UCSB Engineering

Message From The Dean

There are many reasons we're becoming one of the top schools in the nation for Engineering.

We've brought together an amazing group of faculty who represent the top of their fields and are, in fact, among the most cited by their worldwide colleagues, a testament to the quality of their research and its global impact. A high percentage of the faculty has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering. We have five Nobel Prize winners on this campus, four of whom are faculty in Engineering and the Sciences.

We've also brought together an amazing group of smart, accomplished, high-energy students who contribute a great deal to the quality of the learning environment.

We've crafted courses that are designed to balance the combination of theory and applied science necessary for careers in academia and in industry.

We have a uniquely successful interdisciplinary environment. This is becoming increasingly critical in engineering and the sciences, but few campuses have the culture and attitude that catalyze such an environment.

A truly interdisciplinary culture allows all sorts of ideas to cross-fertilize and makes it easy for faculty to work effectively between disciplines to tackle big questions. Visiting scholars tell us they don't often see the openness within departments and the ease of multi-disciplinary collaboration that they find here. In many ways, we have the fresh and committed attitude of a start-up, and although we're part of the prestigious, well-established and large University of California system, we don't carry the burdens of a century or two of established policies or departmental histories that could bind our imaginations. And we've got an entrepreneurial attitude. We want our research to be applied, used and tested.

Engineering here is distinctive. In teaching, we follow a path closer to basic science than at many other of the nation's engineering schools. I think that technology is not just an inevitable consequence of having a tall stockpile of good basic research that was done with no applications in mind. The Santa Barbara engineering model envisions creative people working on applied problems and coming up against questions that require them to do basic research because they realize that the particular area needs to be developed to pursue the technology. That model is manifested here in people who make it possible to do cutting edge research because they have positioned themselves to be effective agents of this exchange between basic science and technology.

Matthew Tirrell
The Richard A. Auhll Professor and Dean

• Nobel Prize Winners
• 2007 National Academy Members