UVa School of Engineering -- still young and growing at age 175

For the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering, its 175th anniversary seems an auspicious time. Having morphed from civil engineering roots to a comprehensive program, the school now seems poised to be one of the prime gainers in the university’s ongoing expansion.

UVa’s expansion comes as Gov. Bob McDonnell pushes for more degrees statewide, with a strong emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math degrees.

Over five years, the university plans to add 1500 students. Dean James H. Aylor’s engineering school is on track to add 400 of those, and he’d like to see that figure rise.

Bill Palombi, president of the Engineering Student Council, described the growth as “pretty aggressive.”

Aylor said that more undergraduates will mean more faculty and, thus, more graduate students.

One of the major drawbacks of such an expansion is that new engineering professors cost quite a bit to set up, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Startup costs for technical faculty have been a focus of UVa requests to Richmond, but have yet to bear fruit.

Job creation will be key, Aylor said. “[It’s] going to be science and engineering, engineering primarily.”

The face of engineering is changing, engineering professor Silvia Salinas Blemker said. Now it’s about using math and physics to understand the world.

“It’s kind of a new generation of engineers or the next phase of engineering,” she said.

That means new kinds of engineering, things such as systems engineering. That’s a fancy term for looking at pretty much anything – societal systems, cities — with engineering principals.

Another newcomer is biomedical engineering.

“A lot of our growth and focus is going to be based on the environment you’re in, and so I see significant growth in the biological sciences because we’ve got a major medical school here,” Aylor said.

Biomedical and systems engineering are very popular with students, Palombi said. He himself is a systems engineering student.

“None of the analysis that I do would be possible without not just computers, but very powerful computers,” he said.

Blemker is studying the biomechanics of human movement, particularly the workings of muscles.

“It’s very interdisciplinary, but in … the type of work that I do and the type of things that I teach, you really need an engineering background,” she said.

Nuclear engineering was one of the last hundred years’ big losers. The university housed a nuclear reactor for decades, but by the end of the 1990s, the program was no more, the faculty dispersed to related subjects.

“There were no students,” Aylor said.

This from a school that, in the 1800s, started with simple, sticks-and-stones civil engineering to help build a new nation.

“It was all about bridges and [other] infrastructure,” Aylor said.

Aylor is a good person to talk about the school’s history.

“My dad taught her from about 1933 to something like 1972, so I spent a lot of time here,” Aylor said.

“Since I got my three degrees here, I basically left for a year and a half and worked for IBM in Manassas,” Aylor said.

The challenge nowadays, he said, is to get everything into four years.

Palombi opted to come to UVa because he wasn’t sure if engineering was for him, he said. He figured that if he decided to switch to something else, UVa would still have plenty of options for him.