Priorities

Attracting Top Talent

People are at the heart of what we do – professorships, undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships, and postdoctoral fellowships are essential to attract and retain top talent from diverse backgrounds at all student levels and among the faculty.

Faculty lead our school’s mission. Great faculty excel as educators, mentors, and researchers. In order to deepen, broaden, and strengthen our faculty base, Columbia Engineering seeks to increase our endowed senior and junior faculty positions to attract new leading faculty and support our star educators and researchers, especially as we grow our faculty.

Providing Columbia undergraduates the opportunity to graduate debt fee is a bedrock principle of our School. To support our commitment to a need-blind admissions policy, the School must increase its financial aid endowment so that talented students of all backgrounds can access the Columbia experience and go on to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges.

Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows play a critical role in the vitality of our School. Fellowships attract and support the brightest minds to join Columbia to pursue this critical stage in their career. As researchers, mentors, collaborators, and aspiring educators, they are on the forefront of knowledge discovery and translation to impact.

A common thread woven through the School’s recruitment efforts at all levels is a steadfast effort to promote diversity. In addition to providing a curriculum and an ecosystem as pluralistic and polyphonic as New York City itself, Columbia Engineering strives to create a community of scholars who embody a commitment to diversity and encourage the multiple perspectives and approaches that promote discovery and innovation. 

Creating and Sustaining Strategic Programs

Exploring new path-breaking ideas requires partnerships among nontraditional collaborators. Columbia Engineering needs robust, flexible funds to invest in Interdisciplinary Research endeavors and support for the early stages of these efforts. We’ve already seen promising results from initial seed grants, and there’s a growing interest for this critical early-stage support.

Columbia engineers aspire to translate their discoveries to real-world impact. Programs, including Translational Research Funds and the Translational Fellows Program, enable our engineers and ideas to bring later-stage research to market. Great ideas can come from anyone. Ignition grants offer a wider audience, especially undergraduates and Masters of Science students, the opportunity to secure funding to advance an initial prototype.

Along with more traditional education and research activity, Columbia Engineering seeks to build a culture of innovation through our broad innovation and entrepreneurship programming. This assortment of activities, sponsored by the Dean of Engineering, includes venture competitions, prototyping facilities, human-centered design courses, coworking space, mentorship, and more. 

Accelerating World-Class Research and Education Spaces

Moving forward, our lecture halls, classrooms, project spaces, physical and digital prototyping labs, research labs, and gathering spaces must house the latest research equipment and create opportunities for organic collaboration. This state-of-the-art environment will catalyze partnerships between departments and across the University, making Columbia Engineering and world-class destination for top students, researchers, and faculty working together to push the frontiers of discovery and to solve pressing global challenges.

Fast-paced advances in technology require our faculty to continually reinvent their research and teaching lab spaces to accommodate critical new investigative tools. Such progress requires ongoing updates to infrastructure and facilities that meet the evolving needs of faculty and students as we continue to build an ecosystem of exploration, discovery, and translational impact.

While there is explosive growth in courses offered at the Engineering School, student’s access to classes is constrained by lecture halls that were built in the age of slide rules and punch cards. New learning spaces designed to accommodate shifting enrollment patterns, the latest teaching technology, and hands-on active engagement will ensure Columbia Engineering will be an education leader.