Sina Y. Rabbany - Spring 2024 DeMattreis Newsletter

Occupying Two Homes: East Campus Meets West Campus 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 We are in the middle of a year of growth in the DeMatteis School. After several years of waiting and anxious watching as the new Science & Innovation Center (SIC) rose from the ground, we finally migrated half of our academic units at the beginning of the Fall 2023 semester. As of now, our entire Department of Computer Science, and the programs in Bioengineering and Industrial Engineering and first-year engineering, are resident in the SIC, while the Civil, Electrical, Mechanical and Engineering Science programs are in the Weed/Adams complex. We have also created a nice Maker Space on the first floor of the SIC, which we hope will attract not only members of our school, but also faculty and students from all other fields, to explore how they can create works of utility or of art under the watchful eye of Ms. Kathy Ching, who serves as its inaugural director.

If that weren’t enough to occupy our time along with the usual round of lecture and lab classes going on, we also had to prepare for reaccreditation visits of six of our programs in late October.

Hats off to all the Program Directors (six of our faculty) who were in charge of writing voluminous reports and corresponding often during the run-up to the visit with each of the accreditation reviewers, whose job is to assess the quality of a degree program based on guidelines set by the engineering professional societies and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), the internationally recognized agency overseeing engineering and computer science degree programs around the world.

Meanwhile, the January session barely gives time for a breather, as we have Hofstra in Silicon Valley once again bringing upper-level Computer Science students to visit west coast high tech firms for a week, and a large group of first-year women students visiting an array of tech companies in the New York City area as part of the winter W-SPiCE program under the direction of Mr. Philip Coniglio, who co-ordinates our co-op and experiential learning activities.

Speaking of Phil, he has also undertaken the task of overseeing our DeMatteis Experiences in Professional Training and Hiring (DEPTH) program, which is designed to ensure that all engineering students beginning with the entering class of ‘24 will have completed at least one professional activity prior to earning their diplomas, thereby demonstrating to potential employers some skill level beyond what is attained merely by completing a set of prescribed courses to meet degree requirements. That will be a major benefit to students choosing the DeMatteis School over other collegiate options in the future.

So let the Spring ’24 semester begin, and as usual, I look forward to hearing from readers of this newsletter through the Alumni News Notes.

[DeMatteis School Spring 2024 Newsletter]