Charles M. Vest

9 september 1941 . 12 december 2013THE FIRST TIME I met Vest was in a large auditorium at MIT in the autumn of 1990 when and his wife, Becky, were being introduced to the MIT community. I remember being immediately impressed with Chuck's warmth, sense of humor, and kind of Midwest folksiness. On the one hand, I thought that his was exactly the type of leadership MIT needed at that stage in the institute's history. On the other hand, I knew MIT could be a harsh, arrogant place, with often unrealistically high expectations placed on people; insiders refer to MIT as a praise-free zone. I wondered how this gentle man from West Virginia would fare in this challenging community. It turns out that I had no reason to worry because underneath this gentle exterior was a core of steel that enabled to act with great courage in even the most challenging of circumstances.Chuck Vest served with great distinction as the president of MIT from 1990-2004. This term was followed by 6 years as the president of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He played important leadership roles both at MIT and on the national stage, in particular making major social justice contributions for low-income students, especially those of color, and women in the academy. In addition, he became the face of science and engineering in Washington DC when our community badly needed to repair its relationships with our Washington representatives.Charles Chuck Marstiller Vest grew up in an academic family in Morgantown, West Virginia. His father, known affectionately as ML, was a professor of mathematics at West Virginia University (WVU). ML was notorious for having academic standards that were, in the words of John Curry, one of his undergraduate students, somewhere near the heavens. graduated from WVU in 1963 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering. One of his fellow students at WVU, Dorothy Manning, says of in those days: Yet, with all that brilliance, he was always humble, a little shy, always kind and encouraging to others, self-effacing, a little grin, a twinkle in his eye, humor, and caring for others. This is exactly the same Vest who became such a great national leader in higher education. It was at WVU that met his beloved wife, Becky.In 1963, and Becky moved from Morgantown to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where began his graduate education in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. received his M.S. in 1964 and his Ph.D. in 1967; he then joined the Michigan faculty as an assistant professor in 1968. While there, he carried out research on heat transfer and, importantly, engineering applications of laser optics and holography. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 1972 and to full professor in 1977. Four years later, began the transition from a career as a teacher and researcher to one as an academic administrator. At Michigan, he served successively as associate dean of engineering, dean of engineering, and, finally, provost and vice president for academic affairs.The call from MIT came in 1990. As he said in his inaugural address, viewed the presidency of MIT as a call to national service-a statement that turned out to be more true than any of us attending his inauguration could have imagined. then began to put together his own leadership team. On the academic side, this included Mark Wrighton as Provost, Joel Moses as Dean of Engineering, Philip Khoury as the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, and myself as Dean of Science. Later appointees included Bob Brown as Provost, Larry Bacow as Chancellor, and Alice Gast as Vice President for Research. was a great teacher as evidenced by the fact that five of his appointees went on to lead major universities across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain: Wrighton at Washington University in St. Louis; myself at the University of Toronto and UC Berkeley; Bacow at Tufts University; Brown at Boston University; and Gast at Lehigh and Imperial College, London. …

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