a great laboratory. It's a very extreme environment. We have significant musculoskeletal loss. So, again, as an engineer, can we model that? Can we quantify it? Can we look at what the mechanisms are? If we can understand it, maybe it will really tell us a lot about osteoporosis on Earth, about exercise devices, exercise suits. So it really all has to do with the health and performance and safety of keeping the astronauts alive, but there's always another application for here in 1G, if you will, in Earth applications.

Then, another major area of my research focus has been in design, engineering design, and my teaching and research. I've taught a lot of engineering design to freshman, all the way up through seniors and graduate students. That kind of informs a lot of my spacesuit design work, advanced spacesuit concepts. I do spend a lot of time with the current technology, the current NASA /Russian technology. But then we push the envelope. We think that's our job here as faculty at MIT to really think of what could be, in 10 years, 20, even 40 years out, what breakthroughs could we see in engineering and science? How do those come together to maybe provide completely new systems.

So a lot of my advanced spacesuit work then really is a nice example, I think, of human robotic cooperation. I have a life-size robot in the lab, and it acts as a surrogate astronaut, if you will. So we're always thinking about kind of designing advanced systems, and that's led to one of my favorite research projects is a Bio-Suit or a spacesuit for Mars missions of the future.

Then another area, say a third other major area of research for me, is more to the biomedical devices and the 1G applications. Again, I love to look at the human performance, astronaut performance in a lot of cases, but it can just be human performance across this whole spectrum of gravity from micro-gravity all the way through one gravity. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking of high gravity in terms of we haven't gone to Jupiter yet where we have to keep people healthy for 9Gs environment. So kind of keep it from the zero to the 1G for all intensive purposes, at least for now.

INTERVIEWER: It's a start.

NEWMAN: Yeah. We're not going to send humans or astronauts to Jupiter any time soon.

INTERVIEWER: So when you're doing your research into these different but related areas, are you kind of working on all of them at once? Does it wind up blending all the time, or are you really sort of down different paths?

NEWMAN: It's a little bit of both. They end up blending a lot. I also like to work with students. The students, of course, need their individual thesis work or their individual project. But the students I work with are always in teams. It might be a team of two, counting me, three. Or a larger team of six or ten people. So it depends. But I think we all learn a lot more by working together, and that's the definition of engineering. A lot of smart people there to try to solve problems, kind of come up with new designs of systems. So all my projects, even though they're a little bit specific to the application, if you will -- it might be micro-gravity or a system for International Space Station, or it might be Mars spacesuit design. But they can really inform each other quite well.

And then with some of the biomedical devices work, that is also informed by some of the space work, as well as in just the passion to help with the enhancing performance or assisting locomotion here on Earth. So, they're best suited if the students and myself, if we're working across and working with each other across the programs, as well as then kind of drilling down deep into some of the specific hypotheses and research question. It's all informed as well with, not just my teaching, but educational research. I perform I think it's also a nice a bit of education research. Right now I'm at NASA grant for education and outreach. So we also take that cut at it, if you will, from our MIT research that we're publishing journal paper on, but we're also trying to disseminate that, if you will, and look at outreach for K-12 education. And come up, actually, with some educational tools and understanding for the general public or for kids. This specific project now is targeted to science museums and children's museums.

INTERVIEWER: It must be kind of fun when you figure something out in one location and you realize it has application to other areas you're working on.

NEWMAN: That's great, and that connecting the dots or how a breakthrough, say, perhaps in our Bio-Suit work, the patterning and the design, how that might be applicable to a system, applicable to kids with cerebral palsy. So those ah-ha moments are great, but it's usually just a lot of hard work. A lot of Master's theses, a lot of PhD theses. And then perhaps when I'm running around the Charles River saying, wait a minute, something that we've been working on might be completely applicable to another area that we also think that we could contribute or come up with an enhanced solution or even an enhanced design.

INTERVIEWER: So collaboration is a very important part of your research.

NEWMAN: Absolutely. It's all teamwork. It's collaboration, of course, with MIT students, undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and then quite a few collaborations external to MIT as well -- other universities, and internationally as well.

INTERVIEWER: What are your thoughts about collaboration within the MIT community?

