Tuesday, November 1, 2011

UPDATED: Big news for York Engineering

UPDATE Nov. 2: York science librarian John Dupuis livetweeted the event (and collected a summary of tweets here). From John's blog:
I did a ton of live tweeting of the announcement, some of which is here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. The most significant new information revolves around naming the new engineering school The Lassonde School of Engineering. As well, what is now the Computer Science and Engineering Building will be known as the Lassonde Building.
Original post follows.

Canadian entrepreneur Pierre Lassonde is donating $25 million to expand engineering programs at York University. The donation will be matched by the university, and combined with the earlier announcement of $50 million for a new engineering building, that makes a total of $100 million for engineering expansion at York. We've been told that Lassonde's contribution is the largest single private donation in university history.

The official announcement will happen today at 1 PM, but in the meanwhile you can read more about the donation in this Globe and Mail story.

With the donation, the university's goal is to move away from the "niche" engineering programs currently in the program, and become a full-fledged "traditional" engineering school. You can expect York to add traditional engineering disciplines like civil, mechanical, and chemical over the next few years.

However, it's electrical engineering that will take the lead in expansion. I am chairing the committee that will write the EE proposal, and we're operating under the assumption that the first students will be admitted in 2013.  I'll try to blog more about our progress as things develop.

For now, it's definitely an exciting time to be at York.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since the cake was modeled after the building, are there any artist renditions of what the new building looks like?

Andrew Eckford said...

As far as I know, everything about the new building, including location, is up in the air right now.

Anonymous said...

Hi Andrew:

Thank you for sharing the job ad.

I am interested in the applying for a position EE. Can you share more about the plan of New EE program?

Best regards,

Kai Wang