During his opening remarks at the investiture of Provost Steven Lerman as A. James Clark professor of civil and environmental engineering, GW President Steven Knapp delivered a brief history of endowed chairs.
In 1502, Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, endowed divinity professorships at Cambridge and Oxford universities. Nearly 50 years later, Henry VIII established Regius professorships at both universities in divinity, civil law, Hebrew, Greek and physics. Later on, private individuals also started endowing professorships, including one that Isaac Newton held starting in 1669.
The oldest endowed chair at GW dates back to 1832, when an act of Congress created the congressional professorship. In 1872, a bequest from Romeo Elton of Exeter, England, formed the Elton professorship of mental and moral philosophy.
“This afternoon, we’re delighted to continue this tradition with the installation of Dr. Lerman as the second A. James Clark professor of civil and environmental engineering,” Dr. Knapp said, as the first Clark professor, Gideon Frieder, looked on.
A. James Clark, chairman of the board and CEO of Clark Enterprises, who received an honorary doctorate of engineering at last year’s Commencement ceremony, endowed the professorship in 1986. Mr. Clark and his wife, Alice, attended the investiture. Earlier this year, Mr. Clark created the Clark Engineering Scholars program in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
After Dr. Knapp and David Dolling, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, read citations and presented a medal to Dr. Lerman, the provost delivered a lecture titled iLab: Innovations in eLaboratory Software, which focused on a project he worked on at his former institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The iLab program, which began before the word “Internet” was popularized, connected undergraduate students with experiments at labs at universities across the globe. Students at the University of Queensland, for example, could access a lab at MIT remotely and conduct an experiment without having to make the trip to Cambridge, Mass.
In fact, only 4 percent of the students at Queensland who tried out one experiment, balancing a robotic arm, in a lab succeeded, while 73 percent managed to get the robot to balance through an iLab.
There is a lot of value in hands-on experimentation, said Dr. Lerman – who was the first director of Project Athena, which provided computer access to all MIT students – but experiments are expensive. Labs also tend to sit idle most of the time, particularly over the summer.
“How many places have a nuclear reactor just to let students use it?” he said. In fact, MIT has a nuclear reactor, which is part of the iLab project, Dr. Lerman said.
Whereas Dr. Lerman and his colleagues thought of iLabs at first as something elite, well-endowed Western universities would export to the developing world, they discovered that some of the most innovative approaches were coming from iLab clients in Africa, who started creating their own iLabs as well.
Throughout the project, scalability of the iLabs was paramount, Dr. Lerman said, which raises an important question that Dr. Lerman left with the audience.
“Should a company go into business called Labs ‘R’ Us?” he wondered.