About Us

New Students Welcome Speech

Good morning everyone.  It is my great pleasure to be amongst the first to welcome you to Khalifa University, and to your new life as a college student at KUSTAR.  Having myself just joined as president on August 1, I share your sense of anticipation of the experience that awaits us all.  I have met with several of your faculty in recent weeks, and we all relish opportunity and challenge we have to change the way a college education is delivered, not only in the Emirates but in the region and in the world.

One of the truly great things in my view, about joining such a new institution, is the opportunity to truly build something new, and to do so with relatively few constraints, at least in comparison with most established institutions of higher learning.    For you, as students, you join university at a particularly momentous time in the history of Abu Dhabi and the UAE—the need for young professionals with technical training, interpersonal skills, the ability to communicate, and to lead could not be more acute.

We are dedicated to helping you attain these skills.  And by the way, I think we should also all have the goal to have fun doing it!  So I look forward to getting to know you all a bit better in coming weeks and months, and to hear your ideas  about how the university and its leadership can be helpful to you in your efforts.

I thought it might be helpful to you to know a bit about me, and where I come from in assuming the leadership of our university.  I am by training a mechanical engineer, having studied as an undergraduate in my home state of Oregon and doing my graduate work at Stanford University. 

My research field is computational mechanics, which involves development of engineering simulation methods and computational tools used in all fields of engineering to model the response of solids, structures and fluids in a wide variety of applications.  My professional career has included time at Boeing, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories, and I spent 18 years as a faculty member at Duke University before joining KUSTAR. 

I've had academic appointments in three fields of engineering (civil, biomedical, and mechanical), and have served as an academic dean and as a department chair.  As an academic dean in particular, I was responsible for the educations of about 2000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, and as a result of this service, have familiarity with the issues often of concern to students, both inside the classroom and outside.  So I hope that during your KUSTAR career, you’ll take advantage of the opportunities we’ll provide to meet with the President, and share your concerns and ideas for the university we are building together.

If I were you, I'd want to know a bit about the priorities of the school you are joining.  I’d like to share just a few thoughts that immediately come to mind as I enter into this job:

  •  That the mandate we have from the Abu Dhabi and federal governments, to combine excellence in both teaching and research, can and will be a distinguishing characteristic of KUSTAR.  All of our faculty members at KUSTAR have a record both of quality instructional experience and demonstrated research quality, and our commitments to these values will continue here.  What this means is when you interact with your teachers in the classroom, you see only a part of their faculty lives at KUSTAR.  Each of them is also working with graduate students, writing papers for technical publication, interacting with industry, and traveling internationally to present their work.  An important part of your time at KUSTAR should be working with a faculty member at some stage on a research project—we are dedicated here to making this possibility available to all of you.  This is part of what makes a college education special—working on an individual basis with a faculty member, and creating something nobody has ever created before.  I’d suggest that each of you should have this goal during your KUSTAR career.
  •  That the newness of our institution, and our commitment to building quality graduate programs as well as undergraduate ones, gives us a distinctive opportunity to create an interdisciplinary learning and research culture for our students.  In the long run, our students will not be wellserved by a heavily siloed environment in which most learning takes place in narrowly defined disciplines.  We will have a commitment, in both faculty hiring and in development of research initiatives, to emphasize problems and areas of inquiry related to society’s big problems:  cheap and affordable energy, clean water, safe transportation, affordable health care, responsible stewardship of the environment, and so on.  None of these will be wellserved by narrow training or research approaches.  You will see this in the seminar series we offer, the project work you do with your classmates, and the research in which you become involved.  Learning how to “think big,” and collaborate with others having different technical training, is an important part of your life as a university student.
  •  That our joint commitment as faculty and staff will be to place our students first.  Of course in the long run, our success will be measured primarily by the accomplishments of our students, and the level of leadership they assume in the nation and world.

Finally, some practical thoughts on being successful as a college student:

  •  Take advantage of EVERY opportunity to learn about what it is to be an engineer, whether it be seminar series, opportunities to participate in career fairs or industrial dayswhatever.  Many of your first academic challenges will be centered about math, physics, language, and other basic subjects:  but do not forget to take time also to figure out where this is all going, and how this knowledge will be applied as you go through your engineering training.

 The biggest challenge for most students is time management…….Don’t overextend with student activities, and make sure that you are “putting in the time” outside of class

  •  Do not succumb to frustration, and if you have trouble, BE SURE TO SEE PROFESSORS WHILE SOMETHING CAN STILL BE DONE.  You will all have an active advising system available to you, and you need to make use of it, particularly if you feel you are in danger of falling behind
  •  Perspective is important….half of you will be at the bottom half of the class at the end of the semester…..a new experience for many.

With best wishes, and looking forward to getting to know you better!