Hi, I'm Matt O'Donnell, the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington. I feel like it's the start of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

The best of times in our college has been what we have been able to do over the last two or three years in terms of our research enterprise and our hiring of new faculty. In the first six months of 2009 our research awards are up by a whopping 25%. And this is prior to any stimulus package funding that we expect to come into the college. We expect over this year to see a significant rise, anywhere from 15-25% in our awards, and we'll reach well over the $100 million barrier, which we've been hovering below for the last few years. We've been able to hire a magnificent set of new faculty over the last two years, about 25 or so out of a total faculty here of about 225 -- about 10%. So it's a spectacular time that we've had in attracting new research funds and new people into our system.

The worst of times: We have experienced the largest budget cut of any public research university in the country. Fortunately, that's been mitigated a bit from tuition increases we will have this year and the next year -- guaranteed tuition increases. And so we expect in our overall academic programs, while having to take some cuts, will still remain as high-quality programs. The net effect is going to primarily be that we are not going to go through the enrollment growth over the next two years. We'll be flatter in that, but, again, we will not change anything in terms of the quality of the program.

And finally, our major new initiative in the area of molecular engineering will speed ahead and has received funding for the new building for which we'll break ground in the summer and our initiative in this area and primarily affecting our programs in health care, health care systems, and energy systems will move ahead.

So I'd like to leave you with that message that we've had an outstanding couple of years at the University of Washington, we've weathered a bunch of cuts, and we are prepared for our future growth coming out of the next year or two.

Thank you very much for looking at Washington Engineer and we'd like to hear back from you about some of our ideas.