Dean Galloway

Rankings. Most of us love to hate them. As academics, we struggle with whether they are an accurate indicator of real quality or just advertising. One can argue that those at the top of the list may tend to appreciate the results of the rankings algorithm more than those at the bottom of the list—whether they agree with the actual algorithm or not.

I would like to share with you some of the numbers that have mattered to me most as dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering for the past 16 years. I believe these numbers are more direct indicators of the success of our students and faculty than rankings.

5,343: The number of students who applied for the 320 available engineering seats in the Class of 2016, illustrating our growing national and international reputation and visibility.

34: The percentage of women studying in our undergraduate programs—roughly twice the national average. Diversity in our classrooms adds to the richness of the education we provide.

81: The current number of tenured/tenure-track faculty in the school. Hopefully, this number will grow to 100 for the Vanderbilt School of Engineering to have the depth and breadth needed for greater impact in engineering education, scholarship and research, as well as to reduce our student–faculty ratio to a level that provides more effective instruction and mentoring for our students.

28: The number of National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program awards received by tenure-track faculty since 2000—indicating the school’s ability to attract creative, high-potential faculty members.

12: The number of endowed chairs in engineering. We need the generosity of our alumni to add more chairs if we want to continue to attract and retain the absolute best faculty talent.

$63 million: The total externally funded research expenditures of the School of Engineering in fiscal year 2011. This number is up 400 percent over the past 10 years, illustrating the talent and the drive of our faculty.

This is just a sample of the numbers that matter to me. These numbers are direct indicators of how well we are accomplishing our mission of education and research, and indicate what we should be working to improve.

As I write to you in Vanderbilt Engineering for the last time, let me express my gratitude for the opportunity to serve as your dean. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve you, our faculty and Vanderbilt in this position.

Kenneth F. Galloway
Dean

Our university’s benefactor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, was an engineer. He may not have had a formal education in engineering but he used his ingenuity to solve problems faced by society in his time, and he created products and services that added value to the economy.

Dean Galloway

In this issue of Vanderbilt Engineering, as we begin a yearlong observation of the quasquicentennial of the School of Engineering—our 125th anniversary—we celebrate the past while renewing our vision for the future as a leading engineering school creating and disseminating new knowledge. We are fortunate to have T.J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, contribute to this significant milestone by writing the feature article, “Vanderbilt was an Engineer” in this issue.

As with many of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s contemporaries, the Commodore recognized the value of engineering as a means of technological and economic advancement. He, along with Andrew Carnegie, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, Asa Packer, John Rockefeller, Leland Stanford and Stephen Van Rensselaer among others, recognized through their endowments of universities with similarly successful engineering schools that a growing economy required an educated workforce.

The value of an engineering education is echoed across the centuries and a capable engineering workforce is still a topic of great concern, especially in a troubled economy. The National Academy of Engineering President Charles Vest urges, “In the U.S., we must compete in the global economy and maintain our American standard of living. … Prospering in the knowledge age requires people with knowledge.”

Scholars have been stressing the importance of the knowledge economy for decades. But what does this mean? Peter Drucker, the world-renowned management scholar, had a deep appreciation for the engineering profession and defined the knowledge economy as one that focuses on production and management of knowledge. Understanding how to apply knowledge for economic gain requires a highly educated society. This belief is validated by our engineering graduates being sought by organizations in nearly every sector of the market, not just technology companies.

In Science magazine, Norm Augustine (retired CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp.) stated, “More than half of the increase in the U.S. gross domestic product has been attributed to advancements in science, technology and innovation.” I cannot think of a time in our history where this fact has meant more to our global competitiveness than now. Recently Paul Otellini, president and CEO of Intel wrote in an opinion piece, “If we want the next Intel, GE, Google or Facebook to be born and grow up in America, we must begin producing more engineers. These jobs support our future.” Engineering and engineering education have never been more important to the future of our country.

I offer this quote to you as a parting thought: Robert Solow (Nobel Prize in Economics, National Medal of Science) stated, “There is no evidence that God ever intended the United States of America to have a higher per capita income than the rest of the world for eternity.” Work must never stop on American innovation for global economic prosperity.

Please join me, the faculty, the staff and the students of the School of Engineering in celebrating our rich heritage. I hope you find the historical contents of this issue of Vanderbilt Engineering interesting (and possibly nostalgic), as well as the activities in which our students and faculty are currently engaged.

