Meet Dartmouth's 14th Dean of Engineering Douglas Van Citters

Transcript

When I think about the job of dean, I get to think about how we can empower our faculty and our students and staff to maximize their impact on the world. And that's really exciting for me because I've been a participant in that for three decades in my various stages at Dartmouth.

Hi, I'm Doug Van Citters. I'm a Dartmouth class of 1999, a Thayer School alum, a professor, and the 14th Dean of Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth. 

I found out about Dartmouth when the rowing coach reached out to me and suggested that I come up and take a look at Dartmouth. But I also got to sit down with Stu Trembly from Thayer School of Engineering. And he explained to me how I could be an athlete and an engineer as a student, and it made me a much better engineer along the way.

To truly understand Thayer's special sauce, you have to experience it. Everything we do at Thayer is hands-on, starting in our very first class. Teamwork compels us to be in the classroom together, working together, solving problems together. We celebrate engineering in the liberal arts. We celebrate crossing over boundaries, not just between what would otherwise be departments at Thayer School, but between engineering and the arts and sciences, engineering and medicine, engineering and business, or even over to the hospital. 

And the reason this is important is because we want our engineers to then work with humanity, to engineer for humanity and understand the human side of engineering beyond the first level. Not just who do we impact with an invention, a device or a solution, but how does that solution impact the rest of society? 

When I think about the feeling that I left Dartmouth with, and the feeling that brought me back to Dartmouth, it was complete freedom. It was freedom to explore my options, freedom to make some mistakes, freedom to correct those mistakes, and freedom to keep trying new areas, new inventions, maybe even trying a new venture with some of my students. 

I want our faculty, staff, and students to have that same feeling always, that they're completely unencumbered in their ability to try something new, to fail forward, and work with each other to solve the biggest problems that they can find. 

The first thing I want to do at Thayer School is listen very carefully to what the faculty, students, and staff want to see unchanged at Thayer. And I also want to listen very carefully to where they believe the next big problems are. 

It's not my responsibility to choose the problems, it's my responsibility to ensure the resources are present for the teams to form around the problems, and then get to work solving them with as little barrier as possible.