Dear Colleagues,
Welcome back! I hope you all are enjoying the final, quiet days of summer. Before you know it, fall will be upon us. As you know, we have many exciting changes this year.
Most importantly, please join me in welcoming Don Bender as the interim dean for the Voiland College. Don has spent the summer becoming familiar with the position and will start officially on August 16 – tomorrow! I am confident he will provide steady leadership during this transition as we move forward with our search process and with bringing a new dean onboard. I urge you to pay attention to, and participate, in the search for the next dean; departmental meetings with the search committee begin this week.
You will have a chance to say hello to Don at our annual ice cream social, which is set for August 25 at 3 p.m. in the ETRL Courtyard. Please be sure to join us as we welcome students to campus, see our interesting student club activities, and have a fun afternoon with colleagues and friends.
Meanwhile, our programs continue to grow and thrive. To meet the dramatic need for engineers and computer scientists in our state, we are pleased to be starting several new engineering programs this fall, including undergraduate degrees in construction engineering and software engineering, as well as an online graduate degree in software engineering. To provide access to our programs for a wider variety of students across the state, we are offering a new software engineering degree at both Pullman and WSU Puget Sound at Everett as well as an electrical engineering degree through Olympic College in Bremerton. Congratulations to all of you who have worked so hard with colleagues across the state to develop and implement these programs. We look forward to watching them grow to meet the high industry demand for our graduates.
Congratulations, also, to our faculty who are involved in the university-wide Strategic Allocation RFP proposals. Behrooz Shirazi will lead a $4.9 million multidisciplinary initiative in community health analytics, using analytics to better understand antimicrobial resistance, and Kim Zentz is leading the Spokane smart cities effort, which will look at smart systems in an urban environment. Subhanshu Gupta also received a Grand Challenges seed grant for work in next-generation, reusable, low-cost sensors. Many of you put in a lot of effort on these proposals, and we look forward to the great work that will result.
Finally, I want to thank all of you for allowing me to serve as your dean for the past decade. I am so proud of your hard work and the huge progress that we have made in growing our programs, improving our student educational experiences, and developing our research enterprises. The college is in good hands, and I’m looking forward to continuing excellence as we move forward in all these areas in the years ahead.
As always…
GO COUGS!!
Candis Claiborn
Professor and Dean
Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture