When Francis Wang ’21, MEng ’22 first joined the MIT Edgerton Center’s Solar Electric Vehicle Team (SEVT), his approach to engineering projects was “to focus my energy and attention on a tidy problem with neat boundaries that I could completely control.”

“But on Solar Car, I realized it takes a very different mindset to manage a substantial project with many moving pieces. It takes engineering leadership,” he recalls.

Wang was determined to strengthen his leadership skills. When he became Solar Car captain, he applied and was accepted into the Gordon Engineering Leadership (GEL) Program.

GEL’s courses and hands-on labs equip students with capabilities they need to lead and contribute to complex, real-world engineering challenges. The one- or two-year program for juniors and seniors complements MIT’s technical education, teaching teamwork, leadership, and communication skills in an engineering context. GEL students also benefit from personalized coaching, mentoring, industry networking, and career support throughout their professional lives.

“Before GEL, I saw the leadership parts of my role as a necessary evil to get to the actual interesting parts, which was the engineering,” says Wang. “The GEL Program gave me an understanding of how engineering leadership is crucial, because in the real world any project worth working on is larger than the scope of an individual engineer.”

In GEL he improved capabilities such as decision-making, taking initiative, and negotiating. He became a more effective SEVT team captain, able to navigate the challenges of taking an engineering project from concept to completion.

“It was often the case that the challenges I faced on Solar Car were not solely technical, involving aspects of communication, coordination, and negotiation. From GEL, I had the framework and the language to approach them,” says Wang.

Each year, 30-40 Edgerton students are accepted into the GEL Program. They come from a variety of teams and clubs including Arcturus, Assistive Technology Club, ChemE Club, Combat Robotics Club, Design Build Fly (DBF), Design for America, Electric Vehicle Team, Engineers Without Borders, First Nations Launch, MIT Electronics Research Society (MITERS), Motorsports, Robotics Team, Rocket Team, and Solar Electric Vehicle Team (SEVT).

“MIT’s best engineering students have GEL training and authentic project management experience with our competition teams,” says Professor J. Kim Vandiver, director of the Edgerton Center.

Edgerton project teams are entirely student-run organizations responsible for all levels of project and team management including fundraising, recruiting, designing, testing, risk mitigation, and project validation. The most successful teams have skilled leaders.

“Many of the excellent Edgerton project team students admitted to GEL are team or sub-team leaders who credit their GEL experience, particularly the experiential learning component, with improving their leadership skills,” says Leo McGonagle, executive director of GEL.

“It’s a win-win-win. GEL gets hard-working, motivated Edgerton Program students who are intent on self-development and improvement. Edgerton project teams often perform better with leaders who are GEL-trained. And the students gain leadership, teamwork, and communication abilities that they can use beyond their project team — in their capstones, course projects, internships, and jobs after MIT,” says McGonagle.

The overlapping connection between GEL and Edgerton truly becomes obvious when students begin to take ownership of project milestones.

“When you become the leader of a technical project, no one gives you a roadmap to team success,” says senior Hailey Polson, former captain of First Nations Launch team. “Technical expertise is not enough to leverage the talent and skills of an entire team or the ability to coordinate a multifaceted project; that’s where the tools, skills, and leadership theory I learned in GEL helped me bridge the gap between knowing how to accomplish our goals and actually leading my team successfully.”

Faris Elnager ’25 served as testing lead on the Motorsports team, which designs, manufactures, and competes with a formula-style electric race car every year.

“Making tough decisions was something that I learned in GEL. On Motorsports, I had to make high-stakes decisions about testing time that affected how we performed at a competition,” he says.

He found that GEL’s weekly Engineering Leadership Labs were a way to test for himself specific leadership capabilities that he could use to improve his Motorsports team.

“One of the most useful skills from GEL was evaluating your stakeholders and learning how to balance their needs. I remember thinking, we’re doing this right now in the [GEL] lab, and then we’re going back to the [Edgerton] shop to do this for real!” says Elnager. “It’s like a positive feedback loop. GEL labs make you better on project teams, and project teams make you better in GEL.”

Now a startup co-founder, Elnager says that the communication skills that he learned through Motorsports and GEL have been critical to his company’s early success. “You can build the best tech in the world. If you can’t pitch it to people, you’re never going to raise any money. Being able to explain a technical project to anyone, whether they're an investor or someone in your industry, is something that’s incredibly valuable.”

Adrienne Lai ’25 served as both mechanical lead and then captain of the Solar Electric Vehicle Team. She recalls how her GEL training would kick in on race day.

