2011 Honorary Degree Citation
Henry Ignatius Smith '58
Doctor of Science
If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, Matthew’s gospel proclaims, you can move mountains, and nothing will be impossible for you.
Seeing possibilities in the most miniscule structures—in things even too small to imagine—is the basis for your extraordinary scientific career. Through your work, you have changed our world, revolutionizing a remarkable number of fields, from the medical industry to computer technology to aerospace.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where you have taught thousands of students over a 34-year career and now hold the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Chair in Electrical Engineering, you are an internationally recognized pioneer in nanoscience. Through your research and innovations, you have vastly improved the performance of computers and all manner of electronic devices by shrinking their size and therefore improving their speed and efficiency.
In 1985 your lab produced the smallest transistors ever made. The shortest channel lengths at that time were about 17 times longer than those of the new, tiny transistors—two millionths of an inch.
You revolutionized lithography, a 400-year-old process for printing illustrations, more recently used for reproducing the chemical patterns in the manufacturing of integrated circuits. By substituting sharply focused x-rays for normal light, you developed features only 100 atoms thick. These emerging techniques have massive ramifications for commercial applications, research and more.
Your work with submicron technology has earned great honors that place you in a very small group; less than one percent of engineers win awards from the Electrochemical Society or become Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, as you have done. Even fewer are elevated to the National Academy of Engineering, which singles out the most significant contributions to engineering and technology.
That all may know of your achievements in science, your record of innovation and invention and your commitment to teaching, for finding the power to change the world in the tiniest of elements, and for reminding us that with a bit of faith, we can move mountains, the College of the Holy Cross confers upon you this day the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa.