Washington Engineer - October 2010 Video Message
Read Matt's message
Hi, this is Matt O'Donnell, I'm dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington. Welcome to the October 2010 edition of Washington Engineer.
I'm really happy to welcome a new set of faculty into the college this year. It's an amazing set of people, and among them are a large number of joint appointments between departments in the college and departments in other schools and colleges throughout the university.
Over the last two years, in fact, we have hired seven new faculty who have significant joint appointments between the engineering college and other schools. For example, we had our first joint appointment between the Department of Computer Science & Engineering and Genome Sciences in the medical school. Also, we've had joint appointments between the physics department and several of our departments in the college, including Materials Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering.
We're very excited to be a proactive place for recruiting people into interdisciplinary areas like this, because they allow us to address the grand challenges facing society over the next 20-30 years and we feel we are going to have the faculty in place to allow us to do this.
As many of you know, last spring we hosted one of the NAE Grand Challenges Summit meetings in Seattle. It was a very exciting meeting with a large attendance and we filmed all of the sessions for subsequent replay both on TV and on the Web. I'm happy to announce that these will start to play this fall on UWTV, all the sessions related to the NAE meeting.
Also this fall, the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education, the largest NSF-funded center on engineering education, will present its final report. This is the result of a multi-year study from 5 universities—the University of Washington is the lead institution, along with Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the Colorado School of Mines, and Howard University—on factors affecting the undergraduate experience.
I think it will be great reading for all of you to help you design your own undergraduate programs, because of some of the factors that were found to be very important in the experience for undergraduates. In particular is the diversity within the design process and the need for diverse design groups to address emerging global markets.
As the academic year kicks off, I also want to congratulate our colleague, our friend Mary Lidstrom. Mary was the former associate dean for research in the College of Engineering. For the last 5 years she's been the associate vice provost for research and starting this fall she is the interim provost of the university. We know we have a very strong partner in high places and I'm really happy for Mary.
Thank you for reading this issue of Washington Engineer.