William Eric Leifur Grimson (born 1953) is a Canadian-born computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served as Chancellor from 2011 to 2014.
His father William was the principal of Estevan Collegiate Institute, the local high school, and his mother was an eminent musician and taught piano performance and music theory.
An expanded version of the dissertation was published by MIT Press in 1981 as From Images to Surfaces: A Computational Study of the Human Early Vision System, which was endorsed by Tomaso Poggio and Noam Chomsky.
[5][6] After completing his PhD, Grimson worked as a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (now CSAIL) before joining the university's faculty in 1984.
In February 2011, he was appointed Chancellor of MIT, succeeding Phillip Clay, and took up his post the following month[6] and served until 2014 when he was replaced by Cynthia Barnhart.