Welcome to Fall 2024 at the UMass Amherst College of Engineering! (2024)

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Greetings UMass Engineering Community,

I am thrilled to welcome you all to our campus for the Fall 2024 semester. I would like to extend a special welcome to those of you who are new to our community. We are committed to making your experience here an extraordinary one.

To kick off the academic year, the College is hosting welcome events under the tent in the engineering quad. Please be on the lookout for additional emails about these events as they approach:

• — Wednesday, September 4th, 5:30 to 6:15pm
• Graduate Student Reception — Thursday, September 5th, 5:30 to 8:00pm
• Engineering Student Organization and Undergraduate Resource Fair— Tuesday, September 10th, 10:30am to 3:30pm

I am also pleased to share a few exciting developments with you:

This Fall, we are fortunate to be welcoming eight talented new faculty members to the College, and additional faculty will be joining us in the Spring. We continue to strive for diversity among our faculty, and we are proud to report that 60% of the new faculty from our latest hiring cycle are women. Over the past five years we have roughly doubled the percentages of women and underrepresented minority faculty in engineering, and we are committed to making further progress in this regard.

The College recently released our 2023-2024 research publication, UMass ENGINEER, which highlights some of the bold ideas being born in our labs, as well as the faculty and students behind the work. ENGINEER is organized around our college’s eight thematic research areas. You can read the digital version here. We hope you will have opportunities to engage with and learn from some of these amazing researchers during your time here.

As you return to campus, you will notice a pedestrian detour impacting the sidewalk between the engineering quad and the Campus Center. We expect the route will reopen by October, but the construction between Draper Hall and Knowles will be ongoing. Even though it is inconvenient, this activity is a symbol of our commitment to advancing sustainable infrastructure for the college and the campus. Soon our Sustainable Engineering Laboratories (SEL) building will begin to rise. Scheduled to open in Fall 2026, the SEL will be a state-of-the-art facility providing specialized research laboratories and learning spaces for sustainable engineering and clean energy technologies. For the building, net zero carbon is a key goal. We are designing for certifications for LEED Platinum and ILFI Zero Carbon, and the building design recently won a grand prize in the Embodied Carbon Reduction Challenge.

There are few additional upcoming events and initiatives you should mark your calendar for:

• This year’s Shirely and Ting-Wei Tang Lecture will be presented by Dr. Meikei Ieong ’96 PhD (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Founder and Chairman of Simbury, a Hong Kong-based leading integrated circuit (IC) company that offers a comprehensive technologies portfolio to meet various artificial intelligence (AI) and metaverse applications. Ieong has held senior executive positions in Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and IBM. Mark your calendar for Wednesday, October 30th, 4pm in the Old Chapel.
• The College and the University will be hosting several career fairs this semester, including the Engineering Career Fair (Sept 30/Oct 1) and the Civil and Environmental Career Fair (Oct 2), the Building and Construction Technology Career Fair (Sept 27), the Tech Jobs and Internships Fair (Sept 27), and the Life Sciences and Biotech Career Fair (Oct 11). There will also be an Engineering Diversity Networking Night (Sept 30) and a Sustainability/Renewable Energy Recruiting Night (Oct 16). You can learn more and register for all of these events on Handshake.
• The departmental Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committees have partnered to bring a few special guests to campus this Fall. Please save the dates for the following lectures: Donna Riley, dean of engineering and computing at University of New Mexico and a nationally recognized leader in transformative engineering education (Sept 27); Ranen McLanahan , program director, entrepreneurial engineering, the Kern Family Foundation (Oct 10); and Matilde Sánchez-Peña, University of Buffalo, whose research focuses on how to promote a more equitable engineering field (Nov 8).
• The whole campus community is invited to participate in the third annual Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) conference on September 18th and 19th, which will feature a series of educational workshops, talks, panels, and networking events dedicated to helping make UMass Amherst a safe and equitable campus for all. The conference is free to attend, but advance registration is required.

I sincerely look forward to connecting with you all this year. Have a great semester and Be Revolutionary Engineers for All!

Sincerely,

Sanjay Raman
Dean, College of Engineering
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering