James R. Killian

James Rhyne Killian Jr. (born July 24, 1904 in Blacksburg , South Carolina , † January 29, 1988 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was an American science organizer and President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1948 to 1959 .

Life

Killian studied management at MIT with a bachelor's degree in 1926. He was editor of MIT's Technology Review and was instrumental in founding MIT Press in 1932 . In 1939 he became assistant to MIT President Karl Taylor Compton and led MIT's activities during World War II . During this time, MIT grew through extensive involvement in war-related research. From 1948 to 1959 he was the successor to Compton MIT president. He was then chairman of the MIT Corporation until 1971, of which he had been a member since 1945.

1957 to 1959 he was scientific advisor (Special Assistant) to the US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and founder of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). He was thus the first actual scientific advisor to a US president, and that at the time of the so-called Sputnik shock , which led to a massive technological effort by the USA to regain leadership in space travel. 1951 to 1956 he was also Chairman of the Army Scientific Advisory Panel. From 1961 to 1963 he was on the US President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. From 1965 to 1967 he was the head of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, which led to the Public Television Act of 1967, and was director of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from 1968 to 1974.

In 1956 he received the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. In 1980 he was the first recipient of the Vannevar Bush Award and in 1975 the Marconi Prize . He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Fonts

• Sputnik, Scientists and Eisenhower. MIT Press, Cambridge / Massachusetts 1977.
• with Harold E. Edgerton : Flash! Seeing the Unseen by Ultra-High Speed ​​Photography, 1939, 1954
• The Education of a College President, 1985

Web links

• Biography at MIT