I am thrilled to be the new dean of engineering at Berkeley. In my 30 years here, I’ve been privileged to witness the College of Engineering evolve into an institution of impact. While deeply rooted in academic tradition, perhaps Berkeley’s greatest hallmark is that it defies the confines of academia to fully engage in every corner of the world to create novel technologies and new industries, drive economic growth and stimulate social change. The College’s role as a major sparkplug in Silicon Valley and the information technology revolution is just one example of this tradition.

Berkeley’s approach, what I like to call its West Coast style of engineering, is not only to train engineers as superb technologists but also to instill in them an urgent sense of the implications of their work. They understand which technologies can make a real difference in the real world.

From my vantage point as past director of CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, I saw no better exemplar of engineering with an impact than CITRIS. My predecessor as dean, Rich Newton, championed this institute as a multidisciplinary and collaborative framework to engage Berkeley faculty and students with the three other CITRIS campuses at Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz and engineering partners worldwide to develop information technology innovations around the globe.

Even when its new headquarters is complete in 2009, CITRIS will continue to operate this way: not focused on the four corners of its own college quadrangle, but reaching outward. My vision for the College will follow this template but push even farther, beyond science and technology, beyond engineering industries, to include our colleagues in the disciplines of medicine, law, business, public policy, economics, social sciences, public and global health and the service industry.

The problems we seek to address are social in nature and global in scope. Creating the solutions—new power sources like sustainable energies and biofuels to preserve our environment, new methods for improving health care delivery like low-cost cures for emerging infectious diseases—will not be enough. We must push beyond the technology to forge new collaborations that will help us open eyes, change behaviors and make a difference in the critical areas that affect us all.

Please send us your thoughts at dean.forefront@coe.berkeley.edu.

S. Shankar Sastry
Dean, College of Engineering
NEC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences