These strengths include faculty in Applied Math, Computer Science, and a variety of science and engineering disciplines. A few faculty in computational science and engineering have expressed great interest in coalescing our campus' strengths through new academic programs and possibly through new structures. Academic opportunities include new major or minor curricula at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and large-scale research in response to large federal funding opportunities. The nexus area of societal impacts of technology has an existing corollary on campus, the new Technology, Arts, and Media certificate program. Bioinformatics This is a very important multidisciplinary area that crosses several colleges.
Academic opportunities are both research and curricular.
The subcommittee decided to defer strategic discussion related to telecommunications until the new head of the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program joins the campus in January. The group identified several organizational and structural characteristics that would be needed in order to realize the opportunities listed above. The sense of the group was that current campus structures do not support these characteristics, and that a new entity is required which has these as its fundamental principles. The new entity would need to report directly to the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs in order to be successful in fostering and rewarding the types of multidisciplinary opportunities that are being discussed. It also would need to have strong backing from the Vice Chancellor.