From the Dean: December 16, 2020 Engineering Community Letter
Dear Purdue Engineering Students, Staff and Faculty,
While I am honored to have had the opportunity of public service and global engagement for the past 12 months, I am truly excited to be back home at Purdue with all the Boilermakers. I cannot thank Acting Dean Lundstrom enough for his outstanding contribution, along with the team in our College. They have provided remarkable leadership in navigating through a challenging time while continuing our pursuit toward the pinnacle of excellence at scale.
It has been a year of trial and toil. A year that also brought out the best in us. Boilermaker engineers rose to the challenges in ways more than one.
We are grateful. Our students, faculty and staff took many actions that enabled a safe reopening. We feel stress and fatigue nonetheless. Our responsibility is to ensure everyone’s health and emotional well-being.
We also are mindful that some have gone through more, such as those with elderly relatives or children at home, those with research programs impossible to carry out remotely, and those who must show up in person to carry out their jobs.
We shall be hopeful. We will emerge from this together: healthier, stronger and better. We will continue to deploy lessons learned and innovations created to a post-pandemic Purdue Engineering, and to the wider world.
Today, on my first day back, we will host an online townhall at 1 p.m. with undergrads, grad students and postdocs to listen to their suggestions and observations. This will be followed at 3pm by a hybrid office hour, with a choice of in-person (at my office in Armstrong) or online. And I will respond to your messages at chiang@purdue.edu as I digest various information over the rest of this month.
For now, I wish you a truly Boiler-up Holiday Season.
Mung
Mung Chiang
John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering
Purdue University