Dean Galloway

I am fortunate to work with a national group of engineering deans who care deeply about the quality and preparedness of engineering students. As I come to the end of my term as chair of the Engineering Deans Council of the American Society for Engineering Education, I want to share with you some of the contemporary issues that engineering deans face. The topics discussed and discussed again include accreditation, diversity and retention, involvement in K–12 education, and research collaboration with industry.

Great organizations constantly assess the current environment and forecast the future to ensure they remain relevant. The accreditation infrastructure maintained by ABET is important for ensuring quality and continuous improvement in engineering education. Engineering deans are concerned with how accreditation policies and processes evolve as engineering education changes. And engineering education and engineering practice are changing. New specialties evolve and new knowledge demands are placed on our students and faculty. As a private institution, we have special obligations to our students, parents, university leadership and Board of Trust. But as engineers, we also must serve business, industry and the public at large. Related to changes in engineering curriculum and educational practices is the evolving licensure process for engineers, which leads to the P.E. designation. This is a topic that generates lively discussion among engineering deans as well as many of our engineering graduates.

Issues of diversity and retention are of great concern to engineering deans. We worry about how to be more inclusive of underrepresented groups in the engineering work force, and deans are concerned with how to increase participation and retention of these students who, by some calculations, will make up more than 70 percent of the U.S. workforce by 2050.

The questions surrounding how to best partner with K–12 school systems are points of contention and deliberation. Should some engineering principles be taught at the kindergarten through 12th grade levels? Who should set the standards for engineering education in K–12 schools? According to a September 2009 report titled Engineering in K–12 Education, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council concludes that the introduction of K–12 engineering education has the potential to increase awareness about what engineers do and engineering as a potential career, and to boost students’ technological literacy. Deans all agree that young students need a better understanding of what engineers do.

Research drives invention, design, analysis and innovation for faculty and graduate students at U.S. engineering schools. Many of us think that industry–university partnerships are critical to maintaining and strengthening our country’s economy. The technology transfer role that U.S. academic researchers are expected to play in economic development, what specific roles they can play in industrial innovations, and how they might go about collaborating with private industry are complicated by several factors. These include 1) declining federal R&D support, which threatens the vitality of the academic research enterprise, and 2) the impact of close university–industry cooperation on the freedom to pursue longer-term, more fundamental research not tied to a particular product or process. Determining the boundaries of university–industry collaboration is a balancing act between competing concerns. And these partnerships are complicated further when issues of intellectual property, open publication and indemnification become contractual items for negotiation.

These issues are not new. Many of you have discussed them and thought about them. The goal is clear and one that we all embrace. We must continuously improve the state of engineering education for future generations of engineers. This is critical for our country.

On a different and important note, the 2011–2012 academic year will mark the 125th anniversary of the establishment of the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering by vote of the Board of Trust in 1886. We are planning a yearlong, quasquicentennial celebration with special commemorative events and Vanderbilt Engineering magazine stories on the School of Engineering through the years. I hope you will join us in celebrating this important milestone in our history.

Dean Galloway

Engineers are, and will be, critical contributors to any sustainable economic upturn. They invent, they design, they turn new ideas into marketable products.

The NAE’s 14 Grand Challenges have been broadcast across the engineering community for more than two years now. There is evidence that some of the challenges — energy, sustainability, health care and the environment — are influencing a national roadmap to economic growth and recovery. Some of these collective goals include increasing production of alternative energy, expanding broadband technology across the country, and computerizing the health care system.

As dean of a research-extensive engineering school, I am encouraged by the role of engineers in supporting sustained economic recovery in America and globally. Our progress can be anticipated and encouraged by academic research and corporate and government R&D. As I critically examine School of Engineering research activities, I believe we are doing our part to contribute to innovative discovery while educating the next cohort of engineers. Our four strategic research areas are well-aligned with the core talents of our faculty and the requirements for a recovering economy: health care, information systems, defense and national security, and energy and the environment.

The articles in this edition of Vanderbilt Engineering illustrate our research culture, which has always been one of purposeful accomplishment — focused on important problems. For instance, in the cover story you will read about advances in health care by Vanderbilt’s world-class imaging institute, as well as the engineers and physicians working with each other to make diagnostic technologies more accessible. Other articles feature an alumnus working in cybersecurity as it relates to national security and another alumnus leading the rebuilding of an engineering icon in the automotive industry.

