Looking Back on the Fall 2023 Semester, Looking Forward to Sharing a New Strategic Plan in 2024

dean's messages

Happy Holidays from the A. James Clark School of Engineering.

Our community, like yours, is looking forward to spending time with family and friends. It is also a reminder of how quickly this semester has gone by and how much we have accomplished by working together.

The Clark School set out to develop a strategic plan to guide us into 2030, one that clarifies our mission, vision, and values and focuses our campus and community activities on research and innovation, reimagining learning, investing in our community, and partnerships to advance the public good. Thanks to sustained and thoughtful input from our students, faculty, and staff, we are well on the road to completing it. We look forward to sharing our plan in 2024.

Our research continued to advance our society and economy. Battery work led by Distinguished University Professor Eric Wachsman, for example, offered a breakthrough that could surpass fast charging requirements set by the United States Department of Energy. We signed a MOU with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to develop new solutions in aerospace, autonomy, advanced materials, and more. We also moved forward with our novel partnership bridging engineering and medicine.

All the while, our wise and service-oriented students continued to amaze us and themselves. Our graduate students, for example, won first place in the Vertical Flight Society's 40th Annual Student Design Competition. The Terrapin Rocket Team took a top spot at the 2023 Spaceport America Cup rocket competition. To offer students more unique opportunities, we launched the xFoundry, an effort to challenge them to solve societal problems through innovation, design, prototyping, and entrepreneurial activities.

For these reasons and many others, the Clark School now ranks 19 overall among more than 200 undergraduate engineering programs—up three positions from its previous undergraduate ranking, according to U.S. News & World Report's 2023–24 Best Colleges rankings.

Our students, faculty, and staff feel fortunate to contribute to our dynamic and diverse community, one that shares a common goal of serving our state and, more broadly, society. We thrive because we encourage and empower students to pursue their passions and ideas, and have world-class faculty to teach our students and award-winning staff to support them.

We are thankful for your support of Maryland Engineering and look forward to sharing 2024's chapter in our story.

Published December 4, 2023