Prof. Christopher Magee Honored

with ESD Educational Excellence Award

By Lois Slavin, ESD Communications Director – October 31, 2005

On October 14, 2005, Professor Christopher L. Magee was honored with the third annual Joseph A. Martore (1975) ESD Educational Excellence Award. This honor is given to a full-time member of the ESD faculty or teaching staff in recognition of outstanding contributions in education to an ESD academic program, such as MLOG, SDM, LFM, TPP, and the ESD Ph.D.

Although teaching is an important component, this award also recognizes other contributions to ESD academic program development. “The thought behind the award was to recognize the leadership role that ESD/MIT faculty members serve in preparing and influencing students to make real world engineering contributions to society,” said Martore, who received both an SB and an SM in Civil Engineering from MIT.

Magee has been Professor of the Practice of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Systems, and Director of ESD’s Center for Innovation in Product Development since 2002. He came to ESD after 35 years at Ford Motor Company, where his early career involved research and technology implementation work. He later served in several executive positions involving product development, with a focus on vehicle systems and program initiation activities.

Magee has made significant contributions from the onset of his affiliation with ESD. He worked with Dr. Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld to develop, and now teach, the ESD Doctoral Seminar.

“Chris has provided strong leadership in shaping seminar content and ensuring effective delivery of the material and he continues to read widely in order to keep the seminar content at the cutting edge of new knowledge,” said Cutcher-Gershenfeld. “He also provides critical coaching and mentoring to the doctoral students. Finally, Chris is committed to innovation in pedagogy, always looking for better ways to enable learning to take place.”

Professor Warren Seering joined the nomination process based on Chris’ work as a section leader in 2.009 Product Development Processes, a crucial design class in Mechanical Engineering. “Every year Chris supervises two 15-member teams. In each case, his efforts have been well-received by the students because he not only knows the material but also how to interact with them. Consequently his impact on the course has been substantial.”

Dr. Daniel Whitney noted that in his collaboration with Chris and Institute Professor Joel Moses on ESD .938 Advanced System Architecture, he observed Chris’ ability to move into new intellectual areas, read current literature, absorb basic ideas quickly, and break them out into astute presentations and close scrutiny of their underlying principles.

“It was truly exciting to watch,” said Whitney, adding that Chris generated the bulk of the lectures covering core modeling and analytical methods, created most homework assignments, and correlated them with the course’s fundamental ideas.

“Although I believe that the three of us contributed more or less equally to designing this course, Chris accomplished the bulk of the innovative task of creating a teachable core,” Whitney continued. “His efforts reflect his strong commitment to strengthening ESD’s Ph.D. course offerings, which is…very important to the Division’s future.”

When asked how he felt about receiving the award, Magee said that this award “was shockingly pleasing” as he has been busy learning how to teach from the people who selected him . He added that he is very happy to move from “rookie status to ‘up and comer” in his educational role.”