Editorial

A Message from the Dean of the College of Engineering

JoAnn Browning, Ph.D., P.E.
Dean, College of Engineering
David and Jennifer Spencer Distinguished Chair

Over the years, Innovations magazine has featured hundreds of stories from across the College of Engineering. From updates on new building construction, to photo collages of student activities, to articles featuring our outstanding faculty and staff, I am proud to have a publication like Innovations to help tell the story of the college. As we continue to grow in size and excellence, a number of changes are taking place across campus, and we are excited to see what 2018 has in store for UTSA and the College of Engineering.

The biggest change at UTSA in 2017 was our new president, Dr. Taylor Eighmy, who arrived in San Antonio in September and hit the ground running! Dr. Eighmy is an environmental engineer, and the faculty and staff in the College of Engineering are poised to help deliver on his vision of an urban-serving institution that leverages key partnerships in the city, the state, the nation, and beyond. Under Dr. Eighmy’s leadership, UTSA will become an urban-serving university that cultivates cradle-to-career learning. We in the college are dedicated to graduating world-ready students with the skills that employers seek as the engineering workforce evolves in Texas and around the country.

Another wonderful change is that our new chemical engineering program welcomed its first cohort in fall 2017. These students have excellent academic credentials and are eager to share their skills with industry in South Texas and beyond. The program will eventually find its home in the new Science and Engineering Building (SEB), which broke ground in summer 2017 and will be complete in 2020. Faculty and staff offices, research spaces, and a state-of-the-art unit operations lab will be included in this structure located across the South Paseo from the Biotechnology, Sciences and Engineering Building (BSE).

The SEB will also house 17,000 square feet of maker space for our senior design students to occupy during the last year of their undergraduate curriculum. More than 600 students graduated with an engineering degree in 2016-17 – the largest number of graduates the College has had in an academic year – and this space will help to provide more opportunities for collaboration and innovation for our future engineering students. The results of our students’ senior design work are demonstrated each semester at our Technology Symposium, and in fall 2017, we had over 80 different projects and posters on display with thousands of dollars in prizes at stake. If you have not been to our Tech Symposium, find your way to UTSA this spring to experience the thrill of the competition and the joy of a completed engineering degree! (click here to see photos from this fall’s event.)

Our research continues to be top tier – with record-setting awards received and research expended in the 2016-17 academic year. We continue to grow in the number of faculty and the number of externally-supported research projects so that we can contribute cutting-edge, new knowledge and technological discoveries to our engineering communities. Please take the time to browse the awards section of Innovations to see the array of problems that our faculty are solving.

I hope you enjoy this latest edition of Innovations, designed and edited by our award-winning Senior Communications Coordinator, Deborah Silliman. She, and the rest of the faculty and staff in the College of Engineering, is passionate about the success of our students, our college, and our university. We all hope that you enjoy perusing our engineering stories in this latest issue of Innovations!