Kenneth Noble Stevens

On the day in 1954 when Kenneth Noble Stevens was first appointed at MIT as an assistant professor, no one could have predicted the number of scientific careers he would launch, the way he would transform the thinking of his students and colleagues, or the breadth of his influence on acoustic phonetics and beyond. He was a member of the MIT faculty for more than half a century and supervised at least 50 PhD students and an untold number of master’s students, undergraduates, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scientists. His first PhD student was James Flanagan in 1955, and his last one was Youngsook Jung in 2009.