Exploring Silevitch’s Northeastern Legacy
For more than 40 years, Michael B. Silevitch, Robert D. Black ECE Distinguished Professor, has had a profound impact at Northeastern as an innovative leader of several groundbreaking initiatives such as SENTRY and ALERT, and as an inspiration to faculty, students, alumni, and members of industry.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Ian Thomsen. Main photo: Michael Silevitch “quite simply represents the best of Northeastern,” says Diane Nishigaya MacGillivray, senior vice president for university advancement. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Engineering leadership and innovation: Michael Silevitch’s enduring legacy at Northeastern
Michael Silevitch, a grandson of Russian immigrants who has launched numerous security and educational research initiatives at Northeastern, is one of the university’s longest-tenured and most accomplished professors.
“Michael is a Northeastern institution,” says David Madigan, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. “Perhaps more than any other person, Michael has led our transformation to a global research powerhouse. We are so lucky to have Michael as a colleague and to be able to tap into his boundless energy and wisdom.”
At 81, Silevitch is still going strong while leading a major Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Center of Excellence based at Northeastern. Silevitch is director of SENTRY (Soft Target Engineering to Neutralize the Threat Reality), a coalition of more than 15 universities headed by Northeastern.
Silevitch is also the founding director of an emeritus DHS Center of Excellence, ALERT (Awareness and Localization of Explosives-Related Threats), a center now led by Carey Rappaport, a distinguished professor in electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern.
Silevitch’s success in creating programs that respond to national needs has earned him credibility with DHS, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other sponsoring organizations. He is a public-minded academic who has learned how to fortify his proposals with salesmanship.
“There is a methodology for winning a big award—you’ve got to define its vision and mission succinctly in the format of ‘so what, who cares?’” says Silevitch, the Robert D. Black Professor and distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern. “This definition must make sense to ordinary people, not just research specialists.
“Almost as important is the need to come up with a compelling name,” adds Silevitch of his preference for catchy acronyms. “You’ve got to create a name for the center that will evoke emotion.”
Many lessons have been learned by way of his hard-earned experiences. Silevitch, the son of a Boston window washer, became the first person in his family to attend college when he enrolled at Northeastern in 1960. His self-confidence as a young student was deepened by his response to congenital nystagmus, a condition of small, rapid, uncontrollable eye movements.
“There’s always this underlying jitter in my eyeball that prevents me from seeing sharply,” says Silevitch, whose eyesight peaks at 20-60. “It hampers how fast I can read. I have night blindness and I can never drive a car. It’s part of my life.”
In childhood the condition threatened to limit his future.
“In the Boston schools, grades one through eight, I was essentially in special education classrooms for visually impaired students,” Silevitch says. “In middle school, I was very lucky to have teachers that allowed me to learn at my own pace. As a result, I was able to pass the entrance exam and enrolled in Boston Technical High School, now the John D. O’Bryant High School for Math and Science. I was the rare case of a kid that could break out of special ed and that may have helped shape me—showing that I could do as well in the mainstream as anyone.”
At Northeastern, Silevitch was on his way to earning three electrical-engineering degrees when he was introduced to the (Richard) Feynman Lectures on Physics, which inspired him to pursue a dual Ph.D. in that discipline. As a result, he would merge the fields to devise breakthroughs in dense plasma dynamics. After completing his Ph.D. he was hired as an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Northeastern in 1971.
After a yearlong sabbatical in 1973-74, spent working for the French government in Nice, Silevitch returned home and at 29 became one of Northeastern’s youngest tenured full professors. At that point he decided to shift his focus by pursuing large-scale research opportunities for the university.
“Creating a non-traditional Ph.D. taught me not to be afraid to tackle new problems,” he says of his interdisciplinary approach. “Having a background both in electrical engineering and physics prepared me for what I was able to do in my career.”
Making a stand
Two of Silevitch’s proposals have been made through NSF’s Industry–University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC) program, resulting in Northeastern-based centers that have been funded by a coalition of industry partners and the federal government.
In the early 1980s, he began pursuing large-scale research opportunities in the midst of the computing boom led by Apple and other manufacturers. Instead of following that trend, Silevitch pursued an alternative mission.
“I realized that a lot of the technology that we need for our country’s defense was not computer-based but was electromagnetics-based, including high-powered microwave tubes and phased array antennas for radar,” Silevitch says.
His initial IUCRC proposal would result in a Center for Electromagnetics Research (CER) at Northeastern. The preparation of the proposal earned backing from the Pentagon as well as from Raytheon, Textron and other companies. But the NSF reviews of his proposal were surprisingly negative. Silevitch says the negative response was based on Northeastern’s lack of experience and reputation as a high-level research university at that time.
“That rejection was a devastating experience for me,” Silevitch recalls. “After recovering from the emotional impact we went back to NSF and said, ‘These reviews are prejudicial. They’re false. They’re making statements that are not based on facts.’”
“As a result, NSF overturned their prior decision. We got funded. And we (Northeastern) never looked back.”
“It was a major first step for Northeastern proving that we can compete on a national level,” Silevitch says of the CER. “We created a center that flourished for 10 years. It was a wonderful thing for a lot of students and faculty—we hired 10 faculty members in the area of electromagnetics.”
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