New Year’s Message from Dean Murthy

Happy New Year and hang on to your party hats—this year is one for celebration!

 

Beginning in May, the UCLA community will come together to commemorate our university’s 100th anniversary, a celebration that will continue through June 2020. In addition, UCLA Samueli will be busy marking 50 years since Professor Len Kleinrock’s team sent the first message over the Arpanet from 3420 Boelter Hall to Stanford Research Institute on Oct. 29, 1969, giving birth to what would become today’s internet.

And there will be ample opportunities for the UCLA Samueli community to participate in celebrating these milestones. Our website and this monthly newsletter are the best ways to stay informed of all the fun coming your way.

In addition to celebrating our past success, helping our students and faculty blaze new trails in engineering will remain a foremost priority.

• This past year, guided by input from our students, we completed 9,000 sq. ft. of new makerspace in Boelter Hall. This will give UCLA Samueli undergrads plenty of room to work on class and personal engineering projects, and begin to shape their future interests in the field of engineering.
• We’ve listened to feedback from our professors, and the student-run Blockchain at UCLA group as well, and are offering our first blockchain programming class this quarter, which filled to capacity on the first day of registration.
• We continue to execute our strategic growth plan and anticipate another strong faculty recruiting year, on the heels of 16 new faculty hires last year. We are investing in top research and teaching talent in the areas of robotics and IOT, AI and machine learning, engineering in medicine, advanced materials, future internet, and sustainable urban systems.

If you’ve been waiting for your chance to come back to campus, this should be your year. We are opening up our annual alumni reunion weekend to all classes beginning this year. Mark your calendars for May 17-18. This will be our third year hosting an on-campus reunion, and the celebration this year will include a faculty/alumni mixer, research presentations and family-friendly activities – all coordinated with the launch of UCLA’s Centennial Celebration.

And in October, we will celebrate UCLA’s role in the birth of the internet with a full-day summit bringing together some of the leading minds in business, government and culture to discuss how much the world has changed since the introduction of computer-to-computer information sharing, how the internet is impacting our lives today and where it is likely to take us in the next 50 years.

As a UCLA Bruin, we all have a lot to be proud of. As a UCLA engineer, that goes double, as we apply the UCLA spirit of teaching, research and service to engineer change in the lives of individuals, and our local and global community. So come join us in 2019 as we celebrate all that makes the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering so special!
 

 
  

Jayathi Murthy
Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean