Dean's Message
On July 15, 2009, I became the 14th dean of The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University. I am privileged to be leading a School with a mission to educate socially-responsible engineering and applied science leaders whose work results in the betterment of the human condition, locally, nationally, and globally.
Ever since its founding as King’s College in 1754, Columbia has had a long history of educating engineering leaders whose contributions have influenced the lives of the world’s citizens. Among the first was John Stevens, Class of 1768, who invented the technology that made possible early steamboats and locomotives. His work provided inspiration for William Barclay Parsons, Class of 1882, the chief engineer of New York City’s first subway system.
Parsons also was the first Columbia engineer to have a global impact. In 1898, he traveled to Shanghai to become a primary surveyor for China’s 1,000-mile-long railway. Later Columbia inventors who fostered a shrinking globe were Michael Pupin, the developer of the transatlantic undersea telegraph cable, and Edwin Armstrong, who revolutionized modern radio communications. Most recently, NASA astronauts Michael J. Massimino ’84 and Gregory H. Johnson MS’85, have taken the Columbia SEAS name beyond the confines of this planet and into outer space. Massimino’s 2009 mission team extended the life of the Hubble Space Telescope to at least 2014.
What Massimino’s mission accomplished will allow scientists to study planets and better observe the cosmic frontier. Our School is seeking to accomplish a similarly significant mission that will impact frontiers—interdisciplinary frontiers in areas such as sensors, bioengineering, and nanotechnology, in what I call “Cyber BioPhysical™ Systems” where the biological, physical, and digital worlds intersect to develop innovative solutions to some of the most vexing problems of society in health, water, energy, and sustainability.
We are uniquely positioned to address these problems. First, from a curriculum perspective, we are meeting the challenge of educating the next wave of engineering and applied scientist leaders by evolving a new educational paradigm, what I call “pi (π) engineering,” where the first supporting leg of a “π engineer” is the depth of knowledge gained in the engineering or applied science major; the second supporting leg is the knowledge absorbed through minors, research experience, entrepreneurship programs, and community-based service-learning. The overarching connector is Columbia’s famed liberal arts Core Curriculum, the contextual umbrella that filters engineering and applied science through the broader perspective of the humanities.
Second, from a research perspective, our School is at a turning point which, with the support of the entire SEAS community, will allow us to become one of the finest institutions of engineering research and education in the country. Every time anyone turns on a television or uses a DVD, Columbia technology has made it possible. MPEG-2, the video and audio compression standard, is the core of most digital television and DVD formats and, thanks to the work of Electrical Engineering Professor Dimitris Anastassiou, we are the only academic institution in the MPEG-2 patent pool. One of the latest “new things,” high-end smart phones, have sharper display screens thanks to Sequential Lateral Solidification (SLS) technology developed by James Im, professor of materials science and metallurgy. These are but a few of the advancements made possible by Columbia SEAS faculty.
This faculty is growing in quantity, quality, and recognition and, as we look toward our future, with the expected addition of a new cadre of “rising superstar” faculty, we will be among the top tier of engineering schools in the nation.
I am pleased to be a part of Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, where, in our classrooms and laboratories, the scientific breakthroughs of the past imbue the ideas and innovation of the present to incubate novel solutions to meet the challenges of the future.
Feniosky Peña-Mora
Dean
E-mail: dean@seas.columbia.edu
Posted July 17, 2009