NEWMAN: It's great. One of the best things about MIT is the research collaboration. Of course, we have our specific department, but you can do research projects -- research projects, really there's really no walls. You knock on someone's door from whatever department. I found that to be really special. That's really kind of magical at MIT in terms of really being able to do the multidisciplinary work.

If I need an expert in, and have a question about what's the appropriate materials and I run over to a colleague and get their students, as well, to interact with my students from aerospace. And that extends all the way to architecture and design, as well as humanities, arts. So the appreciation of--. And so we can really put together, I think, fantastic multidisciplinary teams of researchers just with pretty much asking and getting people to join up to a team. I think we can really produce very different results with multidisciplinary collaboration.

INTERVIEWER: That seems to be something that's quite specific to MIT.

NEWMAN: I say it's kind of the magic, I think. And it's not unique -- other folks are trying to do. It's not always easy to go across disciplines. Because you're trained, especially at the doctoral level, you're trained pretty deeply in one discipline. But now the world's challenges are just too vast. Whether it's water or energy or climate or exploration, in my space. So we need to put together I think people that are trained in different disciplines and come up with more creative solutions. Take a little bit from this field, a little bit from this field, a little bit from this field, and maybe we'll come up with a really powerful idea, let alone solution or a new design that we might want to try.

INTERVIEWER: You did undergo space training, did you not? Could you talk about that?

NEWMAN: Sure. So, all my students want to be astronauts. I have a lot of colleagues and friends that are astronauts. And now that the students are joining the ranks. Myself, I never applied to the astronaut core, but I've had the great pleasure to fly three experiments into space. So that the training that I've had myself is I've flown quite a few times on NASA's parabolic airplane. It used to be NASA KC-135, now we have the NASA C-9. I've also flown on the Russian aircraft, as well as the commercial zero G plane. So, essentially, we're flying up into the sky, going about 45,000 feet, dropping 10,000 feet, and you really do get micro-gravity or zero gravity parabola -- you do for about 25 seconds.

Now the thing is you do this over 40 parabolas. You get a couple hours of literally micro-gravity. Then a 2G pull-out. The 2G pull-out is the one that makes you not feel so well. You go back up, so within 20, 25 seconds you have to take your data. We test out our systems. You can fly lunar trajectories, as well as martian trajectories. So I've flown dozens and dozens of flights, and again, at these 40 parabolas to test out our systems, first of all, and also gain the experience. We can't get rid of gravity on Earth, so flying the micro-gravity parabolas or the partial G parabolas is one that we truly get the right gravity environment.

Now here in the lab, we hang people from the rafters on my moon walker to try to simulate. We go under water, again, to simulate altered environments. Now there's opportunity for some commercial space flight training, since we're on a new era of commercial flight. So we might have been guinea pigs, let's say, in terms of putting scientists and engineers through what's called NASTAR training for flight training. So a lot of high G training, some physiological training, and going through this. Because in the future we see not just the NASA or European or Russian astronaut cosmonaut core probably really opening up space fights at least to low Earth orbit with a cadre of people.

So they're trying to figure out what might be the appropriate training. So, I got to join the first class of scientists and engineers to kind of go through some of that training. As I said, for the experience it was great fun, and also to give feedback about how they might tailor the experience for certain people, especially if you're dealing with a technical crowd or what might be the best training, the most useful training and experiences. So it was pretty fun. We did a lot of high G training and centrifuges, as well as different fight profiles, and as I said, understanding a lot of the physiological responses.

INTERVIEWER: Did you feel like Neil Armstrong?

NEWMAN: I don't know. Maybe in some sense. I don't think we're not the right stuff. Mentality anymore now it's just kind of exploring, and really the great opportunity of thinking of many, many people experiencing and enjoying the wonders of micro-gravity and weightlessness.

INTERVIEWER: Did your stomach get used to it?

NEWMAN: It does get used to it. That's the right question. Your stomach gets used to it when you're going through this. But I'm susceptible to actually seasickness. I'm a big sailor, so it's really one of our passions is sailing. So again, you get used to it. So initially I'll have a little bit of stomach awareness or sickness. But everyone adapts, so you just plow on through. You're there to really get the research done and get your science done. And the more focused you are and the more you have to do, I think, is better, so you don't let the stomach get in the way.

INTERVIEWER: Is there a particular combination of characteristics that makes aeronautical, biomedical engineering of particular interest to you?

