Alfred University is doing it right. First you appoint a female dean of the engineering school, Doreen Edwards, then you expand the concept of what it is to be an engineering student. I’m betting this strategy will prove to be a winner.

From the Chronicle:

New Dean Wants Engineering Students to Look at the Big Picture

Doreen Edwards, new dean of Alfred U.’s engineering school: Students in the discipline “need a better sense of business. They need to understand different cultures. … They need a better understanding of the world in general.”
By Erica R. Hendry

As a child, Doreen Edwards didn’t have many reasons to care about science. She grew up on a South Dakota ranch as the only child of parents interested in the practical science and mathematics of farming, rather than the kind Ms. Edwards found in her textbooks.

But atoms and molecules fascinated her, she said, recalling her curiosity about the way things worked, and how they moved, as early as third grade.

That curiosity would eventually drive her to seek work as a research scientist for Gould Inc., an electronics manufacturer in Rolling Meadows, Ill., and at a basic-research laboratory at Northwestern University, experiences that enhanced her understanding of engineering through both industry and academic research.

That work, in turn, made her colleagues confident that she would carefully balance those two aspects of engineering, and led to her appointment as the new dean of Alfred University’s Kazuo Inamori School of Engineering.

There are only 24 other female deans of engineering in the country, according to the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine. But becoming Alfred’s first female dean of engineering is not as interesting to her as “just being the dean,” says Ms. Edwards, who is 45.

It is a critical time for new leadership as faculty members and officials embark on a universitywide strategic planning process, and the school of engineering prepares for reaccreditation in the next few years.

As part of that process, Ms. Edwards is working to improve collaboration between engineering and disciplines like business, communications, and the arts, with the hope that students will develop crossdisciplinary skills.

“I see engineering students who might be good at communicating minute technical details but don’t have the ability to switch that off and speak in broader, more global terms-that hasn’t been traditionally emphasized,” she said. “They need a better sense of business. They need to understand different cultures. … They need a better understanding of the world in general.”

Seeing that bigger picture is something that comes naturally to Ms. Edwards, said Matthew M. Hall, an associate professor of biomaterials and glass science at Alfred who served on the search committee that found Ms. Edwards among the school’s own administrators. While she can put the school in a universitywide context, she also understands the importance of a strong, research-based engineering education. Mr. Hall said she was largely responsible for a recently completed high-temperature materials-testing laboratory created with a $4-million grant from New York State, an effort she oversaw both as a professor and, since 2007, as associate dean.

“She has a very unique set of capabilities meant to service both the academic and industrial communities,” Mr. Hall said. The project, along with that capability, helped faculty and staff start to “evaluate her as a dean’s candidate.”

Ms. Edwards joined Alfred’s faculty as an assistant professor of materials science and engineering in 1997, the same year she earned her Ph.D. in those fields at Northwestern. She became a full professor in 2007.

She said the same curiosity that drove her to wonder about atoms as a 9-year-old led her to wonder about the “bigger pieces” of how administration worked. That curiosity, combined with her interest in advising and working with students, made Ms. Edwards a good candidate for director of graduate engineering programs, a position she held from 2003 to 2007, while also teaching six courses and supervising three to six graduate students.

“As an administrator, I started to understand broader issues associated with the university,” Ms. Edwards said. “And the more I learned about other aspects of the university, the more curious I was about the rationale behind the decisions.”

Faculty members give Ms. Edwards strong reviews: “She listens and gets things done,” said Pat LaCourse, the engineering and science librarian, who worked with Ms. Edwards while she was in the director’s role.

Ms. Edwards’s ability to streamline simple administrative paperwork and tasks helped her build a rapport with the faculty and staff members, Mr. Hall said. “She made the process less burdensome on the faculty so we could focus more effort on providing the necessary information.”

Her reputation was similarly strong with students, Ms. LaCourse said: “She is approachable” and “finds the time for those who need her attention, but is not a pushover.”

Ms. Edwards said her background in chemistry and work experience in industry help her make students aware of multiple career paths-something she also uses to encourage women to pursue careers in engineering, though she said gender is a “nonissue” at Alfred.

“You always run into individuals” who give you a hard time, she said. “It’s frustrating, but you sort of have to focus your attention on more positive things.”

Fewer than 900 women were awarded doctorates in engineering from American universities in 1997, the year Ms. Edwards earned hers, and only about 14.6 percent of women who earn such doctorates go on to enter academe, according to a January 2005 report issued by Engineering Trends, a database of engineering statistics run by a professor emeritus at Michigan Technological University.

Ms. Edwards said her move from industry to academe was driven by a desire to have more freedom in her areas of research-which have included ceramics, biology, chemistry, and developing materials for electrical, optical, and energy-conversion applications. She has also focused on sustainable-engineering solutions, which she said are particularly important for engineers entering today’s work force.

“Energy-this is one of the major crises that we’re facing, and having engineers who can come up with new solutions for sustainability is the next big step,” she said.

 

Tags: female engineering

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