Welcome back to the East Village, 41 Cooper Square, and Shoop’s Stoop! We successfully completed yet another academic year and I want to share just a few of the exciting things that happened in the Albert Nerken School of Engineering since my last update.

The end of our academic year ended much like the beginning, on a somber note. On Saturday, May 27, I had the sad duty to inform our engineering faculty, staff, and students that Professor Daniel Lepek passed away on the morning of May 26, 2023, after a very private and intense year-long battle with cancer. Daniel was a kind, gentle, talented, and creative person who made immense contributions to Cooper Union and the profession. One could rightly characterize him as a renaissance man. He was a Professor of Chemical Engineering and his research interests included particle technology, fluidization and multiphase flow, pharmaceutical engineering, modeling of transport and bio transport phenomena, and engineering education. He was also a Fulbright Scholar. In addition, Daniel was an accomplished pianist, composer, and musical director. He regularly performed at the Cooper Union Talent Show. When I first arrived at Cooper Union in the spring semester of 2019, Daniel was the first faculty member to invite me to lunch where he introduced me to Madame Vo’s Vietnamese restaurant. It continues to be one of my favorites in the East Village and it will evoke special memories of Daniel in the future. An example of his creativity was ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE – An Immersive Theatrical Experience on Engineering Ethics that he piloted in ESC000 in AY2022. This was an informal, semi-staged reading of ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE which tells the story of a respected doctor who courageously tells the truth about a health hazard in his small town and is consequentially denounced and ostracized. Daniel was a favorite of students and was a valued colleague to faculty and staff across The Cooper Union and he will be deeply missed.

This year we had a total of 103 undergraduate students and 23 graduate students graduate from the School of Engineering. For our undergraduates, this included 22 Chemical Engineers, 27 Civil Engineers, 26 Electrical Engineers, 22 Mechanical Engineers, and 6 General Engineers. In addition to the undergraduate degrees, members of this graduating class were awarded a total of 44 minors: 26 Computer Science Minors, 10 Bioengineering Minors, 2 Chemistry Minors, and 6 HSS Minors.

Our fall 2023 incoming first-year class is again very strong. We admitted 106 students into the Class of 2027. There will be 18 students majoring in Chemical Engineering, 30 in Civil, 32 in Electrical, 25 in Mechanical, and 11 in General Engineering. Women comprise 41% of this class. Additionally, 15% of this class identify as underrepresented minorities, 24% self-identified as the first in their family to attend college and 9% of the class is international. This year we have 43 entering Master of Engineering students.

When I first arrived at Cooper, I was told “we are a small school that punches well-above our weight class.” Our students do this regularly and continue to make us proud. Our students took 1st Place at the Regional AlChE Undergraduate Research Competition, Matthew Moulton ChE’20 was awarded a GEM Fellowship to support his graduate studies in civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, our Solar Decathlon Team was awarded the 2023 US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon Design Challenge Competition Commercial Grand Prize, and our Intelligent Ground Vehicle (IGV) team secured an impressive 2nd place win for self-driving vehicles and 3rd place for self-drive design at this year’s Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC).  Read more about these in this newsletter.

In the fall of 2023, we will add two new tenure-track faculty to our Civil Engineering Department ranks. Hejintao Huang is completing her Ph.D. at Georgia Institute of Technology with a geotechnical disciplinary focus. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bucknell University and her research focuses on the beneficial use of waste materials. Jeong Eun Ahn received her Ph.D. from NYU in 2019 with a hydraulics disciplinary focus. She comes to us with four years of teaching experience at Rowan University and her research focuses on developing sustainable water systems and increasing the resiliency of coastal communities. The face of the engineering full-time faculty continues to evolve. Over the past three-year, I have hired 10 new tenure-track faculty, nearly 1/3 of the tenured and tenure-track faculty in the School of Engineering. In 2013, the composition of the tenured and tenure-track faculty in the School of Engineering was 6.3% women and in Fall 2023 it will be 42% women!

ABET accreditation is important to the continuous improvement, sustained quality, and recognition of the Chemical, Civil, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering Programs. The four ABET accredited majors are periodically evaluated by the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) of ABET. Our reaccreditation cycle will begin this next academic year, with AY2024 being our record year. We will submit a request for evaluation to ABET by January 31, 2024, that will initiate a reaccreditation evaluation visit. In preparation for the visit, a Self-Study Report for each of the ABET accredited programs must be submitted to ABET by July 1, 2024. The reaccreditation evaluation will be a comprehensive general review with an on-sight visit that will occur in the Fall of 2024. Given the importance of ABET accreditation and the amount of work required of the full-time faculty to prepare for the upcoming reaccreditation, this summer, we have full-time faculty from the four ABET accredited programs engaging in ABET reaccreditation activities including outcomes assessment, formatting and compiling faculty curricula vitae for all faculty, formatting and compiling syllabi for all of the courses in each curriculum, and beginning to draft the self-studies.

Thank you again for sharing your valuable time with me on Shoop’s Stoop! It continues to be an exciting time to be part of the Albert Nerken School of Engineering. I look forward to sharing additional updates in future editions of Shoop’s Stoop! From all of us at Cooper, enjoy your summer!

Barry L. Shoop, Ph.D., P.E.  |  Dean of Engineering  |  Albert Nerken School of Engineering