From the Director’s Desk
Greetings alumni and friends,
I hope you enjoy our latest edition of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science newsletter. This year, as we celebrate Washington State University’s 125th anniversary, it’s a perfect time to look back at our school successes and forward to our future accomplishments.
As many of you know, we are continuing to experience rapid growth in the school as we strive to meet industry needs in our state for computer scientists and engineers.
We are pleased that our new electrical and software engineering programs are getting off the ground in Bremerton and Everett, providing access to degrees for place-bound students across the state. We will have expanded coverage of our new degrees and satellite programs in the next issue of the School of EECS newsletter. Our graduates continue to be in high demand all across Washington and the nation, where they have gotten positions at SEL, EMC Isilon, Boeing, Micron Technologies, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard.
I am especially pleased at our efforts in recruiting and retaining women and underrepresented minorities to our programs. There are many challenges to overcome that start many years before students ever apply or get to WSU. We are taking a proactive approach to address these challenges, and I look forward to improving the environment that will lead to success for all of our students.
While we are successfully growing our enrollments, we have also been building our faculty with key hires that greatly strengthen our school. Our successful strategy has been to focus on growing and signature programs in which we have a long and storied history.
With the addition of several new faculty members and the emerging prominence of the Energy Systems Innovation Center, our power engineering program continues to build its reputation as a national leader. I believe we have reached a critical mass for success. In this newsletter, you’ll find a number of exciting projects from this active and dynamic research group.
We also continue to see exciting advances among our research groups in machine learning, smart environments, and robotics, including work from Professors Matthew E. Taylor and Hassan Ghasemzadeh. Whether developing a smarter way to measure edema or robotic methods for farm work, these researchers are making advances that promise to have real impact on our lives.
In the past year, our university has become more clearly focused on critical grand challenges, and our research fits in well within this strategic effort. I look forward to moving forward strategically with new hires in the next year in critical research areas, including in machine learning, data science, microelectronics, and software engineering. We are excited about the new faculty members who have joined our program and look forward to telling you more about their accomplishments in future newsletters.
Of course, the support of you, our alumni and donors, continues to make our success possible. Your gifts, whether through scholarships, research, or for equipment, truly make a difference in helping the school achieve its goals. I look forward to keeping you apprised as we aim for being in the top tier of electrical engineering and computer science programs, and I hope you will come by the next time you are in Pullman.
Thank you for your continuing support.
Behrooz Shirazi