Partners in Progress

By Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen

Science and engineering continue to be essential as we navigate the global pandemic. This past year our students were vaccinated and are back in the classrooms, enjoying experiential activities, studying abroad and engaging in hands-on learning in our laboratories. We are excited about the future and are standing up the processes to implement a strategic plan that will chart our course for the next decade.

Our plan has three major pillars: Creating the Societal Engineer who can impact society; research at the convergence of multiple disciplines to address societal challenges; and partnering with society. You will read more about the plan and how we are bringing it to reality in the next issue, but I want to focus on the third pillar here, because we are forging partnerships with industry that are unique and already bearing fruit. These partnerships are advancing cutting-edge curricula and supplying employers with graduates ready to take on today’s societal challenges.

Traditionally, faculty create curricula in in relative isolation from the corporate world. Degree requirement are designated and then students enter the workforce. Employers must then figure out what skills they did not learn in college and train them. We are taking the opposite approach.

We first did that when we created the Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC) several years ago. We sought input from a broad array of industry leaders before we began building and have continued to do so since. We innovated a curriculum with this extraordinary hands-on facility explicitly designed to be run in partnership with industry. EPIC is run in tandem with an industrial advisory board of world-class product developers who advise us on the technical needs and skills most important to them. They have even mentored students in product design competitions on projects of importance to them.

We leveraged our experience with EPIC to create the Bioengineering Technology & Entrepreneurship Center (BTEC) which opened last year. In less than two years, we built an advisory board that includes leaders in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, therapeutics and medical technology. BTEC insures that our students learn cutting-edge technologies needed by these companies for the development of the next generation of biosensors, cellular and molecular diagnostics and therapeutics, and the application of AI to medicine and biology that could transform healthcare.

You may remember some of the stories in previous issues of this magazine noting the huge growth in robotics and autonomous systems research among our faculty. That drove the creation of a novel master’s degree program, which was designed explicitly for industry. In this issue, you will read about the newest addition to our hands-on facilities: The Robotics & Autonomous Systems Teaching and Innovation Center (RASTIC), designed to produce a workforce that will keep Massachusetts a leader in robotics. RASTIC is the result of our winning a $4.4 Million competitive grant from Mass High Tech. Students will do projects of importance to, and mentored by, industry and they will be immediately valuable to companies upon graduation.

All three of these facilities are used in lab courses. But they also invite students to come in and play, to innovate and develop their own ideas – whether part of the formal curriculum or of personal interest – and perhaps even start companies one day. We have created a successful model that serves our students and their future employers well. We will create graduates who be immediately impactful in fields like AI, machine learning, advanced manufacturing, digital product design, robotics, and medical and biotechnology.

We are finding that companies are excited to work with us and we are excited to produce the workforce that will serve society for decades to come.

Originally published in the Spring 2022 ENGineer Magazine