Bright Minds, Brilliant Cities:
A Strategic Vision for a Changing World
In the Maseeh College, we recognize that it is our job to prepare engineers, computer scientists, and citizens not only for the world of today, but also for the world that will be. We must develop and apply new technologies to address complex challenges that are known now and that will arise. We must rethink cities to be beyond smart, to be brilliant cities that integrate technology for the promotion of improved education, human health, environmental health, resiliency, quality of life, and equity.
We defined five major thematic pillars, one cross-cutting theme that connects all of our pillars, and a set of core values that will transcend everything that we do. These major components of our strategic vision are intended as a roadmap for bold actions that will guide the future of the Maseeh College.
Pillar: Reimagine Engineering Education
The need for a greater and more diverse engineering workforce to tackle complex technical challenges while serving as agents of social change requires a reimagining of how engineers are educated.
PIllar: Reinvent the Built Environment for Human Health
The concentration of people in cities provides untapped opportunities for improving human health and well-being.
Pillar: Transform the Resiliency of Physical and Cyber Systems
Continuing and emerging risks of extraordinary natural and cyber events requires that engineers and computer scientists continuously innovate and evolve physical and cyber systems.
PIllar: Innovate to Improve Planetary Health
An increasingly unpredictable climate calls for innovation to increase energy conservation, and lower the impact of energy production, distribution, and environmental degradation by engineered systems
Pillar: Weave the Computational Fabric from Sensors to Decisions
The ubiquity of technology for gathering data to drive both individual and city-scale decision making provides great promise for enhancing the quality of urban living.
Cross-Cutting Theme: Data Science and Machine Learning
Harvesting from seas of data and extracting knowledge from those data is important across all of the thematic pillars described above.
Core Values
Our shared values are the foundation of our vision and underlie all that we do as a Maseeh College community. Values include honesty, transparency, integrity, advancement of social equity and mobility, fostering diversity of both people and ideas, and more.
Pillar Highlights: Engineering Education
PSU receives $5M federal grant to improve access to STEM education
Associate Professor Gwynn Johnson's five-year project will work to reduce the urban-rural divide by awarding nearly $3 million in scholarships to students from both PSU and Heritage University, a rural, primarily undergraduate institution on the Yakama Reservation in Washington.
Reinventing engineering labs for remote learning
Bob Bass, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, created laboratory demonstration recordings and used online tools to help his students collaborate in the new remote learning environment.
Pillar Highlights: Built Environment
Dean Rich Corsi applies Indoor Air Quality Research to COVID-19 Pandemic
Dr. Rich Corsi has contributed to several articles regarding COVID-19 as it relates to indoor air quality, from proper ventilation to the safety of riding in elevators.
Researchers design HVAC system to help Portland middle school
Mechanical and Materials Engineering Assistant Professor, Dr. Elliot Gall, is part of a team of researchers from Portland State University helping a Portland middle school come up with a lung-saving HVAC system to remove the tiny particles coming from vehicle exhaust from a nearby highway.
Study finds addictive nicotine in Juul nearly identical to a Marlboro
Dr. James Pankow and fellow PSU researchers' recent study helps to explain why a growing number of young people who never smoked cigarettes have become regular users of Juul vaping devices.
Pillar Highlights: Resiliency
New Hire: Fang Song joins Computer Science department
Dr. Song is curious about the theoretical foundations of computation, especially quantum computing. His research explores the power of quantum computer algorithms to solve hard computational problems, and develops cryptographic techniques to combat the unprecedented threats to cybersecurity enabled by quantum computing.
New Hire: David Yang joins Civil & Environmental Engineering Department
Dr. Yang's research focuses on risk management for civil infrastructure under climate change and maintenance optimization of deteriorating structures. His research strives to develop novel, effective approaches to climate adaptation planning for civil infrastructure systems, primarily through applications of machine learning.
PSU researchers create fake earthquake to study soil liquefaction
Civil and Environmental Engineering Professors, Dr. Arash Khosravifar and Dr. Diane Moug, are researching how a new microorganism treatment could help Portland infrastructure survive an earthquake.
Pillar Highlights: Planetary Health
New Hire: Mahima Gupta joins Electrical & Computer Engineering Department
Dr. Gupta’s research focuses on power electronics for sustainability. She is specifically interested in the characterization of advanced power semiconductor devices, development of converter topologies and control strategies, switching circuit realization and layout, and mitigation of electromagnetic interference.
New Hire: Samantha Hartzell joins Civil & Environmental Engineering Dept
Dr. Hartzell uses both stochastic and deterministic frameworks to study the dynamics of carbon, water, and nutrient exchange among the soil, vegetation, and atmosphere. She’s particularly interested in limitations of moisture availability on ecosystem productivity.
Portland State one of four projects funded by $6.7M Dept. of Energy award
Dr. Bob Bass, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, will develop an Energy Services Interface (ESI) that provides a trustworthy link between Grid Service Providers (GSP) and Service-Provisioning Consumers (SPC).
Pillar Highlights: Sensors to Decisions
New Hire: David Burnett joins Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept
Dr. Burnett has spent his career designing sensor systems for scientific, medical, and defense applications. Past projects include wearable biorhythm monitoring, shallow-water intrusion detection, miniature ROVs, and chip-scale wireless chemical sensors. His research interests are low-power wireless motes and field-deployable sensors
Cross-cut Theme: Data Science & Machine Learning
New Hire: Ameeta Agrawal joins Computer Science Department
Dr. Agrawal’s research includes natural language processing, computational linguistics and machine learning. She’s particularly interested in distributional semantics, textual affect analysis, and news recommender systems with a current focus on efficient unsupervised learning and biases in computational modeling.
Grant to provide powerful boost to PSU's research computing infrastructure
A new NSF $400k grant, "CC* Compute: GPU-based Computation and Data Enabled Research and Education (G-CoDERE) at PSU", has been awarded to a group of PSU faculty led by Feng Liu (CS) and comprising Christof Teuscher (ECE), and other interdisciplinary partners.