“It’s quite tricky to be captain of a build team, because there’s no adult to tell you what to do. You have to figure it all out for yourself. When you’re competing, it can be very chaotic. You are trying to maximize a score by driving more miles, but that comes with a trade-off of spending energy or ending the day in a more rural area, or with less sun, so there are a lot of trade-offs to consider. Sometimes someone just has to make a decision. I was very comfortable doing that because I had learned how to take initiative, which is one of the GEL capabilities,” she says.

Now a course assistant in GEL, Lai helps design scenarios that enable GEL students to become better and more resilient leaders. She particularly enjoys playing the role of an uncooperative supplier.

“We close our store randomly. We don’t have what they need. We won’t tell them what we have,” she laughs. “Students get very frustrated. They think that we’re just being mean. But from a real-world perspective, that is all very true. It simulates unpredictability, which is important not just in a job, but in life.”

The value of the engineering leadership skills learned in GEL and honed on Edgerton project teams carries forward into industry, graduate studies, and entrepreneurial ventures.

“GEL preparation, coupled with authentic project management on a competition team, prepares MIT students for great careers in industry,” says Vandiver.

Henry Smith ’25 says he still relies on skills such as negotiation, communication, and understanding stakeholder needs that he used when he was a Motorsports mechanical lead.

“I was doing high-level management, planning, and organization on the team. Being in the GEL Program really increased my value for the team and helped me be prepared to enter the job field. When I graduated, I wasn’t worried about being ready or not. It was a definite yes,” says Smith.

As project teams continue to address ambitious engineering challenges, the synergy between Edgerton and the Gordon Engineering Leadership (GEL) Program ensures that as students graduate, they’re prepared to not only become strong technical contributors, but confident leaders prepared to tackle complex engineering problems in the real world.

The MIT Sailing Pavilion hosted an altogether different marine vessel recently: a prototype of a solar electric boat developed by James Worden ’89, the founder of the MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team (SEVT). Worden visited the pavilion on a sizzling, sunny day in late July to offer students from the SEVT, the MIT Edgerton Center, MIT Sea Grant, and the broader community an inside look at the Anita, named for his late wife.

Worden’s fascination with solar power began at age 10, when he picked up a solar chip at a “hippy-like” conference in his hometown of Arlington, Massachusetts. “My eyes just lit up,” he says. He built his first solar electric vehicle in high school, fashioned out of cardboard and wood (taking first place at the 1984 Massachusetts Science Fair), and continued his journey at MIT, founding SEVT in 1986. It was through SEVT that he met his wife and lifelong business partner, Anita Rajan Worden ’90. Together, they founded two companies in the solar electric and hybrid vehicles space, and in 2022 launched a solar electric boat company.

On the Charles River, Worden took visitors for short rides on Anita, including a group of current SEVT students who peppered him with questions. The 20-foot pontoon boat, just 12 feet wide and 7 feet tall, is made of carbon fiber composites, single crystalline solar photovoltaic cells, and lithium iron phosphate battery cells. Ultimately, Worden envisions the prototype could have applications as mini-ferry boats and water taxis.

With warmth and humor, he drew parallels between the boat’s components and mechanics and those of the solar cars the students are building. “It’s fun! If you think about all the stuff you guys are doing, it’s all the same stuff,” he told them, “optimizing all the different systems and making them work.” He also explained the design considerations unique to boating applications, like refining the hull shape for efficiency and maneuverability in variable water and wind conditions, and the critical importance of protecting wiring and controls from open water and condensate.

“Seeing Anita in all its glory was super cool,” says Nicole Lin, vice captain of SEVT. “When I first saw it, I could immediately map the different parts of the solar car to its marine counterparts, which was astonishing to see how far I’ve come as an engineer with SEVT. James also explained the boat using solar car terms, as he drew on his experience with solar cars for his solar boats. It blew my mind to see the engineering we learned with SEVT in action.”

Over the years, the Wordens have been avid supporters of SEVT and the Edgerton Center, so the visit was, in part, a way to pay it forward to MIT. “There’s a lot of connections,” he says. He’s still awed by the fact that Harold “Doc” Edgerton, upon learning about his interest in building solar cars, carved out a lab space for him to use in Building 20 — as a first-year student. And a few years ago, as Worden became interested in marine vessels, he tapped Sea Grant Education Administrator Drew Bennett for a 90-minute whiteboard lecture, “MIT fire-hose style,” on hydrodynamics. “It was awesome!” he says.

Across a career’s worth of pioneering product designs, Doug Field’s work has shaped the experience of anyone who’s ever used a MacBook Air, ridden a Segway, or driven a Tesla Model 3.

