Dr. Richard C. Larson

Dr. Larson is Mitsui Professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Dr. Larson has focused his research and practice on the services sector, primarily in the fields of technology-enabled education, urban service systems, queueing, logistics and workforce planning. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

From 1995 to mid 2003, Dr. Larson served as Founding Director of MIT's CAES, Center for Advanced Educational Services. Dr. Larson's position at CAES focused on bringing technology-enabled learning to students living on the traditional campus and to those living and working far from the university. He built the center from two to seven business units, encompassing MIT's production and R&D capabilities in educational technologies and its two major lifelong learning academic programs. He has been invited to give lectures on the future of technology-enabled education in testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science (Washington, D.C.) and in many countries. He was founder, with Glenn Strehle, of MIT World. http://mitworld.mit.edu.  He is founding Director of LINC, http://linc.mit.edu Learning International Networks Consortium, an MIT-based international project that has held five international symposia and sponsored a number of initiatives in Africa, China and the Middle East. With Elizabeth Murray, Dr. Larson directs LINC's newest initiative, BLOSSOMS, Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies http://blossoms.mit.edu. On behalf of LINC, his recent foreign trips have been to China, Japan, Senegal, Indonesia, Algeria, Pakistan, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Lebanon and the UAE. From 1999 through 2004, Dr. Larson served as founding co-director of the Forum the Internet and the University — a not-for-profit organization affiliated with the Forum for the Future of Higher Education.