Patrick “Pat” Hale SM ’84, former executive director of MIT Method Design and Administration, handed absent on Feb. 4 at the age of 72 soon after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Hale oversaw the progression of SDM from a small experiment to a renowned system in engineering and management.
Hale served in the U.S. Navy for 22 several years. It was in this purpose that he initial arrived to MIT, earning an MS in ocean engineering. Immediately after leaving the Navy, he pursued a occupation in the nascent area of devices engineering. At Otis Elevator Co., Hale served as director of techniques engineering, incorporating most effective practices from the space into the merchandise advancement course of action. Hale served as an marketplace stakeholder in this position in the earliest days of Procedure Structure and Management. He still left Otis in 2002 but continued to operate with SDM, fostering the generation of the Graduate Certification in Devices and Solution Enhancement. In 2004, he was named director of the SDM Fellows System. Hale served as director of SDM until his retirement in 2016.
Over the 12 decades that Hale led SDM, the program underwent a number of important transitions. At the time of its founding, SDM was attended only by enterprise-sponsored students chosen by their employers for more education that would allow them to grow to be complex leaders in just their businesses. In 2005, the software started accepting self-sponsored students who attended without affiliation from a individual organization or organization. Hale also guided the evolution of SDM’s technique to length education and learning. The application started by mailing physical videotapes to learners then navigated the early stages of movie conferencing. Today’s lectures and recitations are executed live and making use of Zoom world-wide-web conferencing computer software in a hybrid format. In 2014 the software released the integrated core, a a few-phrase sequence taken above the to start with 12 months of review. The main system brings together the three pillars of techniques engineering, process architecture, and undertaking administration in a spiral that enables pupils to learn how all three disciplines get the job done jointly to resolve sophisticated complications.
As a result of this long interval of transform, Hale was usually guided by what would be most valuable to the learners. He enjoyed educating and often appeared for possibilities to take part as an instructor, educating classes in systems engineering and item style and development. Further than the broad oversight of the program, Hale was dedicated to guaranteeing his pupils had the finest attainable knowledge at MIT. He constantly had an open up doorway for any college student who may well have to have personalized, educational, or specialist assistance. Alumni of the plan recall him as a light huge who was deeply invested in his students’ good results.
“Pat was a compassionate director and a mentor to the pupils in the software,” says Warren Seering, the Weber-Shaughness Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a school co-director of SDM. “He was instrumental in guiding SDM from a relatively new diploma software to its current position as a strong and aggressive just one, but he created a position of constantly becoming in contact with the learners.”
In addition to his operate with SDM, Hale served in a variety of roles for the International Council on Devices Engineering, including a phrase as president from 2008 to 2010. In a 2006 interview, Hale described his watch on the value of techniques thinking. “Just as systems engineering is cross-disciplinary, our language and designs will have to converge to bridge domains to facilitate understanding and an knowing of what it implies to be a systems engineer,” he explained. “There are lots of most likely precious examples of greatest follow that we fall short to share or understand across industries since of this hole in semantics and it hampers both our companies’ success and our means to teach and produce tomorrow’s systems and item developers. The SDM software is encouraging to address this very important want.”
Hale is survived by his wife Janet his small children, Christopher and spouse Ann Hale, Michael Hale, Erin Write-up, Kerri and husband Kyle Nelson, Christina and spouse Matthew Lounsbury, Benjamin and wife Catherine Gasse Daniel Gasse sisters Diana and partner Henry, Karen and husband Rush and a number of grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. The loved ones asks that donations be made to the Alzheimer’s Affiliation in Hale’s memory.