College of Engineering Magazine- Fall 2000

From Dot-Coms to DNA Chips, It's an Engineer's World, Dean Campbell Says

By Bari Walsh

"It's a great time to be a 'nerd,'" says David Campbell, happily appropriating that dreaded high school slur. "It's a dot-com world. Who's running that world? Engineers, not lawyers." And Campbell wants to make sure that BU engineers are out in front, quarterbacking the technological advances driving the new economy.

As the new dean of the College of Engineering, Campbell is doing more than trumpeting the nerds' revenge. He is guiding the College at a time when boundaries among disciplines and departments are starting to blur; when advances in genomic research are being made by aeromechanical engineers, for example, not just bioengineers; when educating and training young, capable technologists is more vital than ever; and when science and engineering prowess is driving the global economy as perhaps never before. Campbell, a physicist by training who personifies exactly the kind of blurring of disciplines he foresees, is energized by the task.

To Campbell, being a physicist among engineers is old hat. Prior to coming to BU this summer, he chaired the Physics Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which is part of that institution's highly regarded College of Engineering. The creative tension between the differing approaches of physicists and engineers is mutually beneficial. "It keeps the engineers a little more oriented toward the basic, and it keeps the physicists a little more oriented toward the real world," he says. "Physics is understanding how things work, at the most fundamental level, and engineering is understanding how things work and then building things that work, or making them work differently and better." As Campbell points out, he is not the first of his breed to be dean at ENG; Charles DeLisi, whom Campbell succeeded, was also trained as a physicist. DeLisi, now the Arthur G. B. Metcalf Professor in Engineering, stepped down to devote more time to teaching and research.

As a child in southern California, Campbell was drawn to science out of "a curiosity about why." He started off with common childhood fascinations-dinosaurs and stars-and moved on, still in elementary school, to rocketry experiments "that the fire department didn't thoroughly appreciate." He took up "real science" in junior high, but as an undergraduate at Harvard, a particularly compelling teacher had him toying with the idea of majoring in German. His background in the humanities seems to inform his science; he is not afraid to push his scientific inquiry to the boundary where questions about "why" turn philosophical.

His innate curiosity is part of what causes him to embrace his new position eagerly, even the "adminis-trivia" that can come with running a college. "The thing that really appeals to me about this College of Engineering is that it's quite forward-looking," says Campbell. "It is configured in the way you would want to configure a college if you were starting it from scratch today." For example, he says, its thriving Biomedical Engineering Department is the envy of other institutions struggling to set up their own such departments.

But Campbell emphasizes that biomedical engineering is just part of what positions the College to lead the field as the new century unfolds. "Although some people have said that this is going to be the century of biology, all the disciplines are going to come together," he says. "It's important to realize that even though bioinformatics and biotechnology say 'bio,' they don't impact only biomedical engineering. For example, one of the key problems in developing biochips, these so-called DNA chips, is microfluidics, which is flow in very tiny capillaries. To get that right, you have to have superb fluid dynamics, as our faculty in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering have. You need to know how to design and build these things, and you want techniques that are inexpensive and yet accurate. Our faculty in Manufacturing and in Electrical and Computer Engineering have been developing approaches and methods for doing just this."

Campbell's own research combines physics and certain aspects of electrical engineering. As a specialist in nonlinear science, he studies novel electronic materials like conducting polymers, organic charge transfer solvents, high-temperature superconductors, and semiconductor superlattices. In addition to carrying on his research, he'll be coordinating sessions on "The Engineer as Entrepreneur" for EK100, the College's required introductory course, and working with ECE graduate students and with physics students in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). Collaboration among departments and with the University's other schools and colleges is important to Campbell. He's already met with the chairs of the CAS Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, and Math Departments, and he'll work to ensure that links among these departments and related ENG programs are strong.

The collaborative spirit that Campbell encourages is evidenced in the $25 million grant proposal that the University recently submitted to the Whitaker Foundation. This major proposal, coordinated by Biomedical Engineering Chairman Kenneth Lutchen, would bring together researchers from all ENG departments as well as Biology, Chemistry, and the School of Medicine to create a world-class nucleus of advanced bioengineering research and education at the University.

The proposal highlights another of Campbell's goals: that engineers and scientists learn to communicate effectively with the public. "The public, after all, funds most academic research one way or another. They're not going to want to support it if they don't understand it. Sure, the details of a lot of it are incredibly complicated, but the impact the research can have, why it's important, how it changes our world view . . . all that is something that can be put forth.

"If you're going to go to the public and ask them for support, you've got to be able to say why. And it's an easy sell for scientists and engineers: we're living a lot longer, we're living more comfortably, there's more productivity-all because of investments in science and engineering.

"There's a lot of opportunity out there. As I said, it's a good time to be a 'nerd.'"