The Conversation

Professor Collier and Dean Van Citters chat in the Dartmouth Biomedical Engineering Center at Thayer. (Photo by Rob Strong '04)

Collier: I hoped that this would be the outcome, and I am very, very happy that it is. Turns out you are the third Dartmouth alum who's been Thayer dean. The first two, one was in '09, the other one was in 1929. So there's a little bit of a gap before you come in.

Van Citters: But it must be something with the "9" as I'm the class of '99.

Collier: Absolutely. That's good. So I know your history from the '90s through, but I don't know any of your high school history and what you were thinking about and doing in high school that brought you to Dartmouth. So what's that story?

Van Citters: I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, and I went to a smaller public high school, but I loved science and math. I absolutely adored my classes. I did science fairs. I actually grew up in a house where my father was an astronomer and worked for the National Science Foundation. My mother was a marine biologist. And we, all of us, my siblings, both siblings and I, all pursued science and math through high school, but we also really enjoyed all of our other classes, particularly in the arts.

And along with that, I also was on a rowing team in high school and really enjoyed getting out of school and getting onto the water and rowing competitively, and I sailed competitively during the summers. And so, along with that, during the summers, my job was working in an outboard repair shop. It was more of a chandlery than anything else. In Annapolis, in a yachting community, there are true hardware stores for boats. And this one happened to sell hardware and work on outboard motors. And that's where I started to learn how to work on engines.

At the same time, I drove what could only be described as a jalopy. It was a wonderful, 1986 Toyota Corolla that didn't work most of the time, and so I did all of my own repair work. I also repaired my friends' cars. And I remember at one point, my dad and I had to drop the engine and transmission out so I could repair my own clutch, because the car wouldn't go up the hill next to my house.

So that was high school. It was a lot of fun. And I actually didn't know much about Dartmouth, but I got a call from the rowing coach at Dartmouth who invited me to come and visit.

At the time, that was Scott Armstrong who was the coach through the '90s, and I came up and visited and it was late September. It was exactly the kind of day that the Chamber of Commerce wants you to see. It was frosty in the morning and beautiful, just starting into fall, and I knew right away that this was the right kind of environment.

But the thing that sealed it for me was that Coach Armstrong set me up to talk with Stu Trembly, who himself rowed at Yale and then was here as a faculty member and still an athlete. And Professor Trembly actually explained how I could be an athlete and an engineer at Dartmouth. And of all the schools I went to, this was the only place where a faculty member actually explained that to me in a way that was more than convincing. It was absolutely believable and a place I could see myself.

Collier: That's neat. Of course, it closes the loop. You now have been the faculty advisor to the Dartmouth Men's Rowing Team.

Van Citters: Yes.

Collier: So what I remember, I think our first significant interaction was in ENGS 21, and you were building a wheelchair and trying to make it capable of going over snow. What do you remember about your undergraduate experience, and how it led you to want to pursue more engineering?

Van Citters: Well, it's interesting. The first challenge of building a wheelchair that goes over snow in the early fall is that there's no snow yet in Hanover. And so, I remember distinctly working with you in your office trying to find snow. And you suggested that we go and find snow at the hockey arena because at the time, the Zamboni would simply dump all the ice shavings outside of Thompson Arena.

And so, we would go and fill trash cans full of snow, and that's how we actually tested our wheelchair, and we would test it outside the arena and then we would test it on the ice. And we got a ton of support. The folks from the facilities and athletics departments were both very supportive of that.

It's also through ENGS 21 that I got to meet some incredible folks. One of my teammates from ENGS 21 is now an orthopedic surgeon—and this is Jeremy McCormick—and we still interact. Even to today, he's a foot and ankle surgeon.

But one of the things that I did find in ENGS 21 is that you have to build something to test something. No matter how much time you spend drawing it or thinking about it, until you actually build it, prototype it, and engage with the user, engage with other engineers and have something to show them, you're unlikely to be successful.