But his newest project is his most ambitious yet: reinventing the Ford automobile, one of the past century’s most iconic pieces of technology.

As Ford’s chief electric vehicle (EV), digital, and design officer, Field is tasked with leading the development of the company’s electric vehicles, while making new software platforms central to all Ford models.

To bring Ford Motor Co. into that digital and electric future, Field effectively has to lead a fast-moving startup inside the legacy carmaker. “It is incredibly hard, figuring out how to do ‘startups’ within large organizations,” he concedes.

If anyone can pull it off, it’s likely to be Field. Ever since his time in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations (then known as “Leaders in Manufacturing”) program studying organizational behavior and strategy, Field has been fixated on creating the conditions that foster innovation.

“The natural state of an organization is to make it harder and harder to do those things: to innovate, to have small teams, to go against the grain,” he says. To overcome those forces, Field has become a master practitioner of the art of curating diverse, talented teams and helping them flourish inside of big, complex companies.

“It’s one thing to make a creative environment where you can come up with big ideas,” he says. “It’s another to create an execution-focused environment to crank things out. I became intrigued with, and have been for the rest of my career, this question of how can you have both work together?”

Three decades after his first stint as a development engineer at Ford Motor Co., Field now has a chance to marry the manufacturing muscle of Ford with the bold approach that helped him rethink Apple’s laptops and craft Tesla’s Model 3 sedan. His task is nothing less than rethinking how cars are made and operated, from the bottom up.

“If it’s only creative or execution, you’re not going to change the world,” he says. “If you want to have a huge impact, you need people to change the course you’re on, and you need people to build it.”

A passion for design

From a young age, Field had a fascination with automobiles. “I was definitely into cars and transportation more generally,” he says. “I thought of cars as the place where technology and art and human design came together — cars were where all my interests intersected.”

With a mother who was an artist and musician and an engineer father, Field credits his parents’ influence for his lifelong interest in both the aesthetic and technical elements of product design. “I think that’s why I’m drawn to autos — there’s very much an aesthetic aspect to the product,” he says. 

After earning a degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University, Field took a job at Ford in 1987. The big Detroit automakers of that era excelled at mass-producing cars, but weren’t necessarily set up to encourage or reward innovative thinking. Field chafed at the “overstructured and bureaucratic” operational culture he encountered.

The experience was frustrating at times, but also valuable and clarifying. He realized that he “wanted to work with fast-moving, technology-based businesses.”

“My interest in advancing technical problem-solving didn’t have a place in the auto industry” at the time, he says. “I knew I wanted to work with passionate people and create something that didn’t exist, in an environment where talent and innovation were prized, where irreverence was an asset and not a liability. When I read about Silicon Valley, I loved the way they talked about things.”

During that time, Field took two years off to enroll in MIT’s LGO program, where he deepened his technical skills and encountered ideas about manufacturing processes and team-driven innovation that would serve him well in the years ahead.

“Some of core skill sets that I developed there were really, really important,” he says, “in the context of production lines and production processes.” He studied systems engineering and the use of Monte Carlo simulations to model complex manufacturing environments. During his internship with aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, he worked on automated design in computer-aided design (CAD) systems, long before those techniques became standard practice.

Another powerful tool he picked up was the science of probability and statistics, under the tutelage of MIT Professor Alvin Drake in his legendary course 6.041/6.431 (Probabilistic Systems Analysis). Field would go on to apply those insights not only to production processes, but also to characterizing variability in people’s aptitudes, working styles, and talents, in the service of building better, more innovative teams. And studying organizational strategy catalyzed his career-long interest in “ways to look at innovation as an outcome, rather than a random spark of genius.”

“So many things I was lucky to be exposed to at MIT,” Field says, were “all building blocks, pieces of the puzzle, that helped me navigate through difficult situations later on.”

Learning while leading

After leaving Ford in 1993, Field worked at Johnson and Johnson Medical for three years in process development. There, he met Segway inventor Dean Kamen, who was working on a project called the iBOT, a gyroscopic powered wheelchair that could climb stairs.

When Kamen spun off Segway to develop a new personal mobility device using the same technology, Field became his first hire. He spent nearly a decade as the firm’s chief technology officer.

At Segway, Field’s interests in vehicles, technology, innovation, process, and human-centered design all came together.

“When I think about working now on electric cars, it was a real gift,” he says. The problems they tackled prefigured the ones he would grapple with later at Tesla and Ford. “Segway was very much a precursor to a modern EV. Completely software controlled, with higher-voltage batteries, redundant systems, traction control, brushless DC motors — it was basically a miniature Tesla in the year 2000.”

