Director’s Message

Growing and thriving

As a new school year gets underway, we’re excited about our new cybersecurity program, new research opportunities, and expanding programs. Our School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is growing and thriving.

With $2 million in state funding support, we established our new cybersecurity degree, which is being offered in Pullman, Tri-cities, and Everett. We expect about 100 students initially to pursue studies in this high-demand and critically important field. As we all know, maintaining data security is a constantly changing and growing challenge in virtually every industry, and with this new program, our students will become well trained to tackle these challenges.

Demand for our graduates is higher than ever. In addition to the cybersecurity program, we continue offering our computer science, data analytics, electrical engineering, computer engineering, and software engineering degrees on campuses throughout Washington, including in Pullman, Tri-Cities, Vancouver, Everett, and Bremerton.

I am also excited about our research that continues, particularly in the area of computer chip design. With the aim of securing domestic supplies of computer chips, the recently passed US CHIPS and Science Act provides more than $52 billion for semiconductor research, development, manufacturing, and workforce development. Many of our faculty are doing research in the areas of circuits and systems design, and we are growing these research efforts with funding support from the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, Semiconductor Research Corporation, and Intel.

Among our faculty, Ganapati Bhat recently received a NSF CAREER Award, Diane Cook was named a AIMBE faculty fellow, and Jana Doppa was named a senior member of the AAAI. Anamika Dubey received an Outstanding Young Engineer Award and Mani Venkatasubramanian received the Prabha S. Kundur Power Systems Dynamics and Control Award from the IEEE Power & Energy Society. Our faculty attend many top tier research conferences around the world, which is reflected in our improved rankings.

With our research innovation and enrollment growth, we are also growing our faculty. I’m pleased to welcome six new faculty members this fall. Among their research expertise are system reliability; distributed storage systems; web security and online privacy; cryptography; and reinforcement learning. Our new hires are deeply involved in machine learning, which plays a large role in chip design, and security. Several more faculty hires are expected next near, particularly in the area of chip design. We’re excited to see how our dynamic, young faculty members are re-energizing our program.

This year promises to be busy and productive, and we’re excited to see our students and faculty thrive. Thank you for your generous support of our programs, which makes so much of our success possible. Please feel free to drop by to visit and learn more about what we’re doing. And as always, Go Cougs!
 

Sincerely,