Jerry Hamann

UW Receives $1.1 Million Grant for State-wide Engineering Education

February 2, 2003 - A $1.1 million grant to the University of Wyoming from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will fund a center for “recruiting, retaining, and educating ‘the best in the West.’”

The proposed Center for Excellence in Engineering Education, funded by the five-year $1,150,000 grant, is designed to increase the recruitment, retention, and quality of UW engineering students. It will utilize a new, grassroots approach to educating Wyoming kids from kindergarten through college.

Plans for the center include development of hands-on engineering and technology models for teaching science and math to K-12 students, and restructuring curricula at UW and Wyoming’s community colleges to provide a foundation of current topics and technology in engineering.

"This grant provides us with so many opportunities to improve the quality of our undergraduate engineering programs,” says Jerry Hamann, associate professor in UW’s electrical and computer engineering department. “From contact with middle school students to reformulating coursework, our efforts are backed by the Hewlett Foundation. And this Initiative will bring about great things for us."

UW is one of nine public colleges and universities to receive The Engineering Schools of the West Initiative grants, ranging from $750,000 to $1.1 million over three to five years. The other recipients are: Boise State University, Colorado School of Mines, Montana State University, New Mexico State University, Northern Arizona University, Oregon State University, University of Nevada, Reno, and the University of Utah.

Schools were chosen in part because their programs had the potential of providing a significant “multiplier effect” leading to a change in the institution that would also be instructive to collaborating colleges and universities, says Initiative Director Richard Reis.

“We really believe that the whole can be greater than the some of the parts,” Reis says. “By bringing representatives from the nine schools together on a regular basis, the Foundation expects to have a much wider impact on engineering education than would be possible with just stand-alone programs.”

The awards are being made in honor of William Hewlett, co-founder of the Hewlett Packard company. Mary Jaffe, Hewlett's daughter and Foundation board member, remembers her father saying that the graduates of the state engineering schools were the backbone of HP's success.

The Hewlett Foundation, incorporated as a private foundation in California in 1966, was established by the late Palo Alto industrialist William R. Hewlett, his wife, Flora Lamson Hewlett, and their eldest son, Walter B. Hewlett. The Foundation's broad purpose is to promote the well-being of mankind by supporting selected activities of a charitable nature, as well as organizations or institutions engaged in such activities. Further information can be found at: http://www.hewlett.org/.