Engineering has always been grounded in developing solutions to problems that matter. Today, the scale and complexity of those solutions demand more from us: that we innovate faster, build clearer pathways from labs to real-world impact, and prepare students to work in a world that will ask more of them than ever before.

That is the engineering school we are building at NYU Tandon.

It begins with extraordinary people. This fall, we welcomed 17 exceptional new faculty, including LaShanda Korley, a nationally recognized leader in sustainable polymer design, as Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Jeff Hubbell, whose pioneering work at the intersection of engineering and immunology has helped define modern biomaterials research, is now serving as Interim Chair of Biomedical Engineering. They are part of a faculty distinguished not only by the caliber of their individual scholarship, but by their ambition to pursue breakthroughs that extend well beyond the boundaries of
any one discipline.We are reforming our research enterprise around the solutions we are seeking.

Our new NYC Center for Healthier Plastic Solutions, created jointly with NYU Grossman School of Medicine, brings engineers, materials scientists, physicians, and environmental health researchers together to understand how plastics affect human and environmental health, and to use AI to accelerate the design of safer materials to minimize toxic microplastic release.

The new Center joins the Institute for Engineering Health, the Earth Systems Institute, the NYU Quantum Institute, Urban Institute, Center for Robotics and Embodied Intelligence, and our newly unified Computer Science Department with the Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science. Each shares a fundamental premise: the hardest problems to solve do not fit neatly within departments, disciplines, or schools, so our research enterprise cannot either.

We are building the state-of-the-art infrastructure to match our ambitions.

This fall, New York City announced a $29.2 million investment in NYU’s new Quantum Fabrication Facility at NYU’s new home for Science and Technology at 770 Broadway. Combined with NYU’s investment, QFab will be part of a $130 million, 23,000-square- foot facility designed to close a critical gap between academic discovery and commercial fabrication. Researchers, students, startups, and industry will work alongside one another, while a partnership with CUNY will create new pathways into quantum careers. QFab represents what we believe research infrastructure should be: a platform for discovery, translation, entrepreneurship, and talent development.

The same philosophy is reshaping how we educate engineers.

AI is becoming integral to engineering practice, so it must become integral to engineering education. This fall, a new AI foundations course became part of our undergraduate curriculum, alongside faculty development, program-level human-centered AI strategies, and an ongoing effort to determine — with faculty and students — how these tools can strengthen learning rather than substitute for it.

At the same time, we are rapidly expanding interdisciplinary degrees and creating more opportunities for students to move between theory and practice. Our new Transformative Summer Experiences give master’s students the opportunity to spend a summer embedded either in a faculty research laboratory or with a startup in our incubator network. Our MakerSpace is celebrating ten years as a place where students from across NYU can acquire the skills and tools to turn ideas into working prototypes. And continued investment in our entrepreneurship ecosystem is creating more pathways for discoveries made at NYU to become companies, products, and technologies with impact far beyond our campuses.

Research, education, entrepreneurship, and impact should not exist in separate lanes. Neither should engineering, medicine, science, mathematics, computing, policy, and business. A great research university has all of these capabilities. Our opportunity — and our responsibility — is to connect them.

That is what we are doing at NYU Tandon, across Brooklyn, Manhattan, the full breadth of NYU, and an increasingly global network of collaborators. This magazine offers a glimpse of what becomes possible when those boundaries come down.

Our measure of progress is not how many new programs, centers, or buildings we create. It is what they enable: more ambitious questions, unexpected collaborations, faster paths from discovery to impact, and a generation of engineers equipped not simply to adapt to a changing world, but to define it.

Juan de Pablo
Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology, NYU Executive Dean, NYU Tandon School of Engineering