News Article

College faculty ‘champion’ hires across disciplinary boundaries to enhance teaching, research

February 19, 2008 11:37 AM
Category: CoE Feature

 

2050 ChallengeFrom the CyberInnovation Institute to the Bioeconomy Institute, the College of Engineering at Iowa State University is rising to the “2050 Challenge” to meet critical national and global needs that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and ways of thinking. Now that institutional focus is being matched at the level of the individual researcher.

Currently in the second year of a five-year program to fill as many as 30 new faculty lines in five critical cross-disciplinary “clusters,” the college has announced the appointment of 10 “cluster champions,” or two faculty members in each of the five areas of biosciences, information sciences, energy, sustainability, and engineering for extreme events.

The champions will supervise seminars and monthly meetings, and generally serve as linchpins for the approximately 40 faculty members, including current faculty and new hires, that comprise each of the clusters. Most significantly, they will facilitate communications between cluster faculty and prospective hires who have the potential to both take advantage of the cluster’s interdisciplinary strengths and contribute to its international profile.

This aggressive drive to recruit new talent was made possible in part by the Iowa Board of Regents’ approval in 2006 of a differential tuition for students in the College of Engineering. Part of this new revenue stream was dedicated to increased financial aid, with most of the remainder directed toward hiring new faculty to improve undergraduate education by lowering the student-to-faculty ratio and elevating the quality of instruction.  

According to Associate Dean for Research Balaji Narasimhan, new faculty will also perform research addressing the 2050 Challenge. “The 2050 Challenge demands people who think across disciplines,” Narasimhan says. “So we need our students to think like that, if they're going to solve these problems. By bringing in faculty with the ability to cross between departments, we’ll be able to inculcate that thinking into our students.”

Narasimhan is quick to stress that new cluster hires will not be brought in to create instruction and research programs from the ground up so much as to enhance existing strengths in the college. Because of Iowa State’s world-class facilities, robust funding in targeted technologies, and ability to attract some of the best students in the world, he adds, cluster candidates will find an inviting and supportive environment for instruction and research programs that straddle the boundaries of traditional scientific and engineering disciplines.

“We’re looking for people who have the ability to collaborate with others in fields that are ‘orthogonal’ to what they are doing,” Narasimhan says, “people who have the ability to move the frontiers of interdisciplinary science, who aren’t afraid to work with an economist or a biologist—whatever makes sense.”

Dean of the College of Engineering Mark J. Kushner notes the global mission of the cluster hiring. "The challenges our engineering graduates will face in their careers are incredibly complex, transcending not only the borders of Iowa but those of the nation.  The international perspectives cluster faculty will bring to our classrooms and research laboratories are critical to addressing that complexity."

The “cluster champions” charged with identifying and grooming those candidates include associate professors Julie Dickerson of electrical and computer engineering and Z. J. Wang of aerospace engineering, both of whose research straddles traditional disciplinary boundaries. By vigorously promoting the cluster both internally and externally, they hope to provide an attractive environment for researchers whose interests have grown beyond their formal academic training.

“We need people who can bridge departments in areas such as systems biology and the development of new sensing methods for in vivo systems,” says Dickerson, who brings her own expertise in communications and signal processing to bear in bioengineering applications. “Finding people who have the depth of knowledge in both the problem domain and the engineering side is difficult.”

That difficulty is only compounded by the system of promotions and rewards in academic institutions, which historically have been closely tied to departmental affiliations. By basing hiring decisions across disciplinary lines in the first place, the clusters hope to offer alternatives to both promising and veteran researchers whose work doesn’t fit neatly into traditional categories.

“This type of work can pull people away from a traditional department, making it difficult to evaluate performance and effectiveness,” adds Dickerson. “The cluster hire process is a chance to break free of some of these constraints at both the departmental and college levels.”

To further foster such independence, cluster champions will encourage members to resist the gravitational pull of their primary professional associations and individual research efforts to better comprehend the direction of the cluster as a whole. “An understanding of what our own people can do and what others are doing is very important in formulating a successful strategy to pursue projects of national impact and visibility,” says Wang, an expert in computational fluid dynamics and champion for the extreme events cluster.

To date, the initiative has identified and recruited new hires in the energy, sustainability, and information science clusters. But with more than 30 potential faculty lines to fill, Narasimhan and his cluster champions will have their work cut out for them. It’s a challenge, he feels, that is more than worth the effort.

“These hires will be synergistic,” Narasimhan stresses, “and they will make up a structure that is much greater than the sum of their parts.”


Cluster champions at Iowa State



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