Message from the Dean

A New Kind of Engineering School

BY DEAN KENNETH R. LUTCHEN

Welcome to the new Boston University College of Engineering.

Over the past two years, we have been engaging alumni, faculty, students, our corporate partners and all of BU as we charted our course for the next decade. What we came up with is a new—and, we believe, unique—approach that has the power to transform the way engineering is taught and practiced, and in ways desperately needed to address the complexity of solving society’s grand challenges.

Called “convergence,” this approach grew out of a concept first introduced by the national research funding agencies. At its core, convergence engages the power of synthesizing across often disparate disciplines to accelerate impactful solutions to complex societal challenges. We have engineered our college to embrace convergence completely in our educational mission, our research mission and the way we partner with society.

Central to this approach is recognizing that critical societal challenges will not be solved by anyone trained in only a single discipline. Realizing that we can do something few other engineering schools can achieve, we reshaped our college and our processes to maximize thinking and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, from the design of our educational programs to the ways we invest in and practice research.

We identified six convergent research themes where we can make an extraordinary impact, each of them involving expertise from multiple disciplines; you can read about some examples in the following pages. We are creating a structure that encourages diverse people to bring their individual expertise, backgrounds, perspectives, passions, skills and sensibilities to the group and craft a solution together. We are committed to a culture that embraces the concept that Great Minds Do Not Think Alike.

Our novel educational programs will shape individuals wired for the modern world and will prioritize investments in people to enhance convergent research themes, rather than just individual silos.

We have implemented new, cutting- edge processes that are unusual for an engineering school. Many of our faculty searches are recruiting talent not by department, but by a candidate’s interest in working in these convergent themes. We are recruiting doctoral students along the same lines and establishing honorific fellowships for them aligned with these themes. At the undergraduate level, we are infusing data science throughout the curriculum for all engineering majors, and the senior design capstone project is taking on a more convergent flavor.

Making an impact on society requires engagement with our industry partners. We have built cutting-edge, hands-on facilities for teaching and innovation in product development, robotics and healthcare, all in deep partnership with industry, to ensure that our students are maximally valuable to them right after graduation.

Featuring stories that convey all these exciting innovations, this magazine is your first look at our new college, one “Engineered for Impact” and one that will create a New Kind of Engineer.

Many of our faculty searches are recruiting talent not by department, but by a candidate’s interest in working in these convergent themes.