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Administrators: Add Event
DEAN'S MESSAGE
Greetings!
As I look back over the last year, there is a rich tapestry of accomplishments and milestones established by our faculty, students and staff. I am excited as these achievements set us on course for further successes in the years ahead. Let me recap some of the highlights of the past year.
In late August, we welcomed a freshman class of nearly 500 students - over 100 more students than matriculated in fall 2007 - whose average combined verbal and math SAT score was 1268. The Class of 2012 included 27 valedictorians and salutatorians - a 17% increase over the 2007 entering class. We are also excited about the excellent quality of the applicants for the Class of 2013. Many of these students chose UConn's School of Engineering because of our reputation for educational excellence and generous scholarship support. In 2008, UConn provided more than $1.88M in scholarships to undergraduate engineering students.
Other exciting initiatives for undergraduates occurred during 2008: we were approved for membership in the Global Engineering Education Exchange (Global E3), which will allow our students to take for-credit coursework at overseas partner institutions located in participating countries, and for international students to study at participating U.S. institutions. The Computer Science & Engineering department landed a prestigious three-year NSF REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) grant enabling 10 college students each year to spend the summer at the UConn campus researching BioGRID computing. We embarked on a new Entrepreneurship Senior Design venture with the School of Business geared to add business tools to the undergraduate engineering tool belt: engineering juniors and seniors may now take rigorous MBA-level entrepreneurship classes and apply their emerging business knowhow within the framework of the culminating senior design projects. Another first during the year was the official recognition of our undergraduate chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) by the national organization, paving the way for our students to apply their engineering skills to needy peoples around the globe.
During the year, 226 of our undergraduate students participated in the University's Honors Program. Two students, Alexander Williams (MSE) and James Moriarty (CEE) were named University Scholars, a highly selective program that permits them to craft an individualized plan of study during the last three semesters of their degree programs. Bryan Banville (BME) was selected to participate in the intensive Connecticut Leadership Legacy Experience program. Eric Sirois (BME), Julie Anne Mackey and Alexander Williams (MSE) and Kevin Romeo (Eng Phys) were selected to receive funding under UConn's Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF) program.
In May, we celebrated the graduation of 311 students who completed their undergraduate degrees in December '07 and May '08, along with 84 M.S. and 55 Ph.D. students. We wish them great success in their careers and to carry the foundations of the excellent engineering education to their new endeavors.
We hired 12 exceptional new faculty members in the School of Engineering. These new faculty strengthen our existing programs in sustainable energy, security, sensing, biomedical engineering, advanced materials and hydrology. Read about them here:
- http://www.engr.uconn.edu/email/emaginationvol1-2.html;
- http://www.engr.uconn.edu/SoE/newcgfccdirector.php and
- http://www.engr.uconn.edu/SoE/hanchenhuangnews.php
Four new staff members also joined us in the areas of alumni development, computing services and research grant development. This year, we plan to hire another 10 faculty members in the emerging areas of research and scholarship.
Our Eminent Faculty Initiative in Sustainable Energy, begun in 2007 with more than $7.5 million in support from the State of Connecticut, the Clean Energy Fund, and industry, gained momentum with our successful hiring of six outstanding faculty members. Among them is Prabhakar Singh, an expert in solid oxide fuel cells who joined us in January as Director of the Connecticut Global Fuel Cell Center. Another key team member, Hanchen Huang, will join us later this year as the UConn School of Engineering Professor in Sustainable Energy.
We expanded upon our collaborations with the UConn Health Center, and strengthened our collaborations in bioinformatics and biomedical engineering. An important development was the formation of a Connecticut Institute for Clinical & Translational Science, which unites faculty members across the University, including 10 engineering faculty and researchers from the UConn Health Center, in a unique collaboration aimed at enabling the translation of scientific research into practical applications in the medical field.
Our School was selected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to serve as Research Lead among seven national Centers of Excellence in Transportation Security. This is a truly exciting opportunity to help guide groundbreaking research that will transform the nation's preparedness for natural and man-made disasters.
Our faculty members received important national and international recognition for their scholarship and teaching. Shengli Zhou, of our ECE Department, was selected a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers recipient. The PECASE Awards are the nation's highest honor for professionals at the outset of their scientific research careers. Three faculty received the coveted NSF Early Career Development (CAREER) Award: Ugur Pasaogullari of ME, Bing Wang of CSE and Benjamin Wilhite of CMBE. In addition, Dr. Jun-Hong Cui of CSE was one of just 27 recipients of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program award. Mekonnen Gebremichael of CEE was selected one of just 18 recipients nationwide to receive a NASA New Investigator Program (NIP) grant in Earth Sciences.
Yaakov Bar-Shalom, the Marianne E. Klewin Professor in Engineering and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, was presented the 2008 IEEE Dennis J. Picard Medal for Radar Technologies and Applications. Bahram Javidi, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, received the 2008 International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) Technology Achievement Award, the 2008 Fellow Award from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the 2008 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize. Robert Weiss, the UTC Professor of Advanced Materials and Processing, received the Society of Plastics Engineers' International Award in recognition of his lifetime achievements in plastics research. Cato T. Laurencin, vice president for health affairs at the UConn Health Center, dean of the medical school, and a member of our CMBE Department, was named among "100 Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era" by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
Our School established the United Technologies Corporation (UTC) Professorships in Engineering Innovation and recognized five outstanding young faculty members for their research achievements and future promise: Emmanouil Anagnostou of CEE, Lei Zhu of CMBE, Jun-Hong Cui of CSE, Shengli Zhou of ECE, and Wilson Chiu of ME.
In terms of infrastructure, we were pleased to secure approval for a new Engineering Building, to be constructed on the Storrs campus by 2013 from funds committed under the State's $2.3 billion UConn 2000 investment.
These are exciting times in the School of Engineering and I look forward to meeting you to discuss new initiatives and future successes at UConn.
Cordially,
Mun Choi
Dean, School of Engineering