Dear Students, Faculty and Staff,

Life is drastically different than it was two weeks ago. Like most of you, I have experienced many different emotions in the face of these rapidly changing conditions. Concern for our loved ones, our own health, our community ties as well as our individual plans is top of mind. As a College we must now address the way we educate outstanding engineers in a significantly altered environment. Although this will be challenging, I firmly believe that the changes we make now for the most vulnerable among us will benefit our community for years to come.

Last week Governor Inslee announced new measures requiring the University of Washington, and all higher education institutions in the state, to discontinue in-person instruction on our campuses through April 24. As President Cauce also shared last week, this will require us to begin spring quarter classes with online instruction.

In preparation for this shift the College has pulled together resources to help us all prepare for and navigate this change. We’ve developed a resource on teaching and learning online for faculty and students that can be found here and a resource page for staff to support remote work that can be found here. The University will provide more detailed instructions to students, faculty and staff about the start of spring quarter no later than March 20 and we will continue to update these resource pages accordingly. I want to thank the Academic Affairs team especially our ET&L director, the Computing Services team and the Web team for their quick work to assemble these resources.

Although I’m relatively new to this community, I am already inspired by the way we are coming together to support each other. I want to thank you for your patience, creativity and kindness and ask that we continue to move forward in the same manner. We are innovators and problem solvers and we will get through this together.

I will update you as we learn more about plans for Spring Quarter. Thank you for all you are doing to care for our community.

Sincerely,

Nancy Allbritton
Frank & Julie Jungers Dean of Engineering
Professor of Bioengineering