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College of Engineering Strategic Plan

Vision: The College will be internationally acclaimed as a leader in producing innovative graduates and research that focus on meeting the present and future needs of society.

As a land grant institution, the College of Engineering has a fundamental mission to serve the state of Iowa and the nation by providing a highly educated populace, expanding the economy, and being a source of critical technology and unbiased counsel. In a time of increasing globalization, the College will fulfill this mission by becoming a locally, nationally, and internationally recognized source of scholarship, innovation, integrity, and leadership, and by becoming a preferred destination for students and scholars from throughout the world. Our faculty, students, and staff will foster a collaborative, altruistic, and collegial environment, and partner within the college and across the campus, state, and world, with domestic and international industry, government and universities. The College of Engineering will become known for its commitment to intellectual, ethnic, and gender diversity. We will be a leader in satisfying the critical needs of society. Our graduates will be known and sought by the world’s elite institutions for their leadership skills, ethical behavior, technical and scientific expertise, and attention to society's needs.

Priorities: Our Human Capital

• Our most valuable assets are the members of our extended community, including prospective freshman, our alumni, students, faculty and staff, industrial collaborators, and government partners. Enabling our constituents to be successful in their careers and pursuits creates a sense of ownership in the College of Engineering that best serves those constituents and empowers the College to fulfill its mission.
• Supporting an intellectually diverse environment will broadly stimulate excellence and enable all members of our community to pursue their scholarship in the manner they can best serve our mission.
• Our faculty, staff, students, and graduates will serve honestly and ethically, constantly seeking ways to use their knowledge and experience to improve the human condition.

Priorities: Education

• The College of Engineering will provide an excellent education coupled with experiential learning that recognizes the global leveling of the engineering profession and the rapid pace of innovation. This will be accomplished by providing choice, breadth, and accelerated pace in undergraduate and graduate curricula.
• We will empower our students to customize their educations to achieve their career goals. We will recognize that future opportunities will involve expertise in systems in all engineering disciplines. We will enable an engineering education to be an ideal entry point to all careers.
• Empowering our students and faculty will create an environment that will enhance the intellectual, ethnic, and gender diversity of student body and faculty.
• To prepare our graduates to become leaders in a profession dominated by globalization, our students will have increasing opportunities for international experiences.
• The critical need for a technologically savvy populace will be met by providing technology-based educational opportunities for pre-college students, non-engineering students, and professionals.
• Academic opportunities involving biology will be provided in all majors and programs, undergraduate and graduate, in recognition of the vital role played by biological science and technology in, for example, health care, the food supply, industrial processing, energy development, and environmental management.
• New resources will be devoted to improving the quality and uniqueness of instruction and lowering student-to-faculty ratios to enable more engagement.

Priorities: Research

• We will value, recognize, and reward innovation and creativity in our research.
• We will conduct high value research by investigating leading-edge technology and science and choose to address the most critical of society’s needs. We will meet this goal by taking a leadership position in all we do and by our willingness to accept risk.
• We will be a leader in transforming the results of scientific research, the study of nature, into engineering accomplishment, creating new solutions to society’s problems, a step that requires a seamless integration of fundamental science and engineering practice.
• Cutting-edge research will be supported by strategically investing in people and facilities through generation of new resources and reallocation, while empowering faculty and staff to vigorously pursue external funding to support their own research .
• The importance of systems engineering approaches, particularly involving biological applications, will be emphasized through interdisciplinary research that advances synergistic integration of science and technology across all spatial scales.
• Becoming a preferred destination for regional, national, and international students will recognize our international impact. We will increase the number and quality of PhD students we supervise, both within engineering and collaboratively with colleagues in other disciplines.

Priorities: Public Engagement

• The College of Engineering and its graduates will become participants and leaders in the public debate on the use of technology for the betterment of society.
• The College of Engineering and its graduates will be leaders in expanding state, regional, and national prosperity by helping enact new models of economic development based on embracing technology, lowering intellectual property barriers, and investing in entrepreneurship.
• We will work towards improving the technical literacy of the general public by engaging them through continuing education opportunities and the popular media.

Priorities: Infrastructure

• State-of–the-art research and educational facilities will be continuously improved through strategic maintenance, renovation, and new construction to enable our faculty, students, and staff to pursue their scholarship in the best possible environments.
• We will better engage our constituents by strategically aligning our academic and administrative departments to deliver a consistent and compelling message of our goals and values.
• We will employ the most advanced collaborative information technologies and business practices to best position ourselves to take advantage of new opportunities and to increase our operational efficiency.