Over the weekend MIT named one of its buildings in honor of one of its alumni: the current CEO and chair of AMD, Dr. Lisa Su.
The Lisa T. Su Building, formerly Building 12, serves as the campus’s open-access facility for nanoscale science and engineering and was built in 2018. It houses the MIT.nano Immersion Lab, which is dedicated to “visualizing, understanding, and interacting with large, multidimensional data” and prototyping tools for AR and VR.
Dr. Su said in a tweet that she was “honored to be part of such an amazing place where the future of nano will be discovered, and the next leaders will be trained.”
Dr. Su got her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at MIT in the ’90s. Dr. Su has become one of the most powerful women in tech in her current role as head honcho at AMD. Other accomplishments include being the first woman to ever receive the prestigious IEEE Noyce Medal for her work at MIT, IBM, and AMD.
The president of MIT, L. Rafael Reif, explained in a statement why Dr. Su’s name belongs on the building:
“Well-known, admired, and respected as a visionary leader for her transformation of AMD, Lisa Su is enabling MIT.nano to expand the boundaries of research and innovation at the nanoscale. Researchers dedicated to inventing new, science-based solutions for the most urgent challenges are drawn to the vibrant, collaborative community of MIT.nano that the Lisa T. Su Building now holds.”
According to a former professor, technical recipes developed during Dr. Su’s Ph.D. studies are still being “followed by new student researchers utilizing MIT’s shared tool sets for nanofabrication.”
“MIT has played an incredibly important role in my life,” Dr. Su told MIT. “I am honored and extremely pleased to be able to impact the next generation of students and researchers. There is no substitute for hands-on learning, and I hope that MIT.nano will enable and develop the best and brightest technologists and innovators in the future.”
Dr. Su shares this honor with other tech heavyweights like Cecil Green, co-founder of Texas Instruments, and Robert Noyce, co-founder of Intel and the first person to make an integrated microchip. According to MIT, Su is the first alumna “to make a gift for a building that will bear her own name.”