You’ll also learn of faculty engaging in multi-institutional research that will better secure electronic medical records, plus two of our young faculty members who have won prestigious NSF-CAREER Awards for their respective research in metabolic engineering and microfluidics. You will also read about the stellar accomplishments of our students who are consistently recipients of prestigious scholarships and national recognition for their research contributions.

The School of Engineering is working tirelessly to provide opportunities for young engineers. The number of our students participating in engineering-specific study abroad programs is double the national average, and the student interest in on-campus research is very high. We equip students with knowledge and a solid set of skills so that after they leave our classrooms, our labs and our campus, they are prepared to become contributors to a sustainable economic upturn — as engineers have throughout history.

Dean Galloway

It is widely believed that, to strengthen our economy, we need new ventures, new enterprises, new businesses and new industries. What, then, is an appropriate role for schools of engineering and engineering educators? Can you teach entrepreneurship? Or are some individuals just born entrepreneurs? Are engineers entrepreneurial?

A number of the key entrepreneurial personality traits mirror engineering competencies necessary for a 21st century career. At the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, we are fortunate in having successful entrepreneurs among our graduates, students and faculty.

Many of our alumni mix a strong technical skill set with mastery of time management and organizational skills, understanding team and leadership dynamics, ambitious professional goals, and an alert eye for opportunity.

Our faculty members encourage students to ask challenging questions, prepare them to work well under pressure, help them to communicate their ideas, and nurture a resilient attitude to failure and setbacks. Some of the key principles of entrepreneurship are instilled by the classes we teach, the research we do, and the professional networks we have created—as evidenced by students, alumni and faculty who start their own ventures.

In this issue of Vanderbilt Engineering, you will read about just a few of our engineering graduates who have launched successful businesses. They credit their Vanderbilt engineering education for laying the groundwork for entrepreneurship—from honing creative problem-solving skills to rigorous multidisciplinary design projects to courses in engineering management. These entrepreneurs will tell you career success, while often dependent on technical expertise, also depends on your ability to sell an idea and to manage your time, yourself and others.

Ken Morse, the former head of MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center, thinks entrepreneurs are made, not born. Thus in addition to providing a solid technical base, engineering educators have a responsibility to teach principles of product development and project management, to encourage creative problem solving and to nurture innovative thinking. To that end, a Vanderbilt engineering education has and will continue to launch entrepreneurial career paths.

Dean Galloway

What skills will American engineers need in a very rapidly changing world? How many engineers are needed and where will they be located? More specifically, what are our responsibilities in providing an education that shapes careers that may last more than 40 years after our students leave the commencement stage?

These questions drive curriculum changes. Workforce issues, globalization and new technologies indicate a need for more interdisciplinary skill sets. Today, effective system-level designs require us to communicate across disciplines. And a commitment to basic research is absolutely essential if America is to keep its leadership position in engineering innovation.

At the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, research competitiveness and engineering education are not mutually exclusive. Students take fundamental courses, and they take classes that are design-centered and application-oriented. They work alone. They work in teams. They work in labs with some extraordinary faculty who are doing cutting-edge research funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Institute of Health and others, often with collaborators at notable universities here and abroad.

From my perspective as dean of a highly competitive, research-intensive engineering school, we spend much energy and resources solidifying our research reputation. But we also dedicate a great deal of energy and resources to innovative education initiatives. We now have extensive study abroad programs, unique first-year experiences, service-learning courses, an integrated senior design course, summer undergraduate research programs and more.

We deliver an excellent engineering education to some of the best and brightest students in the country.

Can We Do More?

This is a serious question with many implications. We have an obligation to examine if and when it is appropriate to do more, but not merely for the sake of implementing something new. If we ask, “Is it responsible? Intentional? Sustainable?” then it becomes implementation with a purpose.

We must engage in continuous examination of the effectiveness of existing opportunities and support an ongoing search for better ways of delivering a rich and rigorous engineering education.

In this endeavor, we partner with fellow institutions, corporate leaders, government, other Vanderbilt schools and initiatives, and of course, our alumni. These are exciting and pivotal times for engineers, educators and the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering. In this premiere issue of Vanderbilt Engineering, the successor to both our engineering newsletter Engineering Vanderbilt and annual Research Report, we share some of the excitement of our research and educational initiatives. We will continue to explore the stories, efforts and opportunities of the school and its people in future issues of Vanderbilt Engineering, and look forward to your participation and feedback.