Bill Bonvillian

Biography 

William B. Bonvillian is a Lecturer at MIT, and a Senior Director for Special Projects at MIT’s Office of Digital Learning, leading research projects on workforce education. From 2006 until 2017, he was Director of MIT’s Washington Office, supporting MIT’s long-standing and historic role in science policy. He teaches courses on science and technology policy and innovation systems at MIT and is coauthor of five books on innovation policy, Workforce Education, A New Roadmap (MIT Press 2021 – with Sanjay Sarma), The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies (Open Book 2020), Advanced Manufacturing: The New America Innovation Policies (MIT Press 2018), Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors (Oxford University Press 2015), and Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution (MIT Press 2009), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.  Previously he worked for over 15 years on innovation issues as a senior advisor in the U.S. Senate, and earlier was a Deputy Assistant U.S. Secretary of Transportation. He serves on the National Academies of Sciences’ Board on Materials and Manufacturing and its standing committee for its Innovation Policy Forum and has served on eight other NAS committees, is a member of the Babbage Forum on innovation policy at Cambridge University, is on the Polaris Advisory Council for the GAO’s science and technology policy program, and chaired for four years the standing Committee on Science and Engineering Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  He was elected a Fellow of the AAAS in 2011 and received the IEEE’s public service award in 2007.