Dear Friends of Gonzaga Engineering:
Once again we have had an exciting year, with a new name, new programs, and, at last, the beginnings of a new building! The PACCAR Center for Applied Science is now well under construction, after the initial site work and excavation began in April. The scheduled completion date is sometime in the summer of 2008, with all of the new facilities available for student and faculty use by the start of the 2008 fall semester.
This beautiful three-story building is located directly to the south of the existing Herak Center, and will house our rapidly developing program in Electric Utility Transmission and Distribution (T&D) Engineering, with offices, laboratory, and computer classroom devoted to this initiative. But its 29,000 square feet of space will provide many other resources for the School, including much-needed classrooms (a total of nine, all with multimedia capabilities), faculty offices, a new administrative suite, two conference rooms, and laboratory facilities. These laboratories will include the T&D Power Engineering Lab, a Robotics Lab that can be shared by students from several disciplines, and a Computer Science Lab with a high-speed cluster computer array. Finally, faculty research space will be available for faculty members requiring dedicated areas to pursue their research interests.
Our two buildings will be connected by an enclosed sky bridge that runs from the second floor of the Herak Center to the third floor of the PACCAR Center, with an outdoor pedestrian mall separating the structures on the ground level. The new building was carefully planned and sited to permit future expansion to both the east and west of the PACCAR Center, should it become necessary.
With enrollment continuing at historical highs (448 engineering students again in the fall of 2006), the demand for this new space remains high. We have expectations that we will continue to experience modest increases in SEAS enrollments in future years because of our new initiatives and programs, and our recognized strengths in high-quality undergraduate engineering education. As a sign of this reputation, this past fall we were pleased to obtain one of our highest rankings yet in the US News evaluation of national engineering programs without a PhD—a tie for 20th place.
There are many other indicators of a growing, vibrant School, some of which are not even mentioned in this report because they are still in their formative stages. These include continuing efforts to create an interdisciplinary graduate program in Computational Sciences, a growth of our foreign presence with summer course offerings in Florence, Italy, and Benin, Africa, and an expansion of our partnership with the electric utility industry through development of transmission operator training courses.
Last year I closed these comments with the words of our Mission Statement, and this year I want to leave you with a re-statement of our Vision for the future of our School:
The Gonzaga University School of Engineering & Applied Science will be a leading edge innovator in high-quality undergraduate engineering education for the global marketplace.
This Vision helps us to focus all of our resources, and prods us to be constantly alert for new opportunities for our students to obtain innovative and challenging curricula and courses. In doing this, our faculty and staff recognize that the future world of engineering practice is far different than the world that existed which we studied engineering. Changes in the profession and in the global marketplace will continue to occur, and our educational system must remain current with, and even lead, those changes. Gonzaga is committed to be part of this national effort.
Finally, we thank you for your continued interest in and support of our faculty and students, and we hope you will share our pride in the accomplishments that are briefly listed in this Annual Report.
Dennis R. Horn, Dean of Engineering & Applied Science