NEWMAN: For me the aerospace-biomedical, we even call it bioastronautics. It's kind of a mouthful: aerospace biomedical engineering. But it brings together, again, so many wonderful aspects -- the problem-solving, the skills, the many skills for engineering analysis. But for me it brings in the human element as well. I study people. That was really critical for me. The human is always in the system, in the loop somewhere. So I just kind of have the pleasure to study specifically human astronaut performance.

So really, the engineering skills from aerospace, and aerospace for me is, again, my passion is, it's extreme, it's the future. This sounds cliché, the final frontier, but there's so much we can learn in the unknown. So for me, again, it's not just space, also underwater exploration. We have so much to learn about undersea exploring, the seabed, exploring the animals. And in all of our exploring, I'm sure we learn probably more about ourselves as well. So for me, the passion is really in bioastronautics, now it's moving a little bit more to some Earth applications, some undersea applications. But it's really to explore the unknown.

INTERVIEWER: It sounds like it's being at the edge or the frontier.

NEWMAN: Yeah. I'm definitely comfortable, maybe it's good to be uncomfortable at the unknown or at the edge, to try to look beyond the horizon and try to discover even a new question, let alone perhaps a new answer or solution. I think it's in the human spirit. We're always trying to push the edge, and even though it might not be a comfortable place. The excitement is any kind of breakthrough or anything we learn. And again, kind of bringing that back then to maybe an Earth application.

INTERVIEWER: So, I'd like to go back a little bit to talk a little bit more about teaching. Do you have a philosophy of teaching?

NEWMAN: So, I definitely have a philosophy of teaching. Try to keep it simple. So my philosophy for teaching and research, which are just completely synergistic activities in my life here -- sometimes I'm in front of the classroom, other times I might be in the lab or mentoring students. But my teaching philosophy is simply love, act, discover and innovate. So if we put all those together, each part of it, and kind of have this continuous journey, if you will, I think those are all the ingredients that we need.

Me, in my teaching of students, as well as in kind of a philosophy for the research activities as well. You have to be passionate. You have to love what you're doing. There's no I'm an engineer, so there's no substitution for getting your hands dirty and acting and really coming up with designs or prototypes. The discovery is I think what all scientists and engineers are about. What's the new discovery? What's the wow? And then the innovation and creativity goes right in there. What's a new, what's a breakthrough? A lot of hard work, but then also just trying to maybe solve, even if it's an old problem, maybe try to solve it in a new way.

INTERVIEWER: Would you characterize yourself as sort of a hands-on teacher? Do you like getting your students active in projects?

NEWMAN: Yeah. I'm definitely a hands-on teaching. I use a lot of active learning in my classes, whether it's freshman designing and building blimps and flying them, designing ROVs. It really is looking at engineering education, but in the context within the aerospace department -- we call that conceive, design, implement, operate. So there's the paper design, if you will, the conception, the design. But there's no substitution in the learning of implementing all the systems. For aerospace engineering we're always dealing with complex systems, and so all of the subsystems have to interact and work together. There's also no substitution for getting them to operate.

So even if we simplify it, say at the first or second level, to fly a blimp or go underwater, we just kind of progress through that. Then with the graduate students, I greatly enjoy getting to more advanced, more complex systems. But again, it's really still hands-on, no substitution for the theory -- you have to know the theory and the foundations -- but then let's put it in practice. For our work, work is primarily sponsored by NASA, and now the National Science Foundation. They're also looking for results and systems. Since I'm in engineering design space, we really do come up with prototypes or mock-ups of different working systems.

INTERVIEWER: You also teach a leadership development course. Tell me a little about that.

NEWMAN: It's actually been my pleasure, and just in the last five or so years with the Technology and Policy students to teach the Leadership Development Seminar. I've been at MIT now almost two decades as a faculty member and I love it. But if you ask me what are the things we need to work on. Community and we worked on a lot over across MIT, and really instilling that sense of community and pride that we're all MIT, we're all in this together, and we're kind of greater than the sum of the parts. So I think instilling that community -- I'm a house master, so I live in a dormitory. So kind of practicing what you preach as well, trying to enhance community.

