A lifelong relationship with the Institute
While Evelyn Wang ’00, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, attended MIT as an undergraduate, her connection to the Institute goes back much further than that: This is where her parents met, as graduate students from Taiwan, and married, in the MIT Chapel. So ending up on the mechanical engineering faculty here at the Institute, where Wang earned tenure this year, felt like “coming full circle,” she says. “Growing up, we always heard a lot about MIT.” Wang grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., near the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles, where her father, Kang Wang SM ’66, PhD ’70, is still a professor of electrical engineering. “He’s inspired me into academics in many ways,” she says. Her parents “focused a lot on our education, but they also wanted us to be well-rounded,” Wang recalls. “We traveled a lot, and they always felt that we should play music.” Wang...