Our Franklin Antonio Hall here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering opened just two years ago, and in that time
it has won 15 architecture and design awards – and counting. In this final Dean’s column of 2024, I’d like to step back and discuss the bigger picture of Franklin Antonio Hall – and what these awards mean to me.
But first, as we enter the holiday season, allow me to pause to count my blessings. I am incredibly grateful to everyone who is part of our Jacobs School community. To our students, staff, faculty, alumni, industry partners, friends – and to the larger community that enables us to advance engineering and computer science for the public good: THANK YOU! I am deeply grateful.
And in fact, it is the generosity of many people all across our Jacobs School community that has made Franklin Antonio Hall such a success. This generosity makes the avalanche of awards for the building particularly meaningful to me.
Thank you to everyone who has stepped up! We couldn’t have done it without you. And yes, there are still opportunities to get involved in philanthropy and drive impact in the building. Please get in touch if you’d like to learn more.
From the beginning, my goal for Franklin Antonio Hall was to create an academic engineering building that would:
• Maximize the circulation of people and ideas
• Stand the test of time
• Welcome industry
• Benefit people outside of the Jacobs School of Engineering
These four mantras served as human-centric performance objectives for the design and programming of Franklin Antonio Hall. They shaped all aspects of building design and programming. I am absolutely thrilled that the architecture and building-design community is recognizing the outcomes of this process with so many awards.
As I look back on all that went into designing, programming and fundraising for the building, I see the DNA of our Jacobs School. In fact, our efforts in Franklin Antonio Hall to advance engineering and computer science in order to deliver positive outcomes for society are a microcosm of what we do all across our Jacobs School.
This year
we ranked #1 in the nation for citations per publication among all public engineering schools, according to the US News Rankings of Best Engineering Schools. Many of our faculty also rank among
the world’s most influential researchers. I am incredibly proud that we are being recognized by our academic peers for our research accomplishments. Citation rankings represent a direct vote of excellence and relevance from our engineering and computer science faculty peers at other universities.
When I step into Franklin Antonio Hall, I actually feel this excellence and relevance. It merges into a sense of awe. I feel this awe when I look up into the soaring atria and see our research collaboratories that draw people from different disciplines together to work on the most difficult challenges that no lab, discipline or industry can solve alone.
I also feel this awe when I allow these research collaboratories to shift into my peripheral vision so that I can gaze through one of the atria and out into the bright blue sky. Looking into the great beyond, I think of what more we might do by building on our strengths. I think of the powerful moves we are positioned to make thanks to the fertile, collaborative, cross-disciplinary research and entrepreneurship communities here in Franklin Antonio Hall and across the Jacobs School. I think of the institutes we are building.
Fusion engineering, healthcare engineering and carbon-negative biomanufacturing are three exemplars.
I think of all the potential we have to connect in the coming year on shared efforts to advance engineering and computer science education, research and innovation for the public good. I look up, and with this sense of awe, I look forward to all of it – and I sincerely thank everyone inside and outside the Jacobs School who is part of our community. Together, we make
bold possible.