Harvard Computer Science Expects Faculty Retirements

The faculty members affiliated with Harvard Computer Science are poised to face a wave of retirement over the next few years—a trend that is likely to lead to considerable hiring of new CS professors as well as the development of expertise within the Computer Science subfields of computation and modeling.

According to School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Communications Director Michael P. Rutter, six of the 18 active or tenured faculty affiliated with CS at Harvard are over the age of 60.

The proportion of over-60 faculty in CS slightly higher than the corresponding proportion for SEAS overall, which Dean of SEAS Cherry A. Murray said was about 30 percent during an All-Hands Meeting last spring. At that time, Murray called for the faculty to grow “reasonably quickly” in order to ensure that new professors were hired “before the [older] faculty retire.”

According to Rutter, Harvard CS has responded to this need for renewal by being particularly vigorous in training and tenuring junior faculty. Five of the nine total promotions to tenure in SEAS within the past five years have gone to professors affiliated with CS, though only about one in four full-time-equivalent faculty members in SEAS are affiliated with the field. In addition, one-third of the junior hires at SEAS in the past 10 years have also been affiliated with CS or with CS and electrical engineering.

Yet according to Computer Science Area Dean Michael D. Mitzenmacher, Harvard Computer Science will be launching a search for another faculty member in the next few weeks, and will continue to be looking for new talent both to replace retiring faculty and to increase the overall number of CS professors.

“I’d like to see us grow to 25 to 30 faculty eventually, but my guess is that that will be a decade-long process, or more,” Mitzenmacher said.

Mitzenmacher added that these searches hoped to attract “the most talented people, but also people who can focus on not just a narrow area, but who can focus on the opportunities Harvard offers to branch out.”

But Murray said that she is specifically hoping to bring in more CS theorists among the group of new hires. This hiring trend would counteract the imbalance created by the departure of the current batch of senior faculty, many of whom are theoretical computer scientists.

Murray also said that she is looking to bolster the area’s reputation in several computer science subfields.

“We need more computational faculty,” Murray said, adding that computation and simulation are becoming a “third leg” of science.

CS Lecturer David J. Malan said the CS area should not change dramatically with these replacements, but he added that “the introduction of younger faculty certainly breeds newer ideas to the department.”

—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Evan T.R. Rosenman can be reached at erosenm@fas.harvard.edu.