Back to teaching leadership, really our students are the future, and they're the future leaders. We have a lot of -- they are, but we don't want that to be by happenchance, we want to make sure that we're giving all the opportunities. Can you teach leadership? I'm not sure. But what you can do for sure is give opportunity for skill development, for personal development, for teamwork. And just even studying the literature. The literature in literature I find very fascinating from Lincoln on up to contemporary.

There's all different types of leaders. So I've actually myself gone through the Sloan leadership class to learn their distributed leadership model. So again, maybe I'm just spreading the word a little bit from some of the scholars in leadership, some of the folks who are in the Sloan School of Management. I'm trying to also make sure that the engineering, the school of engineering, and our students have those opportunities. Again, you can talk about it, you can read the literature, but there's no substitution in my mind for getting out there and doing it.

So, for instance, the very first session that I had with my Technology and Policy students, it's we do -- I call it the leadership laboratory, because we go to Thompson Island and we're in a high ropes course, and there's nothing like instilling trust when you're there up repelling back and down. You're learning a lot of lessons of teamwork and trust, and communication is really important. Then the reflection. Maybe the activity didn't go so well. Well, why not? So I think that that's also very much a hands-on activity, as well as learning from great leaders in the past.

Then it's personal as well. So my final project in the Leadership Development Seminar for the students is to come up with their own leadership plan. I have one for myself, you need one for yourself. And what are the characteristics and the skills that you really want to work on. So that might be their two-year plan in Technology and Policy, it might be their six-year plan for their PhD, it might be their 10-year plan.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think those characteristics are that make a good leader?

NEWMAN: It's fun to discuss and debate. I have the students boil it down to less than 10 kind of characteristics of the great leadership. So everyone has their own, but some of that, again, my personal list of characteristics of leadership, love comes up right at the top, the compassion, the passion itself comes up. Integrity would be very high on the list. And so you put in the different -- I can go on and on with the list if you want.

One of the first assignments I have the students read is Norm Augustine. He has a very nice, a short kind of brochure, if you will. Norm Augustine's a great MIT advisor, if you will, and has Augustine law. So anyhow, Norm has a great template, I think, for leadership and comes up with 10 characteristics of leadership, mentioned a few of them. And so just thinking about that and putting in our own. You can have a list of 20 easily. But I think that it's a really good exercise for students to come up with six or 10 leadership skills, if you want to call them that, also leadership characteristics that they might have some strengths in, but they need to identify their weaknesses as well.

So what are some of the characteristics that they really want to work on. Lots of times listening comes into that. It's not always leadership from the front, definitely not the one who has maybe the loudest voice. It's who can build the team. Who can listen, who can synthesize some of the information and look at the team dynamics. So a lot of it's listening, reflection. See, these are some more of the subtle characteristics or points. Making sense of the whole environment. Then there's some that actually are inventing where it gets to the innovation, it gets to the creativity. It gets to the novel ideas.

INTERVIEWER: MIT is particularly good at generating leaders. Why do you think that is?

NEWMAN: Everyone wants to know why MIT is so great at generating leaders. I think first of all, you have to say we get incredible students at the undergraduate level, the graduate level. So we get great -- and hopefully we don't do too much harm and when we get great leaders that emerge. But also there's the time here. I think the development of students here on campus has something to do with that. MIT's a place that people don't say no. You have the craziest idea. We just thrive off of each other's intellect and ideas and maybe different approaches to a solution.

So you put those kind of people together and I think that you do actually create a really unique environment for leadership. Again, I call it distributed leadership, because it's not just the one person leading. It's much more of the teamwork and the group dynamic, and leaders that the Sloan calls the distributed leadership model. That's really important, because everyone has skills in different areas. So it really probably takes a team to perhaps lead, to be a term project for the student. It could be to lead in the development of a new business.

Now these are not usually individual actors. It might be small teams, but it usually is teams of people. Smart people coming together to lead in whatever endeavor -- maybe it's a new start-up, maybe it's to lead some curriculum reform. We've had a lot of innovative educational reform and ideas come out of MIT, too. And as you get some of the faculty together that want to look at pedagogy, want to say maybe we can -- we're doing things already, but we could even do it better.

So it's really also never being satisfied with what we're doing today, because you can always think about maybe we could do it better, we can improve things.

INTERVIEWER: Are you still using the Gauguin quote?

NEWMAN: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: How did that come about? What is that? Tell me why?

