Here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, we hired 15 new faculty in Fall 2023 – and more than 160 faculty over the last ten years. That’s a lot of world-class engineering and computer science innovators to join a school in the course of a decade! Almost exactly one year ago, we celebrated our first named academic department both here at the Jacobs School and on the main UC San Diego campus: the Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering – our bioengineering community is truly a marvel. As I highlighted last month, we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the naming of our Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering. Meanwhile, Franklin Antonio Hall is fully activated – the circulation of people and ideas is remarkable. We have strategically grown our masters programs; risen in many different rankings; expanded our experiential-education capacity for undergraduates; and logged more research expenditures than any engineering school in California or on the West Coast. Our industry engagement efforts and student centers are national models. I could go on. But I share this extremely non-comprehensive avalanche of good news to highlight that the Jacobs School has arrived – and that we are rising still.
So, what’s the roadmap for our future? After spending ten years strengthening our Jacobs School and refining all the machinery we use to be successful, we are set for a deliberate, sustained, continuous rise in positive impact – both here in Southern California and on the national stage. We have reached the point where we can drive innovation ecosystems for specific enterprises at scale.
Biomanufacturing, fusion engineering, and microelectronics production for 5G/6G (including new funding from the Chips and Science Act of 2022) are three examples of Grand Initiatives at the Jacobs School where we are building enterprise-scale innovation ecosystems that are poised to have direct positive impact.
We have also put together a process to ensure a consistent stream of big, grassroots ideas coming from our academic departments. This is about surfacing public-interest research efforts that could become transformative with the right support – likely in collaboration with an industry consortium. I’m calling this the Leviathan Initiative. More to come on this exciting project.
At the same time, I am working on a new effort to facilitate transformative research from the other direction by accelerating the formation of industry consortia. Proactive collaboration and
leadership driven from the industry side is frequently a critical factor for empowering engineering schools to solve emergin enterprise-scale challenges that are too big for any one discipline or company to tackle alone.
With the Leviathans, we have a grassroots process for surfacing emerging research opportunities from our departments. With the consortia project, we are building an industry-driven process for surfacing research needs. I believe the Jacobs School has an important role to play in connecting these two processes. In fact, we intend to test the premise that these two systems can not only operate in parallel but be linked together.
In closing, while remaining steadfast in our missions for education, research and innovation for the public good, we are also part of a group of engineering schools that has stepped up in terms of positive national impact driven by engineering and computer science innovation. I believe this is what the country needs. And we will do it at the enterprise scale, in order to have the greatest positive impact possible.
As always, I can be reached at DeanPisano@ucsd.edu.
Sincerely,
Al
Albert ("Al") P. Pisano, Dean
UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