And so, I spent a lot of time in the machine shop learning how to use the mills and the lathes to make the parts that then went on the wheelchair, that then it turns out didn't work very well until we iterated a couple of times. And that actually fed a lot of my Dartmouth experiences, my hands-on experience going back to high school. And then what I learned when I honed it here is that being able to use your hands and take an idea into something that other people can share with you, other people can envision, is a true key to being able to start to build a team. If your team understands what you're trying to do, then they can critique it and you, likewise, can critique their ideas.

So ENGS 21 was the introduction, the true introduction, to my engineering time. It was my sophomore fall class. And from there, I dove deeply into engineering. And in fact, the next course that I took was materials science with Erland Schulson. And that's where I started to get into the science of the materials that I was machining and getting to understand their mechanical behavior, and that actually kicked off an entire love of materials. And whether they're metals or polymers like I was working on at Thayer School, or rocks and sediments like I was learning about on the Earth sciences side, it was all the same at the end of the day. It was crystals, and the analytical techniques were very similar. The mechanical behavior was just different timescales. But it was something that allowed me to engage with my world in a way that I just couldn't do in high school, and it was really fun.

Collier: Right, and get to use a whole bunch of tools and learn all kinds of stuff. So you were here for the AB. We interacted, and then as I understand it, you left and then came back sometime later for the BE. So what went on in that interim and what brought you back?

Van Citters: I was a double major in Earth sciences and engineering, and over the course of my senior year, I made a lot of calls to the alumni network and learned about what a career in the geosciences might look like—and very specifically, in hydrogeology and almost at the interface of environmental engineering and geology. And I found myself at a firm doing exactly that, doing hydrogeology in support of spring water development.

I worked at this firm for two years, and as part of that, I was on a drill rig. I was looking at pumping stations, I was looking at bottling plants, and I was looking at snowmaking. And the theme through all of those is that, not only was I working with groundwater, and this was all clean groundwater at the time, but I was also doing the engineering behind it to either get it out of the ground, or put it into bottles, or understand how we're pumping it around, say, a ski resort. And yet at the time, I didn't have an accredited engineering degree.

The end result is that I made a call to you from a Walmart parking lot. I was actually at a ski resort and the Walmart was the only place that I had cell phone coverage, and I said, "I need an engineering degree to keep doing the job that I'm doing because I can't get promoted otherwise."

And you said, "Well, come on back and get an engineering degree. You'll get the BE, and then you can become a professional engineer and keep doing your career. But I have an idea, which is, if you do that degree concurrently with a master's degree, we can probably figure out a way to pay for it."

At the time, I still had loans from my Bachelor of Arts because Dartmouth didn't have the financial aid packages that they have today. And this sounded like a great idea to me. So I came back and all I knew at the time was that I would be working on bearings. But as a mechanical engineer, and somebody who had worked on engines for a very long time, I knew something about bearings already.

I should have looked deeper—that these were knee bearings and they had nothing to do with ball bearings, and so I was in for a little bit of a rude shock the first two weeks of my master's degree—but that's what brought me back to Dartmouth.

Collier: And you got involved at one point there upon your return with Francis Kennedy. He was working with us in the lab on a whole bunch of projects, but I think you started with him on something slightly different. I can't quite remember what that was.

Van Citters: Professor Kennedy's project, which was the one that ultimately funded my master's degree, was very specifically trying to build a new piece of equipment to challenge the materials that we use in artificial knees and artificial hips, because there was a piece of equipment that had long existed that would challenge one piece of polyethylene at a time for four weeks at a time. And so your throughput of this piece of equipment was very low, and like most pieces of homegrown equipment, it was a little bit crotchety. It leaked. It made a mess and it was quite loud.

And so, Professor Kennedy's challenge to me was to build a piece of equipment to test multiple pieces of polyethylene at once and do it in a way that was far more predictable and didn't make noise and didn't leak, but still gave the same scientific results. So I actually found myself back in the machine shop building a massive piece of equipment that became the foundation for my entire graduate program.

And along the way, Professor Kennedy taught me machine design and tribology, the study of friction and wear, and then the interactions of materials in their environment, particularly on the mechanical side. And we developed a very close relationship that's persisted to today.

