Year of planning points to exciting future for School

The School of Engineering, the largest and arguably the most well-known of the schools that make up the Institute, has undergone a major planning effort this year.

"We’ve come through this planning process," said Dean Bud Baeslack. "We’ve developed a very rigorous plan."

Heavily influenced by The Rensselaer Plan, the first-year goals of the school’s plan include developing formal processes for assessing the school’s programs, increasing the diversity of its faculty, and creating a new program for introducing incoming freshmen to the different disciplines of engineering.

"We want something interesting, exciting," Baeslack said about the new freshman program. He hopes to have the program implemented by the fall semester.

The plans lend focus to research in biotechnology and information technology, the research initiatives emphasized in The Rensselaer Plan.

Baeslack said the school would need to focus even more within these areas in order to be successful.

"We have limited resources. We’re going to have to invest very carefully and very selectively," Baeslack said.

Research in both IT and biotechnology is going on throughout the school. Most of this research involves interdisciplinary groups that take their members from schools outside of engineering.

The Center for Multi-phase Research focuses on systems in which materials exist in more than one state—liquid-solid or gas-liquid systems. Their research has both theoretical and practical applications on scales from nanotechnology up to very large systems.

Currently the center is looking at several opportunities for new ventures, including a number in the field of biotechnology. Michael Podowski, director of the CMR, said the area lends itself to the center’s work.

"It has to do with all sorts of phenomena and processes that have more than one component material," he said.

As the biotechnology initiative is still new to RPI, the center’s work in this area is in the early stages. "It will take a while, and will require collaboration with other groups," Podowski said.

Partha Dutta, assistant professor in ECSE, was recently added to the list of Rensselaer’s National Science Foundation Early Career Award winners and awarded a $375,000 grant for his work with semiconductor materials, for which there are a range of applications.

Multidisciplinary research is another area Baeslack hopes to put emphasis on in the future. He said the school should "work with folks with different skills in different disciplines."

He wants to develop relationships between the school and other parts of the campus. "I would like to see more of that involved with the incubator," he said.

The engineering school plans to hire new faculty in the coming months. Most notably, five new hires in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering department were approved during the Institute’s budgeting process.

The hires will help stop a trend of declining numbers in the department. "We’ve gone from a faculty of 45 members down to 30," said Bruce Carlson, professor and curriculum chair of ECSE.

The reason for the decreasing interest is competition from outside academia. "Universities can’t compete with industry in the area of computer engineering," Carlson said, citing stock options and other benefits as the primary draws.

As one of the key departments involved in IT and biotech research, more faculty will be crucial to ECSE. Research requires graduate students to keep it going, and graduate students need faculty to support them, Carlson said.

In addition to the effect on research, the department’s instructional programs have taken a hit from the smaller numbers.

"We’re teaching in different modes than we used to," Carlson said. The department had switched over to primarily studio classes, but now many of those classes are being switched back to a lecture/lab format.

Carlson believes that the five new faculty may be "too little, too late." However, he still thinks that the new hires are a good idea.

"Anything will be a help," he said.

Baeslack has placed a lot of importance on gaining new faculty. "An important criterion for our success is our ability to attract really top-notch people," he said.

He believes that in order to attract the kind of people he is looking for, the school will need to continue to produce high-quality students.

"Outstanding students are a key to attracting quality faculty," he said.

The engineering school has a lot to look forward to in the coming months. Baeslack expressed excitement for the year. "It’s been a very intense planning year," he said. "I think we’ve come a long way."

"It’s going to be an interesting year," he said.