MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR
t is my great pleasure to introduce myself as the new ECE department chair. I am joined by Professor Yu Hen Hu, who will serve as the vice chair for operations. Some of you know me and I would sincerely appreciate hearing from you with updates on how you are doing. Others I have not had the pleasure to meet; however, I would love for you to introduce yourselves by E-mail, phone or a drop-in visit. If there is any way in which I can be of assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me.
On behalf of the entire ECE family, I wish to express deep gratitude to Professors Parameswaran Ramanathan and Amy Wendt, department chair and co-chair from 2005-2009. With their outstanding leadership and dedicated service, the department enters the next decade with many strengths and opportunities upon which to build. I feel extremely fortunate to have inherited the role of chair from their successful stewardship.
It is no secret that ECE and higher education in general are affected by the same challenges—economic, environmental and infrastructural—that are facing individuals, the nation and the globe. I see these challenges as a stimulus to reexamine many aspects of the department and seek improvements in how we affect learning, deliver support services and facilitate research.
While new approaches will address using financial resources more efficiently, our principal priority will remain on maintaining and improving the quality of student learning and research impact. In the coming year, we will conduct an intensive strategic planning initiative that will examine and revise our organizational structure, curriculum, instructional approaches and external communication. For example, a recent up-date to our department’s strategic five-year plan organizes our research profile emphases into the timely categories of energy, information and health. These priorities reflect the importance of electrical and computer engineering in finding solutions to grand societal challenges in these areas.
We are also actively contributing to the College of Engineering 2010 and Beyond Initiative to transform engineering education to meet the needs and realities of the future. Examples of successful course innovations led by ECE faculty under this initiative include Introduction to Society’s Engineering Grand Challenges and a new Engineering for Energy Sustainability certificate program.
One important area of emphasis during the next several years will be to develop and nurture our community of alumni and supportive friends and family, both individual and corporate, whose collective expertise and diverse, successful career experience coupled with their memories of UW-Madison and ECE represent a crucial pool of knowledge and professional support resources that we wish to more fully engage to ensure the success of our future students, faculty and staff.
By recognizing the importance of developing our resources to maintain our quality, we are aligning our department with the college’s plan to endow the department chair position. This will establish a flexible pool of resources to support priority investments in faculty recruitment start-up packages, teaching fellows, departmental colloquia with publicly available video archives, and funds to incubate new exploratory initiatives in teaching and research.
As state budgets struggle with increasing public obligations and declining revenues, we will increasingly rely on the philanthropy of those who have a symbiotic relationship with us. This will be critical to sustain and improve the exceptional learning and research that we are committed to providing as our faculty and students continue to achieve exceptional outcomes in the lab and the classroom.
I feel fortunate to have been a member of an outstanding and deservedly high-ranked department for almost 20 years, and I look forward to serving the colleagues, students, supportive alumni and industrial partners of ECE as we set sail to an exciting future.
John H. Booske, Chair
2416 Engineering Hall
1415 Engineering Dr.
Madison, WI 53706
Tel: 608/262-3840
Fax: 608/262-1267
E-mail:
ecechair@engr.wisc.edu
