August 10, 2009

New Dean Wants Engineering Students to Look at the Big Picture

Doreen Edwards, new dean of Alfred U.'s engineering school: Students in the discipline "need a better sense of business. They need to understand different cultures. … They need a better understanding of the world in general."

Enlarge Image

Doreen Edwards, new dean of Alfred U.'s engineering school: Students in the discipline "need a better sense of business. They need to understand different cultures. … They need a better understanding of the world in general."

By Erica R. Hendry

As a child, Doreen Edwards didn't have many reasons to care about science. She grew up on a South Dakota ranch as the only child of parents interested in the practical science and mathematics of farming, rather than the kind Ms. Edwards found in her textbooks.

But atoms and molecules fascinated her, she said, recalling her curiosity about the way things worked, and how they moved, as early as third grade.

That curiosity would eventually drive her to seek work as a research