At Segway, Field assembled an “amazing” team of engineers and designers who were as passionate as he was about pushing the envelope. “Segway was the first place I was able to hand-pick every single person I worked with, define the culture, and define the mission.”

As he grew into this leadership role, he became equally engrossed with cracking another puzzle: “How do you prize people who don’t fit in?”

“Such a fundamental part of the fabric of Silicon Valley is the love of embracing talent over a traditional organization’s ways of measuring people,” he says. “If you want to innovate, you need to learn how to manage neurodivergence and a very different set of personalities than the people you find in large corporations.”

Field still keeps the base housing of a Segway in his office, as a reminder of what those kinds of teams — along with obsessive attention to detail — can achieve.

Before joining Apple in 2008, he showed that component, with its clean lines and every minuscule part in its place in one unified package, to his prospective new colleagues. “They were like, “OK, you’re one of us,’” he recalls.

He soon became vice president of hardware development for all Mac computers, leading the teams behind the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro and eventually overseeing more than 2,000 employees. “Making things really simple and really elegant, thinking about the product as an integrated whole, that really took me into Apple.”

The challenge of giving the MacBook Air its signature sleek and light profile is an example.

“The MacBook Air was the first high-volume consumer electronic product built out of a CNC-machined enclosure,” says Field. He worked with industrial design and technology teams to devise a way to make the laptop from one solid piece of aluminum and jettison two-thirds of the parts found in the iMac. “We had material cut away so that every single screw and piece of electronics sat down into it an integrated way. That’s how we got the product so small and slim.”

“When I interviewed with Jony Ive” — Apple’s legendary chief design officer — “he said your ability to zoom out and zoom in was the number one most important ability as a leader at Apple.” That meant zooming out to think about “the entire ethos of this product, and the way it will affect the world” and zooming all the way back in to obsess over, say, the physical shape of the laptop itself and what it feels like in a user’s hands.

“That thread of attention to detail, passion for product, design plus technology rolled directly into what I was doing at Tesla,” he says. When Field joined Tesla in 2013, he was drawn to the way the brash startup upended the approach to making cars. “Tesla was integrating digital technology into cars in a way nobody else was. They said, ‘We’re not a car company in Silicon Valley, we’re a Silicon Valley company and we happen to make cars.’”

Field assembled and led the team that produced the Model 3 sedan, Tesla’s most affordable vehicle, designed to have mass-market appeal.

That experience only reinforced the importance, and power, of zooming in and out as a designer — in a way that encompasses the bigger human resources picture.

“You have to have a broad sense of what you’re trying to accomplish and help people in the organization understand what it means to them,” he says. “You have to go across and understand operations enough to glue all of those (things) together — while still being great at and focused on something very, very deeply. That’s T-shaped leadership.”

He credits his time at LGO with providing the foundation for the “T-shaped leadership” he practices.

“An education like the one I got at MIT allowed me to keep moving that ‘T’, to focus really deep, learn a ton, teach as much as I can, and after something gets more mature, pull out and bed down into other areas where the organization needs to grow or where there’s a crisis.”

The power of marrying scale to a “startup mentality”

In 2018, Field returned to Apple as a vice president for special projects. “I left Tesla after Model 3 and Y started to ramp, as there were people better than me to run high-volume manufacturing,” he says. “I went back to Apple hoping what Tesla had learned would motivate Apple to get into a different market.”

That market was his early love: cars. Field quietly led a project to develop an electric vehicle at Apple for three years.

Then Ford CEO Jim Farley came calling. He persuaded Field to return to Ford in late 2021, partly by demonstrating how much things had changed since his first stint as the carmaker.

“Two things came through loud and clear,” Field says. “One was humility. ‘Our success is not assured.’” That attitude was strikingly different from Field’s early experience in Detroit, encountering managers who were resistant to change. “The other thing was urgency. Jim and Bill Ford said the exact same thing to me: ‘We have four or five years to completely remake this company.’”

“I said, ‘OK, if the top of company really believes that, then the auto industry may be ready for what I hope to offer.’”

So far, Field is energized and encouraged by the appetite for reinvention he’s encountered this time around at Ford.

“If you can combine what Ford does really well with what a Tesla or Rivian can do well, this is something to be reckoned with,” says Field. “Skunk works have become one of the fundamental tools of my career,” he says, using an industry term that describes a project pursued by a small, autonomous group of people within a larger organization.

Ford has been developing a new, lower-cost, software-enabled EV platform — running all of the car’s sensors and components from a central digital operating system — with a “skunk works” team for the past two years. The company plans to build new sedans, SUVs, and small pickups based on this new platform.

