Chairman's Corner

by W. Thomas Miller, III

At this point I appear to have survived my first year as Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering without causing too many problems. How successful I was in my first year probably cannot be evaluated for another year or so. Basically, I tried hard to do most things the same way that John Pokoski had, in part because I did not have enough experience to change things, but mostly because John had done such an excellent job as chair that I was very hesitant to tamper with his success. John was an invaluable resource during the fall semester and I consulted with him frequently. He tried to escape during the spring semester by going on sabbatical to Arizona, but I tracked him down and continued to seek his advice on major issues via electronic mail. I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank John both for his nine years as chair and for his assistance to me during the last year.

During John's last year as chair (1993-94) the Department again went through the national accrediting process (ABET). The review was very thorough, examining overall program requirements, individual course syllabi, sample graded homeworks and exams, randomly selected student folders and interviewing selected faculty and students. ABET can accredit a program for from one to six years (or refuse to accredit a program), depending on the result of the review. I am very glad to report that we received a very positive review and are now accredited as an electrical engineering program until the next century! Thanks are due to John Pokoski both for leading the accreditation process within the Department and for steering us in the right direction for the previous nine years, and to John LaCourse for hashing out many of the details required for the ABET documentation.

Not everything stayed the same during my first year as chair. Joe Murdoch and Al Frost both retired from the ECE faculty and Don Melvin retired from his position as Associate Dean. All three retain offices in Kingsbury Hall, however, and are still involved in various department and college activities. As the result of the retirements we hired a new faculty member. Dr. Jennifer T. Bernhard will be joining us in August from Duke University. Her primary technical interest is in the electromagnetic aspects of wireless portable data communications. Her research will complement the Department's increasing involvement with the communications field in collaboration with the UNH Interoperability Laboratory and local companies. Finally, throughout the semester we had meetings of ECE faculty groups to review the undergraduate curriculum. At the end of the year we approved an outline for a new curriculum which promises to continue to provide a solid framework of fundamentals during the first three years while allowing more freedom for individual students during the senior year. We hope that this revised curriculum will allow students to better prepare for the wide range of career options being pursued by ECE graduates.

The Department made some significant headway in going electronic this year. We completed the networking of all offices and laboratories for internal use, installed a mail list server for distributing ECE Department information via internet electronic mail, and installed a World-Wide-Web server for providing interactive information about the Department. While we did much during the year to establish the infrastructure, the challenge remains to make it all really useful to alumni, friends, students and faculty of the Department. We would greatly appreciate any advice on how to accomplish this. A good start would be for you to send us your e-mail address if you have one, so that we can establish a ready link with as many alumni as possible. A related article in this edition of Signals and Noise contains more detail.