College News from Dean Ilyas

Dear Faculty and Staff:

We are in the last week of the Spring 2016 semester. I express my sincere gratitude to all of you for your hard work, continued support, and dedication to the College operations. Here is a brief summary of what is happening in our College.

The commencement ceremony for our College is scheduled for Friday, May 6 at 1 p.m. The College will have a reception for our graduates at 11 a.m. in the Student Union, Grand Palm room. It is a wonderful day for our graduates and your participation in graduation as well as in the reception will be viewed as an encouragement to them as they transition to a new phase of their lives.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Sudhagar Nagarajan for receiving the "Exceptional Faculty Award 2015-2016" for the FAU Northern campuses.

In addition, several of our faculty members and students were recognized at the University Honors Convocation and received their prestigious awards reported in last month's Connections.

You may already know that Dr. Richard Granata has been elected as our College Faculty President. Dr. Amir Abtahi served the College in that capacity and did a wonderful job as President of the College Faculty during his tenure. Please join me in thanking Dr. Amir Abtahi for his service and congratulating Dr. Richard Granata on his election.

I am pleased to share with you that a Bachelor's degree program in Environmental Engineering has been officially approved and we will start accepting students. Please join me in congratulating Dr. Yan Yong, Dr. Dan Meeroff and the CEGE department faculty and staff for their many years of efforts to bring this degree program to fruition.

FAU's leadership and all the deans support the need to raise graduate student salaries to be more competitive. Although, the graduate student salaries in our College are (slightly) better, they are still far from being competitive. So, we have taken an initiative to raise them in our College. The decision about the salaries for Research Assistants will be in the hands of Principal Investigators with a cap of $30K for PhD students, (after passing the qualifying examination) and $23K for MS students. The stipend for teaching assistants is being adjusted upwards by $1000 for both MS and PhD students.

The 50th anniversary of our Ocean Engineering program was a wonderful event, many proud alums participated. This program has truly enjoyed a wonderful reputation around the nation and the world. This is, of course, due to the unmatched dedication and hard work of all of the past and current faculty, staff and students associated with this unique program.

For your information, our College of Engineering and Computer Science plans to celebrate its 50th anniversary in the year 2020. We have already started making plans for that event. If you have any ideas to contribute, please share them with me. We will keep an active file on all the possible activities, list of invited speakers, and other such information.

Our College's Senior Design Showcase is being held on Wednesday, May 4, from 4 to 7 p.m. at FAU Tech Runway. A large number of visitors from industry are expected to attend. Your participation will be an encouragement to our students.

The College's Executive Advisory Board members will have their second meeting on May 4 and afterwards will be attending our Senior Design Showcase. One of the items that will be presented in the board meeting is the establishment of a Center for Innovation and Discovery in Engineering (CIDE). The Center is expected to bring students, industry partners, some of the senior design activities, and entrepreneurship, together and lead to invention disclosures/patents, and potentially some startups. This initiative aligns with one of the platforms in FAU's strategic plan.

The collective bargaining process has been successfully completed. The new agreement calls for faculty salary increases over a period of three years (2015-16, 2016-17, and 2017-18). I believe the in-unit faculty members have received the information about these raises directly from the University and UFF leadership. The implementation details for these raises are still being developed. I will provide you with additional details as they become available.

Thank you for your participation in our annual anonymous survey. There were a total of 33 participants/attempts – 23 faculty and 10 staff. One was empty and a few were incomplete. I will make an attempt to summarize the survey and send it as a separate email.

Once again, I thank all of you for your support. I very much appreciate your hard work and dedication and let us collectively make this College shine better than ever. I encourage you to continue sharing your constructive criticism, suggestions, comments, and advice with me so that we all continue the upward trajectory of our College.

College of Engineering & Computer Science News from Dean Ilyas