Dear College of Science Faculty and Staff,
Once more this week, we witnessed horrific violence against Asian people. This morning Associate Dean Randall Hughes and I sent to the entire College a letter (included in our March 5 Update) that reiterates College support for our Asian community, consistent with the message this week from President Aoun. The College of Science is committed to a culture of respect and action towards equity, and is a place where every person is valued, and where each person belongs.
In better news, accessibility to COVID vaccination in Massachusetts is significantly expanding. It is anticipated that the bulk of the state will be vaccinated by July 4. I will be grateful and ready when my turn comes!
Across Northeastern and our College, it is admissions season! The next class of Northeastern admitted undergraduate students is a talented bunch, and Northeastern continues to be an exceptionally competitive university. There were 75,230 applicants for the 2,800 spaces in the first-year cohort! We look forward to welcoming hundreds of students into our COS community as majors or combined majors, and many more across Northeastern who will take COS classes. My enormous thanks to everyone involved in recruiting these top students.
Our new cohort of PhD students has been interviewed, and outstanding students at this high level of training have been recruited. My enormous thanks to everyone involved in recruiting our future PhD students. This year we introduced an important new cross-College program, the ‘Connected Science PhD’. The program begins to reinvent the PhD, through cross-disciplinary research, work experience and professional training, and is a unique pathway to a vast set of careers.
And we are recruiting faculty, with ten parallel searches open across the College. For each search we are interviewing at least four candidates, making for a wonderful set of exciting seminars. It is a huge amount of work to run faculty searches, and my enormous thanks to the faculty search committees, to the expert staff assisting, and to everyone else involved in recruiting our future Professors. Seven of the searches have some focus of interest, including topology and machine learning; environmental psychology; analytical chemistry; sustainable energy; computational biology; and high energy physics. All are cross-disciplinary, within or beyond the COS, helping to promote novel and crucial research. For the other three searches, we introduced the ‘INVEST’ program, a cross-College search in any discipline, where top candidates can be fresh out of their PhD, without need for the usual postdoctoral training. A special enormous thank you to the INVEST search committee, who built the whole process. Our candidates are fantastic, full of new perspectives and bright ideas that address challenges across our planet and beyond.
In each set of admissions, we are committed to bringing into the College brilliant people, across the diversity of society. We are on the path to bringing our representation in line with the demographics of our society. Together, these efforts help realize our overarching goal: to promote ever greater excellence in the College of Science and at Northeastern University.
Best regards,
Hazel Sive PhD
Dean, College of Science
Northeastern University