Local boy makes good
MIT has become an increasingly international institution, attracting top technical talent from all over the planet. But Michael Watts, who recently earned tenure in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is as local as they come. Watts grew up in Hingham, Massachusetts, about 20 miles from Cambridge, working summers and vacations for his parents’ flooring and rug company, which his grandfather had founded. As a teen, he once had a job installing flooring at Draper Laboratory, which spun out from the lab of MIT aeronautical engineering professor Charles Stark Draper and has offices a few blocks away from the Kendall/MIT subway station. At Hingham High School, Watts fell under the spell of a physics teacher named Charles Dirk. A former navy officer, Dirk “was a very excitable character,” Watts says. “If somebody didn’t get it, he would get red in the face.” But Watts responded well to Dirk’s teaching style,...