Top-notch faculty recruitment is critical

BY VIJAY DHIR

Last month, we were elated by some great news here at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Three of our senior faculty members — Frank Chang and Yahya Rahmat-Samii from electrical engineering and William Yeh from civil and environmental engineering — were elected to the National Academy of Engineering. This is among the highest professional honors for an engineer. This year, our total of three new members was the highest in the country, along with Harvard and UC Berkeley.

This wonderful news is something that the entire campus can be proud of, as our faculty's contributions in their respective fields have had positive impacts on all of our lives. Since 2003, nine of our faculty have been recognized with this distinction.

On the other end of the spectrum, three of our junior faculty recently earned CAREER awards from the National Science Foundation. These highly competitive awards recognize great promise in the laboratory and the classroom. In the past five years, 18 of our young faculty have received this award from the NSF and other federal agencies.

In addition, four of those 18 winners have also been honored with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the most prestigious award for a researcher in the early part of his or her career.

These awards to our faculty are certainly a great tribute to the importance and potential of their work. We want to keep this trend going, which means we must continue to recruit and retain excellent faculty who are on the forefront of their field. This is one of the most critical issues for us here at UCLA Engineering, as it is across the entire UCLA campus.

As a public institution, we are facing more difficult challenges than our private peers in providing competitive salary packages and incentives to attract the best faculty candidates.

Our budget from the state has been shrinking for some time and now has become the new reality. And while our Los Angeles location and weather cannot be beat, they also coincide with traffic problems and high housing costs that can be a negative for potential new faculty who are weighing offers from multiple schools.

To take on these issues, UCLA Engineering is in the midst of an ambitious initiative that includes raising funds for new endowed chairs, as well as fellowships and scholarships for students. This effort is part of a larger campuswide initiative, Ensuring Academic Excellence.

The innovative and world-changing scholars of the future are out there — let's continue our work to keep UCLA as a premier destination for them.

Dhir is dean of UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.