Principal Investigator Diana Chien
Co-investigators Svetlana Boriskina , Jared Berezin , Sean Clarke , Krista Kitowicz , Brian Mernoff , Jacqueline Goldstein , Deanna Montgomery , Erika Reinfeld , Chiara Ricci-Tam , Caitlin Stier , Reza Rahaman
Project Website https://mitcommlab.mit.edu/
Project Start Date July 2013
The Communication Lab is an educational program within the MIT School of Engineering. Our goal is to help engineering students and postdocs learn the technical and professional communication skills they need to achieve their career goals. We do this by training students and postdocs as Communication Fellows, who coach their peers within their departments. In addition to our core service of one-on-one, discipline-specific coaching, the Communication Fellows offer workshops, online articles, and other resources to help trainees build vital skills in written, oral, and visual communication.
In effect, we offer a two-tiered training service: by intensively training the Communication Fellows, we empower them to provide their communities with innovative, grassroots communication support.
The Communication Lab applies a “just in time” learning philosophy to its efforts. We align our services with students’ and postdocs’ authentic communication tasks and deadlines, and work to meet them where they are, literally and figuratively.
The approach to communication emphasizes iteration among a set of strategic questions: communicators must define their audience (Who?) and goals (Why?) for their communication before selecting content (What?) and making choices about organization and presentation (How?).
The Communication Lab was first piloted in 2013 in the Department of Biological Engineering (BE) under the faculty leadership of Professor Eric Alm and Department Head Doug Lauffenburger. BE wanted to provide additional support for its students to learn communication skills, and hired Jaime Goldstein to launch a model centered on discipline-specific peer coaching.
Since 2016, the Communication Lab has been a School of Engineering program within the Gorden Engineering Leadership ecosystem, under the oversight of GEL co-directors Dr. Reza Rahaman, Professor Douglas Hart, and Professor Martha Gray.
Since 2017, the Communication Lab model has also been taught to and adopted by institutions beyond MIT via the Summer Institute training workshop. This has resulted in the formation of the greater Communication Lab Consortium; read more about the Communication Lab Consortium here.
To provide discipline-specific service, the MIT Communication Lab operates through a membership model. Each member department has its own Communication Lab Manager, who customizes the program’s services and outreach to match the needs, culture, and goals of their community. Cross-departmental leadership is provided by the central Program Director. See our current staff here.