11 free courses taught by MIT’s 2025 National Academy of Engineering electees

Learn chemical engineering, electrical engineering, and more with online resources from MIT Open Learning.

(Original article published on Medium by MIT Open Learning on March 26, 2025)

Image: Top row, left to right: Martin Zdenek Bazant, Moshe Ben-Akiva, Charles Cooney, and Yoel Fink. Bottom row, left to right: Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Kristala Prather, Eric Swanson, and Evelyn Wang. Collage: MIT News

Twenty-one members of the MIT community were elected to the National Academy of Engineering for 2025, one of the highest professional distinctions for engineers. Anyone in the world can learn chemical engineering, electrical engineering, and more from these pioneering researchers through MIT Open Learning’s free online courses.

Chemical Engineering

Martin Zdenek Bazant, the E.G. Roos (1944) Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, was honored for contributions to nonlinear electrochemical and electrokinetic phenomena, including induced charge electroosmosis, shock electrodialysis, capacitive desalination, and energy storage applications.

Courses taught by Bazant:

• Analysis of Transport Phenomena
• Electrochemical Energy Systems
• Math Boot Camp for Engineers
• Physics of COVID-19 Transmission
• Random Walks and Diffusion

Charles L. Cooney SM ’67, PhD ’70, professor emeritus of the Department of Chemical Engineering, was honored for contributions to biochemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing that propelled the establishment and growth of the global biotechnology industry.

Course taught by Cooney: Principles and Practice of Drug Development

Kristala L. Prather ’94, the Arthur Dehon Little Professor and head of the Department of Chemical Engineering, was honored for the development of innovative approaches to regulate metabolic flux in engineered microorganisms with applications to specialty chemicals production.

Courses taught by Prather:

• Biochemical Engineering
• Integrated Chemical Engineering Topics I: Introduction to Biocatalysis

Civil engineering

Moshe E. Ben-Akiva SM ’71, PhD ’73, the Edmund K. Turner Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was honored for advances in transportation and infrastructure systems modeling and demand analysis.

Course taught by Ben-Akiva: Transportation Systems Analysis: Demand and Economics

Electrical engineering and computer science

Tomás Lozano-Pérez ’73, SM ’77, PhD ’80, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Excellence in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, was honored for contributions to robot motion planning and molecular design.

Courses taught by Lozano-Pérez:

• Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science I
• Introduction to Machine Learning

This article was adapted from MIT News. Read the original article.