July 19, 2016

Dear Friends of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Business

It is mid-summer, and campus is bustling with research projects, summer camps, freshman orientation programs, and preparations for the beginning of the academic year. It seems like just yesterday that we held our 2016 spring commencement, where a record number of students earned their diplomas and started the next chapter of their lives. The spring commencement also capped a year in which the university reached several high-water marks related to growth, including over 400 full-time faculty members, a freshman class of nearly 1,500 students, and a total student body of nearly 9,000. Not only did we become bigger, we also became better.

Employers and corporate partners noted that S&T graduates were more career-ready due to experiences outside of the classroom, such as internships, faculty-mentored research projects, study abroad, and student design teams. With this in mind, Missouri S&T implemented a requirement that every student participate in one of these or other experiential learning activities as a condition of graduation. The new initiative is just one of many ways that S&T works to ensure the success of our graduates and their employers.

New faculty get ‘smart’

Summertime is also when the campus welcomes new faculty, of which there are many in the College. New faculty appointments were made in psychological science, economics, mathematics and statistics, biological sciences, English and technical communication, and business and information technology. Among these are three new faculty hired into psychological science as part of S&T’s Smart Living signature area, which seamlessly improves quality of life by transforming home, workplace, healthcare, transportation, and energy infrastructures into “smart” environments. Smart Living increases our understanding of how people and technology interact by combining sensing with physical action, social behavior analysis, data analytics, engineering, technology, communication, and decision-making into a single, integrated concept. Last year, physics and chemistry hired faculty within the Enabling Materials for Extreme Environments signature area.

The College goes global

Several faculty from the College are spending this summer planning and organizing new study abroad courses that will be offered in the 2017 summer session. The College partnered with the office of international and cultural affairs to provide funds for the development of new study abroad courses that will allow S&T to double the number of students taking international credit-earning courses by 2020. This was the challenge that S&T accepted from the Institute of International Education, and we will likely reach (and far exceed) this target goal by 2017. Faculty from arts, languages, and philosophy; economics; and English and technical communication are developing courses that they will teach to S&T students onsite in Austria, Germany, Nicaragua, Iceland, Oman, England, Scotland, and Wales. Moreover, several of these courses are being developed in partnership with faculty from the College of Engineering and Computing. In this way, participating students are guaranteed to have an interdisciplinary study abroad experience.

Faculty on the rise

Our faculty provide S&T students with a truly exceptional education. They create new knowledge and insight that help solve the world’s great challenges. Exemplifying this truth is Dr. Daniel Fischer, assistant professor of physics, who was recently awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Development (CAREER) grant titled “Control and Analysis of Atomic Few-Body Dynamics.” The CAREER grant, considered among the most prestigious of all federal awards to young scientists, will not only help propel Dr. Fischer’s research to new heights and further cement S&T’s reputation as a leading research university; it will open the door to research for many aspiring young scientists in the physics program. Even more impressive, Dr. Fischer’s CAREER award is the fourth given by the NSF to faculty within S&T’s physics department.

Your support is crucial

The continued success of the College would be impossible without the dedicated service and assistance of its students, faculty, staff, alumni, research collaborators, and corporate partners. I’m honored and humbled to have the great fortune of working with these talented people to promote the goals of the College, and I look forward to many more years of success and prosperity for S&T.

I hope that you are enjoying the summer, and if you consider visiting the campus as part of your summer travel plans, please contact us at  casb@mst.edu so that we can show you firsthand many of the exciting developments in the College.

With warmest regards,

Stephen Roberts
Vice Provost and Dean
College of Arts, Sciences, and Business