Upon his death on Dec. 2 from the melanoma cancer he’d battled for years, Dr. Scott Wills, Phys 83, was remembered by the Tech community as a passionate educator, a tireless
supporter of his students and a relentlessly curious researcher.
A professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mr. Wills taught more than 2,880 students in 83 classes during his time on the Tech faculty. His wife, Linda Wills, whom he met while working on his doctorate in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is also a professor at Tech, and together they collaborated on a number of research projects focused on surveillance technology, co-leading the Mobile Vision Embedded Systems (MOVES) research group.
Mr. Wills was a Yellow Jacket himself, graduating in 1983 with an undergraduate degree in physics before returning to teach in 1991.
Mr. Wills served on a number of boards at the Institution level, including the Joint College of Computing/College of Engineering committees, which formed the Computational Science and Engineering Program and the Software Engineering certificate. In 2009, Mr. Wills’ students honored him with the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award, one of the highest accolades a Tech professor can attain.
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This is indeed very sad. Although I only took one class by him (Digital Logic), he was one of my favorite professors at Tech, and that class has been the motivation behind the choice of a specialty that I’ve been at a decade. My sincerest condolences to his family. His endearingly-goofy laugh will be missed by all his former students…