Dean Barbara J. Grosz

by Pat Harrison

She has always been a bit of a rebel, breaking through barriers and boundaries. When Barbara J. Grosz was growing up in a North Philadelphia neighborhood, she and her twin brother would scheme to escape the playpen, having discovered that if one of them held up the mat that covered the hole in the middle, the other could slide through to freedom. Later, they would take turns standing on each other’s shoulders so that they could climb over the fence and flee the backyard: One day she would stand on his shoulders; the next day he would stand on hers.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that with parents who valued education and sent them to a magnet school during that Sputnik era, when science education was a national priority, both Grosz and her brother became scientists and educators. After earning her undergraduate degree in mathematics at Cornell and her PhD in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, Barbara Grosz embarked on a career in research and teaching, and her brother became a physician. Today, he’s an internist and an associate professor on the part-time faculty at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and she is dean of the Radcliffe Institute and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“It gives me another chance to make something happen,” Grosz said when asked why the deanship appealed to her. “I had a wonderful time proving that Radcliffe could attract some of the world’s leading scientists as fellows and bring them to the Harvard community for a year, and we continued to design new programs—such as the Policy Studies Initiative—during my interim deanship. As dean, I intend to extend the Institute’s reach so that it has even more of an impact on the rest of the University and the world at large.”

Making things happen by building research groups and new programs has been the story of Grosz’s career. Before she joined the Harvard faculty in 1986, she was a senior staff scientist and program director at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, where she expanded the natural language processing group from a handful of scientists to almost twenty, broadening the scope of research to include related areas of artificial intelligence.

During her last few years at SRI—where she began as a research mathematician in 1973—Grosz cofounded a research center that was a joint effort of Stanford University, SRI, and Xerox PARC. The Center for the Study of Language and Information has a Radcliffe Institute ring: It brought together computer scientists, philosophers, linguists, and psychologists to examine human and computer languages and language processing in new ways.

When she joined the Harvard faculty, Grosz was the fifth tenured member of the computer science group and the first tenured woman in the history of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Over the years, she has helped build the computer science group to twenty, including one other tenured woman and two junior women. The engineering division is now Harvard’s newest school, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which includes five tenured women.

Clearly, Grosz has again broken through a few barriers: Not only is engineering one of the most male-dominated fields in academia (and industry), but deanships held by women were until recently a rarity at Harvard. Today, Grosz is one of three women deans of the University’s eleven schools. Other schools led by women are the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Law School.

Grosz has also broken down barriers in research, where she looks for new ways to make computers behave more intelligently and builds systems that allow them to act collaboratively. Her research is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing from the fields of linguistics, psychology, economics, and organizational behavior. This past February, she received one of the highest awards possible for an engineer when she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, which cited her for pioneering research in natural language communication between humans and computers.

Removing obstacles so that others can thrive is one of Grosz’s passions. She chaired the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Standing Committee on the Status of Women when it issued its 1991 Report on Women in the Sciences in FAS. Then, in 2005, she chaired Harvard’s Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering. More recently, Grosz can be heard quoting Nancy F. Cott, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, who said in the Winter 2008 issue of the Quarterly that the library’s goal is “to make sure that whenever history is written, women are a central part of the story.” Grosz says, “I would extend that idea to the Institute as a whole—that we make sure women’s contributions in all scholarly, scientific, and artistic areas are recognized and that women’s opportunities are enhanced.”

In general, Grosz believes that the Radcliffe Institute is on solid footing: “By all measures—number and quality of applications, acceptance rate, fellows’ achievements and awards and their contributions to the Harvard community—our fellowship program is strong.” The Schlesinger Library has also thrived over the past several years, she says, broadening the scope of its collections and digitizing materials to make them accessible to researchers throughout the world.

But Grosz doesn’t intend to let the Institute rest on its existing strengths. During her year as interim dean, she began planning the Policy Studies Initiative by convening a committee of faculty members from Harvard’s professional schools and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The committee proposed that scholars and policy leaders form three-year study groups to address such topics as access to clean water, mass migration, and the reform of democratic institutions.

A Short-term Visitors’ Program is another initiative that Grosz will be launching during the coming academic year; it will bring visitors to the Institute to work with Radcliffe fellows and Harvard faculty members for periods of a week to a month. “We’ve already given fellows in our clusters small amounts of funding to bring in visitors for short periods of time,” Grosz says. “Usually these visitors were people who couldn’t spend a whole year here, but who added a lot to the cluster.” The Institute will now make such funding available to fellows more generally and to Harvard faculty members who lead Exploratory and Advanced Seminars, so that they can not only bring groups together for two or three days, but also invite some participants to stay longer or return for a visit if that would be useful.

Asked whether she has any special message for Radcliffe College alumnae, Grosz says with glee, “Radcliffe rocks!” Then, more seriously, she says how thrilled she was during the past year to meet College alumnae who support the Institute. “Very recent alumnae as well as those from their fiftieth reunions told me how proud they are of the institute for advanced study that Radcliffe College has evolved into.”

In Grosz’s view, the Institute is continuing the aims of the College: “The fellows’ program is doing for women and men in all fields of study and in the arts what Radcliffe College used to do for women students—providing the opportunity to work unfettered in a rich intellectual environment, enhancing their careers, and enabling them to be players on the world stage.”

So another chapter begins in the life of the little girl who longed to escape the strictures of the playpen and the backyard—a continuing narrative of climbing to new heights and helping others rise at the same time.

—Pat Harrison is editor of the Radcliffe Quarterly.

Photos by Tony Rinaldo