NEWMAN: So for my leadership course, I guess the motto, if you will, of day one of the class, I put a picture of Gauguin's masterpiece: Where are we from? Who are we? And then where are we going? I think that those three questions are so important for life. I think they're also, I use them as a model for leadership development, because the past, the present and the future, and you can look at it individually for yourself, for your internal improvement and development. And you can also scale that to a society or a group of people.

So I think Gauguin was asking the absolute critical questions, and then putting on his artistic answer that he had to that, or at least making us think about these questions and maybe offering not the definitive answer, but playing around and experimenting with past, present and future that really guides what I think is a great foundation to think about leadership, and individual as well, as I said, maybe societal development. Pretty profound questions.

I'm also really interested in how technology, engineering and science are influenced, as well as can contribute to the arts. So I am also just personally kind of very interested in this synthesis, if you will, of art and design to science and engineering. I think that we have so much to learn from each other. So I really love to think about how we can all be influenced from our specific expertise or our disciplines, but really sharing some. I think art has a lot to contribute to science and engineering as well has a lot to contribute. I would put design as the fourth. It's really art and design, to and science and engineering that's spent a lot of time thinking about what are the synergies that we can all think about and maybe attain, and really improve our own scholarship and our own work.

INTERVIEWER: So, I'd like to ask a little about being director for the Technology and Policy Program. What is it about that program and the collaboration between MIT and Harvard that works so well?

NEWMAN: For TPP? For HST there's more--.

INTERVIEWER: Yes. I'm sorry.

NEWMAN: Which one? For TPP or HST?

INTERVIEWER: Let's talk about Technology and Policy first.

NEWMAN: OK. Because that one's more MIT grown. But OK.

So the Technology and Policy Program, I've had the pleasure to be the director over the last six years. I did get my Master's in Technology and Policy as well. So I'm an alum from the program. Professor Richard de Neufville started it in the 1970s as really one of the first multidisciplinary curriculum offerings for the graduate level across MIT. It was tough, a little bit tough back in the 1970s to have those ideas that engineers and scientists should also be educated. Maybe not experts, but definitely have the breath in economics and political science, and really looking at some really tough questions. What are the societal, political and economic implications of our technology? Of our science? And I think those are the right questions.

Fast forward to 2010, everyone, all the national reviews from the National Academy of Engineers say if you're training engineers, of course. So now it goes without saying that we need to develop engineers as world citizens. They have to be thinking about the societal implications of engineering. The economic implications, the societal. But it wasn't too long ago when those were actually not seen -- the engineering education, science education was very disciplinary oriented. So trying to break that open. And we like to think about it in TPP as dual excellence. We provide deeper graduate education in engineering and science for the students.

But they have to also crossover, they have to at least become familiar and be able to talk to an economist, a political scientist. Because, frankly, when we look at it and we look at Washington or any of the cities -- the leading cities for government, as well as both public and private, we're the failures. The failures are usually not in the technology -- it's usually in the people or the systems. It could be the policies behind them, it could be the silent implications. So we really think we have to take a multidisciplinary approach to solving the most challenging problems of the world.

So this education, I'm just a huge believer in more of the breath, more of the multidisciplinary. It doesn't short-change the engineering or the science, you have to be expert at the graduate level in your area, but you also need to be open-minded and look at all the other influences. And frankly, some of the policies -- we have a law requirement. I mean I want my engineers all to be able to talk to lawyers. They don't have to be lawyers themselves, but it, frankly, could be quite a different language, if you will, a different culture. So you have to basically try to step in the shoes of someone else and understand, perhaps, where that expert's coming from, whether it be the economist or the lawyer.

So I want to train engineers and scientists who are actually very comfortable in the shoes of others, so that they can really come up with, again, what is our mission is engineering and science for the betterment of humanity. So if we're going to put technology and science in place, we really have to know the societal/political implications of our engineering and science.

INTERVIEWER: Is there something you want to say about the MIT-Harvard history-science.

NEWMAN: I've been an affiliate faculty with the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology, or HST Program, for most all of my career at MIT. I can't say enough about it. Half of my graduate students, half of my doctoral students have come through HST. They want to be biomedical engineers. They get incredible engineering training here at MIT -- we don't have a medical school. We have a great collaboration with Harvard in terms of the PhD students in the medical engineering, medical physics get the equivalent of a couple of years of Harvard Medical School.