Sy Adler has been Interim Dean of the College of Urban and Public Affairs (CUPA) since June, 2019. He started as a faculty member in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning in 1982 and served as Director of the Toulan School and Associate CUPA Dean before his appointment as Interim Dean. Prior to joining the PSU faculty in 1982, Professor Adler worked for the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning on transportation and growth management issues. While there he also did research about the history and politics of transportation planning in LA, and later published several articles on that subject. One paper, “The Transformation of the Pacific Electric Railway: Bradford Snell, Roger Rabbit, and the Politics of Transportation in Los Angeles,” published in 1991 in Urban Affairs Quarterly, won a best paper award from The Society for American City and Regional Planning History.
In 2012, Professor Adler published Oregon Plans: The Making of an Unquiet Land-Use Revolution, a dissection of the political history of the Oregon statewide land-use planning program. The book is based on archival research and interviews with activists and planners who worked at local, regional, and state levels. Professor Adler wrote the book to help Oregonians and others understand the roots of the program, which is well-known and highly regarded throughout the planning world, and how and why it matters for daily life. Dr. Adler is now writing a book-length complement to that work, an historical analysis of the original growth boundary around the Portland metropolitan area. A short version, "A Historical Perspective on the Metropolitan Portland Urban Growth Boundary," was published in Planning the Pacific Northwest, in 2015. He self-designed his undergraduate major in Urban Studies, and has endeavored since then to bring an interdisciplinary perspective to his teaching, research and outreach activities.
Dr. Wu-chi Feng has been at Portland State University since 2004. Prior to becoming Interim Dean, he was the Associate Dean for Research for the Maseeh College, where he focused on mentoring the bright, young faculty in the college and moving the research enterprise forward. Wu-chi has also served as the Computer Science Department Chair from 2007-2010 and 2016-2019. As department chair, he started the We in Computer Science student group, which provides networking and support to communities historically underrepresented in CS and celebrates diversity in the field.
Before joining Portland State University, Wu-chi was an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Oregon Health and Science University (and the Oregon Graduate Institute). He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University.
Dr. Feng has been working in the area of video streaming technologies for over two decades. His current research interests include computer vision-based sensor systems, multimedia streaming, and multimedia systems. He has published over 100 journal and conference publications in multimedia streaming and networking. He has also received the prestigious NSF CAREER award for his research in network protocols for video-on-demand services.
Dr. Feng received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Pennsylvania State University and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Computer Science and Engineering.
Dr. Coll was born in Havana, Cuba and migrated to the United States during the 1980 Mariel Boat Lift. After serving as a noncommissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps, he completed a bachelor’s degree in Social Work from Saint Leo University, his master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Central Florida, and a Ph.D. in Counseling Education and Supervision from the University of South Florida. Dr. Coll is the current Dean of the School of Social Work and Interim Dean of the College of Education at Portland State University and has held administrative and faculty positions at Texas State University, University of Southern California, and Saint Leo University. His research interests have been predominantly on worldview development and counseling veterans with a focus on veteran transition. He is the author and co-editor of numerous publications, including: The Counselors Primer for Counseling Veterans, Linus Publications; co-editor of The Handbook of Military Social Work, Wiley Press; Student Veterans in Higher Education: A Primer for Administrators, Faculty, and Advisors, Lyceum Books and most recent Civilian Lives of U.S. Veterans: Issues and Identities, Praeger Publishing. He is a graduate of the American Council on Education (ACE) Fellows Program, University of California, Berkeley, Executive Leadership Academy (ELA), Harvard’s Institute for Management Development Program (MDP), Harvard’s Institute for Management and Leadership in Education (MLE).
Michael Bowman was born in Seattle and grew up in the Seattle area and southeastern Alaska. He has a BS in Physics and a Masters in Library Science, both from the University of Washington. His first position was as the Physical Sciences Librarian at Rutgers University – Newark. He came to Portland State in 1992 as the Engineering Librarian and has also served as Science-Engineering Coordinator, Coordinator of Reference Services, Comics Librarian, and Assistant University Librarian. His scholarly focus is empowering users to find and organize the information they need.