Hiring plan helps Tech offer first class education.
HOUGHTON -- As students begin to return to Michigan Tech, the university receives word that they are once again ranked among the top national colleges in the country.
U.S. News and World Report ranks Tech as 121st among national universities and 64th among engineering schools.
Interim Provost Max Seel says the university's success is a credit to programs such as its Strategic Hiring Initiative, which aims to continually improve Tech's academic standard.
"It’s all about people. If we are able to add additional faculty in strategic areas, we make the best investment in the future of the university," says Seel.
The second phase of the initiative focuses on innovation and research with computers.
President Glenn Mroz says that the seven new faculty members hired in this area are the best of the best.
"One of the big advantages we have now with so many universities contracting, we're expanding at this time. So we've had a very rich pool of candidates," says Mroz.
Laura Brown and Chaoli Wang are two of the new hires. Both will work to create new computer programs--Brown to help interpret data and Wang to help visualize data.
"My research is involved in trying to pair down or narrow down that data and find out information that's really important to the problem in their field," says Brown.
"A student may be in a different department, but they also have this data that they need to look at in an efficient way, and that's why visualization can come in and play a big role in helping them," says Wang.
The third and fourth phases of the hiring plan, focused on health and energy, will launch this fall.
The university will spend two million dollars over the next two years on hiring faculty in those areas.
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