Getting Ready for the Big Move

Sina Y. Rabbany, PhD (Bioengineering)

Dean, Fred DeMatteis School of Engineering and Applied Science

Jean Nerken Distinguished Professor of Engineering

Sina.Y.Rabbany@hofstra.edu

The year 2023 began with the successful operation of our four firmly established winter programs: the Hofstra in Silicon Valley program (which I joined up with for a few days out in California), the winter component of our W-SPiCE program, and our two bridge courses, one for Computer Science majors and the other primarily for engineering majors. The newsletter has in-depth stories about some of these events, so I won’t go into any detail here about them But it goes to show that the long holiday break that we take at Hofstra is not one in which the DeMatteis School is idle, and it provides many opportunities for students to tack on some experiential learning in the interval between hitting the books in the Fall and Spring semesters.

The countdown continues to the grand opening of the Science & Innovation Center on the eastern side of the campus From the outside it looks virtually complete, so there is no longer any need to resort to architectural drawings to visualize it I had the occasion to do a walk-through of the four floors a few weeks ago, and while there was still considerable work to be done on the interior walls, flooring and other amenities, especially on the lower floors, the grand sweep of the building could easily be appreciated. It is massive, with many laboratories and classrooms while also containing many open spaces for students and faculty to congregate in Also, the second floor opens out onto a large terrace, soon to be populated with substantial amounts of greenery, that will make an ideal place to host gatherings of alumni and other constituencies.

In the meantime, we are working on finalizing the reconfiguring of our current quarters in Adams and Weed Halls. Since all of computer science (along with most of bioengineering and industrial engineering) is migrating to the new building, space is being opened up, especially in Adams Hall, for the creation of new labs to support the remaining engineering programs That will mean an expansion of our environmental labs from one to two rooms, the creation of a room with an anechoic chamber for electromagnetic wave transmission investigations, a soil mechanics lab for the civil engineering students, an energy lab for mechanical engineering students, and more. It is going to be a very busy summer for us as we work to create an optimal learning environment for all our majors.

As usual, I am very pleased to hear from readers of this newsletter who are alumni, and I encourage anyone who has yet to check in with us to send in a short account of what you are doing these days. I am also looking forward to a productive Spring 2023 semester, which will culminate in perhaps about 100 more graduates from the DeMatteis School (added to the 60 or so whom I greeted at the December 2022 commencement) moving on to establish their careers, and who will hopefully remember their years here as the catalyst that inspired them along the way.