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!
Degrees have been conferred, awards given, grades submitted, and just like that, the 2015-16 school year draws to a close. It sure felt like this semester went fast!
This spring, all the frenetic activity meant just a little more to me than usual as I get ready to step down as dean in the fall, and Don Bender steps in as interim.
As the end of the year rapidly approaches, we are pleased to celebrate the accomplishments of our faculty, staff and students. Several faculty and staff members received prestigious awards this spring.
Jim Petersen forwarded this article to the faculty and staff in the Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering. This sobering account of the explosion at the University of Hawaii reminds us all of the critical importance of having regular safety inspections in all labs, formal safety training for all people working in labs, and careful and thorough training associated with all laboratory procedures for anyone working in a specific lab.
I would like to express my gratitude for having had the opportunity to serve you as the Dean of the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture for the past ten years. These years have at times been difficult, but more often exhilarating, and our College has emerged as a key cornerstone of WSU, critical to our land grant mission, and a true jewel in the university’s crown.
’m writing to provide you with a budget update for the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture.
In last month’s letter, I described how, as part of WSU’s effort to reexamine how its budgets are allocated, the university recently implemented reductions beyond the original five-percent strategic budget reallocation to the Voiland College budget.
In an effort to clarify the expectations for tenure and promotion and to explicitly address promotion expectations and procedures for non-tenure track faculty, the VCEA Leadership has reviewed and revised our promotion and tenure guidelines. We have revised both the set of guidelines applicable to engineering and computer science disciplines, and the set aimed at the design disciplines and construction management.
In recent years the Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture has enjoyed unprecedented support from both the state legislature and from across the University. This has resulted in significant growth in enrollment (since 2009, up nearly 65% at both the undergraduate and Ph.D. levels), significant growth in the number of faculty (adding approximately 25 new faculty positions and hiring 32 new tenure-track faculty members when vacancies became available over the past two years), and significant growth in research expenditures (since 2010, up 75%) as well as intellectual property licensing.