With other legacy carmakers like Volvo racing into the electric future and fierce competition from EV leaders Tesla and Rivian, Field and his colleagues have their work cut out for them.

If he succeeds, leveraging his decades of learning and leading from LGO to Silicon Valley, then his latest chapter could transform the way we all drive — and secure a spot for Ford at the front of the electric vehicle pack in the process.

“I’ve been lucky to feel over and over that what I’m doing right now — they are going to write a book about it,” say Field. “This is a big deal, for Ford and the U.S. auto industry, and for American industry, actually.”

While siblings Kevin Chan ’17 and rising senior Monica Chan may be seven years apart in age, as Monica Chan puts it, “we’re eight grades apart, so, like, eight life-years apart.”

Despite this age gap — Kevin left for college when Monica was in fifth grade — the siblings share remarkably similar experiences and interests. Both led subteams on the MIT Motorsports team, albeit eight years apart. Kevin was the electrical systems lead from 2015 to 2017, and Monica is the current software lead.

Founded in 2001 by Rich James ’04, SM '06 and Nick Gidwani ’04, and supported by the Edgerton Center, MIT Motorsports designs and builds a high-caliber Formula SAE car to race in yearly competitions. Over the past 23 years, MIT Motorsports has built 19 cars, won 10 trophies, and has had hundreds of team members. Alumni are die-hard fans and established an endowed fund for their 20th anniversary to ensure the team’s longevity. In 2017, Kevin’s team won Second Place Overall at the Formula SAE Electric competition in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Kevin was one of two electrical engineering students on the team, and today Monica oversees a subteam of 10 students. The subteam expansion has facilitated the development of a custom telemetry system. “You can view live data coming off of the car that’s transmitted through radio, and we have a custom dashboard that we created with a custom PCB that transmits all that data now,” Monica says. 

“It’s so funny to hear Monica talking about this, because when I was on the team, our UI [user interface] for the driver and everything was so simple. It was just a little, single-line display that showed the max cell temperature and minimum cell voltage,” Kevin chuckles. “And then we literally had a sticky note on the dashboard that was like, do not go above this temperature. Do not go below this voltage.”

While at MIT, Kevin kept up with his sister weekly, updating her on everything happening at Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (FSAE). “A big piece of advice Kevin gave me when I was a junior in high school was that you’re never too young to do something amazing,” Monica says. “He told me back then that ‘you're not going to be much smarter two years from now than you are now.’ That piece of advice helped me get through high school and pushed me to do my best to do the hard and difficult things because indeed, it’s more about the personal qualities you have that push you to do the hard projects. Knowledge can always be acquired, but the drive is the harder part.”

Traditions are part of the fabric of the team culture. Their team stretch at the end of every meeting is an enduring tradition. “Everyone just extends their arms out while standing up and then does a squat. Then, they clap. This is just a thing that has been done on the team since before I was on the team. They said that the origin of it was the stretch that Japanese autoworkers do at the beginning of the day to stretch out their jumpsuits in the factory and make the knees a little bit more flexible. And it’s just fascinating, because this stretch is now almost 20 years old on the team,” Kevin says.

“Hitting Roman,” the day the car first rolls, is an important milestone. “When I was on the team, we were convinced that saying that the car was going to run was bad luck,” Kevin says. “We were trying to come up with a new term to replace the term ‘running car’ because we thought that saying the words ‘running car’ would make it so that the car never ran. So instead of calling it a running car, we called it ‘Roman Chariot.’” The name stuck, and Monica’s team hit Roman in April.

For Kevin, the spirit of Motorsports remains ever-present, as he shares his home with four Motorsports alums and collaborates with three Motorsports alums at Tesla, where he serves as a staff energy systems design/architecture engineer.

“FSAE and the Edgerton Center played a huge role in jump starting my career and my internships. I think there’s not many places where you can get both the breadth and the depth of the design process,” Kevin says.

For Monica, “Race car puts many things in perspective where you implement a lot of the things that you learn in class into a physical project. Sometimes I learn things through race car before I learn them in class. And then when I go back to class, it gives me a better physical intuition for how something works because I have experience implementing it.”

The team recently returned from the Formula Hybrid competition in Loudon, New Hampshire, where they finished first in design, first in scrutineering [mandatory technical, safety, and administrative checks], second in acceleration, third in the racing challenge, fourth in project management, and fifth overall. Edgerton Center Technical Instructor Pat McAtamney reports, “I’ve never seen a team complete a brakes test in one try.”