College of Science & Engineering Alumni Newsletter

Fall 1999
 

A Wonderful Progress Report
By James C. Kelley, Dean
College of Science & Engineering

       This semester has been a very busy one for all of us in the College of Science and Engineering. We have been planning for a major seismic retrofit and renovation of Hensill Hall which will involve adding flying buttresses to the north side of the building and renovating much of the infrastructure of the building, including the electrical, mechanical and ventilation systems. The project will take about 18 months, but we should have a much better building when we are finished. During the remodeling we will occupy new space in the Science Building which will be returned to the College and, after the remodeling project, will add to our biomedical teaching and research complex, primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health.
     We have also had unprecedented success in grant income in the past few months. In September and October alone we received almost $7 million in new research funding, much of it coming to the Romberg Tiburon Center, our teaching and research station focussing on San Francisco Bay. We are the only university in the Bay Area with such a facility devoted to working on understanding the health of the Bay and its importance to the quality of life in the Bay Area.
     The Advisory Board for the college has been particularly active this year. The Board has raised nearly $100 thousand to support scholarships for graduate students in the College and this year we made two awards. The recipients were Christa Speekman, a student in Marine Biology and Constance Ganong, a student in Evolutionary Biology. Last year’s recipient, Cheryl Thompson is currently in the Ph.D. program in molecular biology at Harvard.
     This fall we welcomed three new members to the faculty, Arek Goetz in Dynamical Systems in Applied Mathematics, Alex Schuster in Complex Analysis and Bruce Manning in Environmental Chemistry. This year we will be conducting searches for 10 additional new faculty in biochemistry (2), ecology, microbial ecology, physiology, molecular biology, astrophysics, computer science, pure mathematics and mathematics education. This introduction of new faculty represents both the constant renewal of our faculty and the continuous process of change in our curriculum and research activities to keep us competitive in the rapidly changing worlds of science and engineering.
     It is indeed an exciting time to be at the College of Science and Engineering at San Francisco State University. We hope you will visit us soon to enjoy the excitement.
 
 

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