Greetings from the College of Sciences and Arts at Michigan Tech!
The campus is vibrant, warm, sunny, and abuzz with activity! The walkways are filled with students ten minutes before the start of the hour as they hurry to class. Students converge on the Walker Lawn to eat their lunch, open a book, slackline (walk along a tight line secured between trees), and even engage in a water balloon fight (big activity last night)!
For me, the College of Sciences and Arts at Michigan Tech is busy fulfilling its mission to deliver comprehensive education, research, and innovation in various scientific, humanities, and technical arts disciplines focusing on achieving academic excellence, advancing research and scholarship, and promoting interdisciplinary collaboration. We seek to cultivate critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills among students, preparing them for what tomorrow needs.
The College also plays a critical role in the education of every Michigan Tech student through the wide array of courses we offer as part of general education. Our arts, humanities, and sciences programs reflect our place in a technological university. From sound design and audio technology to actuarial science, human factors, applied physics, biology, chemistry, and business analytics to pre-professional health programs, technical communication, medical laboratory science, and exercise science, the College offers many distinctive degree programs for undergraduate and graduate degrees. And we are in the final stages of bringing nursing over from the recently closed Finlandia University. We are just awaiting approval from The Higher Learning Commission (HLC), hopefully sometime in October, in order to begin offering that degree.
The College promotes and supports cutting-edge research and scholarly activities in the sciences, humanities, and arts. It encourages faculty and students to engage in research projects, contribute to knowledge and innovation, and disseminate their findings. The research projects include turning plastics into protein for use as an emergency food source; making clouds to study the physics of the earth’s atmosphere; understanding the impacts of multitasking on cognitive performance; using hydropower to store energy in old hard-metal mines; understanding how new media technologies can facilitate the spread of misinformation; and uncovering how the central nervous system regulates the cardiovascular function and body fluid and sodium homeostasis, and their impacts on diseases like congestive heart failure and hypertension. And I am only scratching the surface!
To support our increased emphasis on research, I appointed a new Associate Dean for Graduate Research and Education, Ashutosh Tiwari. Dr. Tiwari is a broadly trained protein chemist and cell biologist, as well as a professor of chemistry at Tech. His research is in the area of protein aggregation diseases. He has received numerous grants as PI or as Co-PI from the National Institutes of Health, the ALS Therapy Alliance, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association (ALSA), and the MTU Research Excellence Fund. He is the perfect person to lead our efforts in growing graduate research and education efforts for the College.
So much activity is underway here at Tech. I am looking forward to this academic year. I hope you are too.
Best wishes.
Dean, College of Sciences and Arts
