A Message from the Dean
While 2025 was a tumultuous year for education and research in the United States, the University of Rochester’s Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences has kept its eyes steadily fixed on the future, building strategically for an ever better world.
This summer, URochester launched four new transdisciplinary centers to foster innovation and collaboration that will not only reshape existing fields but also create entirely new ones. I’m proud that Hajim School faculty are leaders in three of these new centers with transformative potential:
- SoundSpace aims to put URochester at the frontier of music and technology.
- The Center for Extended Reality seeks to awaken the potential of AR/VR by focusing on how we perceive and experience the world.
- The Center for Coherence and Quantum Science (CCQS) tackles one of the greatest challenges of quantum research: designing robust light-matter interfaces that power next-generation quantum systems.
The Hajim School has also been very active in helping shape the future of the region’s economy. The National Science Foundation Regional Innovation Engines (NSF Engines) program announced that a Rochester and Finger Lakes region coalition led by faculty from our Institute of Optics and Laboratory for Laser Energetics advanced to the final stage of the program’s second competition, and we look forward to a site visit in February. The Hajim School is part of a new initiative supported by the NSF and Micron to empower K–12 STEM educators to become leaders in the rapidly expanding microelectronics and semiconductor industries in New York and Idaho. A longstanding partnership between URochester’s Center for Emerging and Innovative Sciences (CEIS) and New York has been renewed for another 10 years, and URochester joined other public and private research institutions in New York State as a member of the Empire AI Consortium.
This fall we launched innovative new master’s programs including an MS in aerospace engineering and an online MS in healthcare data science and AI. We also changed the name of our 110-year-old chemical engineering department to the Department of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering, signaling a commitment to reshaping the future of the field.
An extraordinary cohort of new faculty joined the Hajim School this academic year, including alumnus Barry Silverstein ’84, who you will read about later in this newsletter. Over the past year we made significant strides in the Wyant Challenge, a historic initiative launched in 2022 by the late optics pioneer James C. Wyant ’69 (PhD), trustee emeritus, and his wife, Tammy, to expand the Institute of Optics faculty by 50 percent. In 2025, we secured three new transformative gifts to establish professorships through the challenge, with a fourth to be announced soon, leaving just two more early career professorships to reach our goal.
We look to build on these exciting developments in 2026 and beyond. Cheers to bright days ahead.
Wendi Heinzelman
Dean of the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences