Franklin Moss ’71
Weston, MA

At-Large Candidate
 
“When I turned 50 I decided to dramatically redirect my energies from starting and building software companies, which had been my occupation and obsession for 25 years, to exploring ways to improve the quality of life for people throughout the world,” says Frank Moss.  Currently Director of the MIT Media Lab and Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, Moss describes this phase of his life as “venturing out of my comfort zone into new and totally unfamiliar territories.”
           
For most of his career, Moss has been immersed in the hi-tech start-up world where he has served as entrepreneur and CEO many times over.  His list of start-ups is extensive and includes Apollo Computer, Bowstreet, Lotus Development, Stellar Computer and Tivoli Systems, which he took public in 1995 before selling to IBM in 1996. From 1998 until last year he served as President of Strategic Software Ventures,   which assists in the growth and development of next generation internet companies.
           
The new millennium brought a new focus for Moss.  “In 2000, inspired by the project to map the human genome, I began to explore how information technology could accelerate the process of discovering the causes and cures for disease,” he says.  This led him to co-found Infinity Pharmaceuticals, which employs “innovative information technology to speed novel cancer drugs into clinical trial in record time,” explains Moss. “Witnessing our drugs give patients hope for their future has been the greatest reward of my career.”  At the same time he became an advisor to Harvard Medical School, chairing its committee for the creation of the university’s Systems Biology Department.
           
Last year Moss made his leap into the academic world official when he accepted his current position at MIT.   The Media Lab is “an extraordinarily creative environment for research in technology applied at the human level, and it is renowned for its role in inspiring the digital lifestyle revolution which we enjoy today,” says Moss. “Looking to the future I have refocused the Lab to address many of the critical problems facing society around the globe, beginning with the disabled, the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised.”  Under Moss’s leadership the Media Lab is developing lifelike bionic limbs for amputees; social-emotional prosthetics for individuals with autism; and sociable robots that enable the aging to live independently. 
           
Moss earned his BS in aerospace and mechanical sciences from Princeton in 1971 and his MS and PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT.  After graduating from MIT he joined IBM—first in Israel at the IBM Science Center and later in New York—where he led research and development projects in computer networks before launching his computer and software start-up career.  His accomplishments have garnered him numerous honors, including an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 1995.  He was named a Forbes magazine “Leaders for Tomorrow” in 2000 and was listed among Computer Reseller News’s “Top 20 Entrepreneurs to Watch for” in 2001.
           
Moss has also devoted considerable time to volunteer work at Princeton where he served on the Computer Science Advisory Committee for four years and currently serves on the Leadership Council of the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS).  He has also been an Annual Giving solicitor and a Reunion Alumni-Faculty Forum panelist.
           
If Moss’s former “occupation and obsession” was the computer start-up industry, his current passion is the forging of new solutions to age-old medical and social problems, through the application of innovative technology.  Of his work at MIT he says, “Our goal is to bring the benefits of technology not just to the next billion people of the world but to the last billion people as well.”  And in exchange for advising and mentoring MIT students, he says, “I get to absorb their energy and optimism for the future.”