Photo: Brad DeCecco

Underground Research: With two-thirds of its space below ground, the Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering building houses a 900-square-meter clean room and facilities for materials synthesis and advanced microscopy.

The expanded faculty, in turn, helped reinvigorate education in the division, especially at the graduate level. Under Narayanamurti's tenure, the graduate student body doubled to 350, with the number of applicants jumping nearly threefold, to more than 1200.

Narayanamurti's own profile accompanied that growth. On campus, he is said to know everybody and be known by everybody. His nickname is now so ubiquitous that he is quoted in the Harvard Crimson simply as Dean Venky. Ask about his personality and people say things like “builder,” a “dynamo,” a “bubbling enthusiast.” “You walk into his office and you feel bombarded with ideas, and you come out feeling like you can take on the world,” says Greg Morrisett, a professor of computer science. He said he came to Harvard in 2004 because he liked the direction Narayanamurti was taking. “I saw that this place was going to take off.”

Despite all of Narayanamurti's efforts, though, the Harvard engineering program remains small compared with those of the top tech schools [see table, “Elite Engineering”]. Its faculty is about half the size of those of Princeton and Caltech, schools that Narayanamurti considers peers, and its research spending is a fraction of what big schools like MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley spend. In the latest U.S. News & World Report ranking of top U.S. engineering graduate programs, Harvard comes in at a disappointing 23.

After several years in the job, Narayanamurti says, he came to the conclusion that the division would become preeminent only if it drastically raised its profile. In particular, the idea of creating a first-rate engineering school had been around for a while. Narayanamurti's bosses, Rudenstine and Knowles, supported the idea, and so did a subcommittee of Harvard's board of overseers, which recommended the upgrade to school as early as 2002.

But when Narayanamurti began discussing the idea with Harvard president Larry Summers, Rudenstine's successor, the dean discovered that Summers was skeptical at first. The two men held several long, often heated conversations, and finally, by mid-2004, Summers came around to the idea.

With the support of the overseers and the president, it seemed as though Narayanamurti's plan was falling into place. He even found time to contemplate his retirement, and on 31 May 2005, he surprised his faculty with an e-mail announcing that he would step down the following year.

Then the Summers scandal broke.

After making some controversial remarks on women in science, Summers became engulfed in criticism. A “lack of confidence” vote by the powerful Faculty of Arts and Sciences led to his eventual resignation in February 2006. For a while the venerable institution appeared leaderless, and nothing much seemed to get done.

Given the circumstances, Narayanamurti agreed to stay as dean until a new president was hired—and until the new engineering school was established. (Some at Harvard remember events slightly differently. One professor describes Narayanamurti's attitude as more like “Give me the school or else I won't stay.”)

With Harvard's top echelon still in flux, Narayanamurti bolstered his efforts to rally his own faculty around the idea of an engineering school. “You'd pass Venky in the hall and he'd tell you about it,” says Vahid Tarokh, a professor of electrical engineering. “Person by person, Venky—a one-man army—got everybody on board.”

But convincing the rest of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which had the power to make or break the deal, proved a different matter. Some people, Narayanamurti says, feared that engineering could rapidly swell and begin siphoning money away from other disciplines. So Narayanamurti took to the paths of the Harvard campus and spent six months persuading colleagues in various departments and schools.

Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology and former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, says she found Narayanamurti's arguments credible. “We received assurances that, as in the past, [the engineering school's] faculty and undergraduate and graduate activities would remain closely tied with other parts of the university,” Skocpol says. “This was understood as a welcome evolution rather than any kind of upheaval.”

So when Narayanamurti put the motion before the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on 12 December 2006, he had done his homework. And after the unanimous vote passed, he was ecstatic. It also helps that Harvard's new president, Drew Gilpin Faust, is on board with the plan. In her speech at the school's launch last September, she credited Narayanamurti with maneuvering Harvard toward a more tech-friendly outlook, calling him “the North Star of our engineering galaxy.”

After the Harvard Corporation ratified the engineering plan in February 2007, Narayanamurti created several committees to handle the transition from division to school, dealing with faculty growth, financial issues, collaboration with industry, and even the design for the school's seal. He continues to push for stronger cross-disciplinary collaborations, which he says are made easier by the fact that the school isn't divided into departments.

His vision of a school with few divisional barriers has helped attract new faculty. Capasso, who joined Harvard in 2003, recalls that he had entertained a number of offers from universities, but he “would not at first glance take Harvard very seriously. What changed my mind was that they were putting their money where their mouth was.” In his case, the main attraction was the creation of the Center for Nanoscale Systems, which brought together several Harvard groups and is now based at the new Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering [see photos, “Nanoscience, Megabuilding” and “Underground Research”].

Susan Graham, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former president of the Harvard Board of Overseers who backed the upgrade to school status, notes that the open structure seems to prevent the usual departmental squabbling over resources. “The question now,” she says, “is whether this will scale as they grow.” As Narayanamurti continues to expand the faculty, he says he has been contemplating Graham's question. He says that once the faculty has about 100 full-time professors, the school will reach a “critical mass” to do significant things while remaining a manageable group.