In 2006, when Tomás Palacios completed his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he was torn between taking a job in academia or in industry.

“I wanted to make sure that the new ideas that we were generating could find a path toward society,” says Palacios, the newly tenured Emmanuel E. Landsman Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. “In industry, I was sure that would happen; I was not sure how it would work in academia.

“What I found when I came here is that MIT is really an amazing place to get all these new ideas out and to collaborate with industry to make sure that the new concepts and new ideas coming out of the university environment find their place in real products and applications,” adds Palacios.

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