I hope this message finds you well. As we welcome the start of another academic year, I am grateful for the incredible community we have built together over the years. I am excited to share this year’s update with you all.

In this issue, you will find exciting news and updates on the Smith School’s progress on our strategic initiatives that you have read about in recent issues of the Olin Hall News. The changes we made to our graduate program a few years ago are proving their value now, and the research activity in the school is the strongest it’s ever been. This fall, we launched our re-imagined Master of Engineering program to embody a cohort experience focusing on professional skill development and deepening technological knowledge. Last year, we welcomed several new faculty members, whom you will meet later in the issue. We also welcomed a few new staff members and continue to benefit from their collaborations and contributions to our mission. We see the impact of our work already – the Smith School ranking has moved up five places in the last three years to #13. I am confident that our continued work and support from our alumni will see us break into the top ten soon.

In the coming year, we are embarking on a revolution! A revolution prompted by the National Science Foundation, which challenged engineering communities to think deeply about how to teach the next generation of engineers and prepare them for the exciting opportunities and challenges ahead. This summer, faculty and staff began determining what a modern engineer needs to know and how to embrace what engineering education research reveals about how students learn. We are fortunate that we recently invested in hiring two engineering education researchers to join our faculty ranks as crucial collaborators on this work, and who directly advise us on the best practices and pedagogical scholarship while studying the process of change and its impact on our students, faculty, and staff. Our goal in the coming year is to redesign our curriculum and department culture to prepare our undergraduates for this future, embrace a “living laboratory” philosophy of learning that maximizes students’ opportunities to deeply understand problems, design solutions, test them, and learn from the results all while maintaining the same quality in our program everyone values.

In the future, students will experience engineering in multiple ways: embracing hands-on learning and putting the theory they learn immediately into practice by leveraging our unit operations laboratory across the four years of our program; emphasizing design thinking by teaching our students how to take the principles they learn and combine them with innovative thinking to solve problems; and engineering real-life challenges by bringing contemporary problems into the classroom enabling students to be part of creating the solutions, for example, analyzing strategies Cornell could use to reach its carbon neutrality commitment by 2035.

Everything is on the table as we consider building the best program to serve our students, including plans to develop state-of-the-art classrooms to enhance student educational experiences and enable the kind of hands-on engagement we want in all classes. In this issue you will hear from Allison Godwin, the Dr. G. Stephen Irwin ’67, ’68 Professor in Engineering Education Research, and Professor Alexandra Coso Strong, who are leading our revolution and will tell you more about the research they do and the vision for the future of engineering education that is sweeping through the college.

If you are visiting for Reunion this year or at any time, please get in touch with me to walk through Olin Hall and hear more about the exciting ideas underway!

Susan Daniel
William C. Hooey Director of the
Robert Frederick Smith School of
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Fred H. Rhodes Professor of
Chemical Engineering
Cornell University