The appointments of Dr. David H. Bernstein to the Mitsui Chair in civil engineering and Irene R. Heim to the Class of 1943 Chair in linguistics and philosophy were recently announced.
Professor Bernstein, the Mitsui Career Development Professor, specializes in transportation research. His current interests include congestion pricing (policies and technologies), network equilibrium models, and geographic information systems in transportation. He holds the BA in economics (1981), State University of New York, Binghamton; the MPA/URP in economic analysis (1983), Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School; and the PhD (1990), University of Pennsylvania. Before joining MIT in 1990, he was research director at Atlantic Commodities, vice president/software development at Investment Technologies, and project manager at the University of Pennsylvania's Network Analysis Laboratory.
Professor Heim, the Class of 1943 Career Development Professor, is recognized as one of the most prominent and most influential figures in contemporary semantics, an area that is among the most technically complex branches of linguistics. As a teacher, Professor Heim is noted for her ability to introduce her students to the strands of semantic argument and then showing them how these are woven into the broader picture of the field. In her publications and colloquium and conference presentations, she has been a force for reshaping the field of semantics and is seen as a leading voice affecting the choice of the central questions to be asked and their answers as well. Professor Heim studied at the University of Konstanz and Ludwig Maximiliam University in Munich, where she received an MA in philosophy (1977). She earned her PhD (1982) from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. From 1981-83 she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and MIT and then taught linguistics at the University of Texas/Austin from 1983-87, and at UCLA from 1987-89, when she joined MIT.
A version of this article appeared in the February 26, 1992 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 36, Number 21).
