Krishna Rajagopal, the William A.M. Burden professor of physics and former chair of the MIT faculty, has been named dean for digital learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the institute said in a July 26 news release.

Rajagopal will assume the post Sept. 1.

I am excited about this new challenge, as I will be helping MIT faculty members take their passions for teaching and learning to new levels in ways that can have long-lasting impact across MIT and around the world, the Indian American educator said in a statement.

Our digital learning efforts already reach thousands of students in MIT classrooms and millions of learners around the world. What makes this an exciting time for education is that as these technologies, as well as research on how people learn, evolve, they are transforming how we teach today, and will do so in ways that we cannot yet see and must invent, he said.

In his role, Rajagopal will lead efforts to empower MIT faculty to use digital technologies to augment and transform how they teach, MIT said.

He is charged with building and strengthening connections between academic departments and the Office of Vice President for Open Learning, to facilitate broad-based engagement and bottom-up change, it added.

Rajagopal will work with vice president for open learning Sanjay Sarma and senior associate dean of digital learning Isaac Chuang on the offices strategy and organization.

Krishna combines his stellar research career with a passion for improving teaching and learning and a remarkable ability to integrate diverse points of views into a unifying vision, Sarma, who made the Rajagopal announcement, said in a statement. In a time of significant changes in education, I am confident that Krishna will offer great guidance for our open learning initiatives. He will work to maintain and enhance MITs position as a leader in providing access to high-quality education around the world, and he will continue to improve teaching at MIT.

Previously, Rajagopal served as associate head for education in the department of physics, where he stewarded the department's undergraduate and graduate educational programs and became known for his dedication to students, the news release said.

Since joining the MIT faculty in 1997, Rajagopal has produced a significant body of research in theoretical physics focused largely on how quarks behave in extraordinary conditions such as the hot quark soup that filled the microseconds-old universe, conditions that provide a test bed for understanding how a complex world emerges from simple underlying laws, MIT said.

His work links nuclear and particle physics, condensed matter physics, astrophysics, and string theory, it added.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2004. He is a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow and won the Everett Moore Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2011 and the Buechner Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1999, according to his bio.

Rajagopal grew up in suburban Toronto after his family moved there from Munich when he was less than 1 year old.

He graduated from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and then earned a doctorate degree at Princeton University. After stints as a junior fellow at Harvard University and a Fairchild Fellow at Caltech he joined the MIT faculty in 1997.

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Physics Professor Krishna Rajagopal Named Dean of Digital ... - India West