Brown Engineering Professor of the Practice Rich Morales has been named co-director of the joint Masters of Art in Design Engineering (MADE) program, administered by both RISD’s Architecture + Design division and Brown’s School of Engineering.
“Together with co-director Jonathan Knowles [professor of architecture at RISD], Rich will help guide the MADE program into a new era of growth and innovation,” said Sorensen Family Dean of Engineering Tejal Desai. “His exceptional record of achievement and his distinctive contributions to the School of Engineering at Brown make him an excellent choice for this position.”
At Brown, Morales teaches design, strategy and decision-making for Brown undergraduates and graduate students, and has been a highly engaged teacher and mentor to students in the MADE and PRIME (Program in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship) master’s degree programs. He also volunteers as an advisor to Brown’s Formula One race car design team, baseball team, and supports the university’s veteran community. In 2024, Morales (with Louise Manfredi) received a Hazeltine Innovation Award to support a proposal on Data-driven Sustainability in Fabrication: Reframing the Industrial Ecology of the Brown Design Workshop.
“The partnership between Brown and RISD is a powerful curricular and experiential eco-system that allows talented engineers and designers to leverage their experiences and skills to better understand, frame, and design solutions for a better world,” said Morales. “Our students blend qualitative and quantitative methodologies with creativity and a strong foundation in technology and innovation as part of a tight-knit collaborative cohort who work hard, but have fun tackling tough problems.”
A former senior Army Officer, Morales served as Professor and Head of the Department of Systems Engineering at West Point for five years, worked as a research analyst tackling complex problems in the public sector and private sector, and contributed to a number of technology focused think tanks in the U.S. and in Europe. As deputy director of i-Teams at Cambridge University, he linked innovative student ideas with ground-breaking university research to develop commercially viable strategies and improve university-industry links across the United Kingdom. As a principal investigator, Morales examines the ethics of drone use and the role of decision support AI as part of a joint venture with the Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab whose mission is to drive ethical and human-centered design, development, deployment, and use of technology.
Outside of the classroom, Morales is Leader in Residence at the US Coast Guard Academy, and serves on several national boards alongside leaders from business, academics, and nonprofits, where he advises start-up efforts in systems integration and innovation. Through his research on complex systems and performance improvement he has worked closely with leaders at NASA, McKinsey & Co., Sikorsky Aircraft, Google, IBM, Boeing, and a variety of university research centers and government institutes.
Morales holds a B.S. in aerospace engineering from West Point, a Yale M.B.A., graduate degrees in strategic studies from the Naval College of Command and Staff and resource strategy from the National Defense University, and a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Cambridge. He studied systems dynamics and organizational learning at MIT and is a Harvard Kennedy School Senior Executive Fellow and Yale School of Management Donaldson Fellow.