Professor Jack P. Ruina

Born in Rypin, Poland, he was the son of Nechuma Warshaw and Michael Ruina. Hewas brought to the United States by his parents in 1927 at the age of four, and became a naturalized citizen in 1932. He did his undergraduate work at the City College of New York and his graduate work at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, earning his MEE and DEE degrees there. He was granted the Outstanding Alumnus Award from both colleges. From 1948 to 1950 he was a research Fellow at the Microwave Research Institute of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, after which he was an Instructor, Assistant Professor, and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Brown University until 1954. From 1954 to 1963 he was at the University of Illinois' Coordinated Science Laboratory as a Research Associate Professor, a Research Professor and Professor of Electrical Engineering. He was Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1963 until 1997 and currently is a Professor Emeritus at MIT. From 1964 to 1966, during a two-year leave of absence from MIT, he served as President of the Institute for Defense Analysis in Arlington, Virginia. At about the time that he assumed this position, the organization was achieving great notoriety from publicity concerning two of its studies, Phoenix and Fair, which were the product of the leftist wing of the American scientific community. In their full context, the two studies were pleas that appeasement measures bordering upon surrender become fundamental United States diplomatic and military policies vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. From 1966 to 1970, he was also Vice President for special laboratories at MIT. He served in positions at the U.S. Department of Defense, including Deputy for Research to the Assistant Secretary of Research and Engineering of the U.S. Air Force, Assistant Director of Defense Research and Engineering for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. In 1961, he received the Arthur S. Flemming Award as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men in Government. In 1969, he participated in a Pugwash Conference, a meeting of American Scientists with Soviet scientists and government officials. He served on government committees, including a presidential appointment to the General Advisory Committee, 1969 to 1977, and acting as Senior Consultant to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 1977 to 1980. He has served as a Board member of the MITRE Corporation (a not-for-profit organization chartered to work in the public interest) since 1967. From 1992 - 1997, he served as Vice Chairman of the Board and in 1997, he was made an honorary member of the Board of Trustees. He is the editor of the book The Nuclear Age Reader (with Jeffrey Porro and Carl Kaysen, 1988). He delivered a speech regarding military superiority to the American Academy of Sciences, entitled The Nuclear Arms Race: Diagnosis and Treatment, printed in the October, 1988 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,