Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to announce that we have received authorization to move forward with our hiring plans for this year. I thought you might be interested to know that we hired 18 tenure-track faculty members as a result of our searches last year. So if it seemed like last year was exceptionally busy, there was a very good reason for that!
It also promises to be another busy year this year, as we search for an additional 28 tenure-track faculty across our college and locations.
Just think about this for a moment: these ambitious hiring plans represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape our college and launch us quickly into a new era of productivity and impact. What we do this year, as well as what we accomplished last year, will have a lasting impact on our college, and indeed the university, for decades to come. So as we think about how we will be filling these positions, there are two important aspects that we will be keeping in mind:
- We are initiating these searches with the intentions of filling as many of these positions as possible at the associate or full professor rank. It is extremely important for the health of the college well into the future that we maintain a healthy balance of faculty ranks as these new positions are filled.
- We will be hiring faculty into our highest priority research thrust areas, so that new faculty members will immediately find peers and collaborators. This is important for their success and for our future. Our college’s signature research themes are all interdisciplinary, and all of the search committees will include committee members from outside the department or school.
This model of emphasizing collaborative, interdisciplinary priority areas is embraced and promoted by the university. Hopefully you have seen the communications from Chris Keane, Vice President for Research, regarding the initiation of the 120-Day Research Study. As part of that study, he is looking ahead to identify “grand challenge-like themes” – emerging opportunities that are consistent with the mission and strengths of WSU. These are intended to be strongly interdisciplinary and collaborative, and articulated in terms of societal impact. The themes that are ultimately selected will be “current and emerging areas of high impact research where WSU is positioned to make unique contributions to society in the state, region, and world.”
To find out more about the study, please visit the story on the WSU Insider website.
Through the month of October, the university faculty has been invited to submit ideas for these research themes and, if desired, the names of lead faculty or units clustered in a proposed theme. To submit a theme or for more information, please visit the 120 day study article on the WSU Research website.
It has already been an eventful year, and promises to continue to be busy and prosperous! Thank you for all you do for Washington State University and the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture.
Go Cougs!
Candis Claiborn, Professor and Dean