But also along the way, Professor Kennedy provided me with a lot of opportunities to engage with undergraduates as I was building this piece of equipment. We needed a lot of help. And so, that's where I first got to teach and mentor somebody in the laboratory as a teammate, because I was no better as a machinist than anybody else so we worked together. And the only thing that I knew was the direction that the machine had to go, but the undergraduates I was working with knew pretty much everything else better than I did.

Collier: It was pretty neat because I remember you had multi-stations, and it was a huge machine. And it took up a whole bench there in room 15 and was going eternally, which was really neat.

Professor Kennedy, at some point as you finished your master's, sort of handed me the baton and said, "Your turn," and off we went to do your doctorate.

And through that whole process, I think you got a lot more time with undergraduates and guiding undergraduates and mentoring folks, and I think that had a lot to do with a whole bunch of students' success as they report back to me. So good job on that. 

But what was your thought in that time as you got to teach people a whole bunch of things that went well beyond your wear tester?

Shown here as a PhD candidate in 2004 with Cara J. Foster '07 and Jennifer Crist '07, Van Citters says mentoring Women in Science Project interns was a large part of how he came to love teaching. (Photo by Joe Mehling '69)

Van Citters: I think each of us in our career has a defining moment, and that was the profound moment when I was teaching students and I realized that that was the most fun thing I could do. And it changed from me wanting to pursue a master's degree and a bachelor of engineering so that I could become a professional engineer and get back into the field, to actually pursue a PhD so that I could become a professor and teach. 

I enjoyed the mentorship immensely and the challenge of learning something so deeply that you can teach it in three different ways, and hopefully explain it to somebody else in a way that they're then motivated to pursue it in the same way that I was.

Now it turns out that, you might recall, we started this by actually trying our hand at tissue engineering, which for me as a geologist-materials-scientist-mechanical-engineer was quite different. 

The human body is an elegant machine, if you want to describe it that way, but the reality is it doesn't work quite that way. And in 2003, give or take, this was on the very leading edge of tissue engineering. And we were spending a lot of time working with pigs and cartilage and trying to understand, how does cartilage grow? Because our cartilage in general, it's avascular. It's not innervated. For the most part, it doesn't heal. And yet, we were trying to make cartilage heal in the laboratory, not even inside of a human or a pig.

And as an engineer, that's what taught me how to teach myself because there was nobody at Thayer School doing tissue engineering. And I think it's one of the great parts of engineering school is that we have to learn how to teach ourselves something because whatever we're learning today, and I tell my students this constantly, "I can teach you a lot of things today, but if you look back a decade in your own career, everything you learned a decade ago, you're probably not using today. You have to constantly teach yourself." And tissue engineering was the perfect example because there was nobody here to teach that.

Collier: Yeah. I thought it was a perfect project. You had all this experience with metals and plastics and we'll just set it up so now you're dealing with tissue. That was good.

Van Citters: I enjoyed that, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with the undergraduate students. And it turns out that getting a lot of knowledge regarding the human knee brought us back to the problems that we are still trying to solve today with artificial knees—with trying to improve artificial joints, whether it's the knee, the hip, the shoulder, or the ankle in a way that they outlast the patient, in a way that the patients don't have to suffer through a second surgery because that device failed.

But it turns out that the failure modes oftentimes involve biology. And so, the tissue engineering aspects of what we did in the early 2000s informed how I understand biology and its impact on polymers. And I'm still working on some of those problems today. Moreover, some of my students today are working in fields including women's health and tissue engineering, including the Achilles tendon. How does it fail? We're thinking about infection, and all of these bits harken back to a couple of years that we spent in the laboratory trying to heal pig knees. So it certainly wasn't time lost.

Collier: Well, and if you remember, you had to get into some detailed stuff because one of the goals was in challenging the tissue—can we load it? And you built some equipment to do that. That was kind of fun.

But I just came out of your lab meeting this morning, and as I remember it, it's tremendously collegial. It's friendly. It's family-like, and that's what I was trying to do as you came through. And I had the joy of having Francis Kennedy, but also Dr. Michael Mayor and others that really made it so that it was a very collegial event. We worked on projects as a group, and I can see you've continued that, and that's really neat.

Van Citters: It's critical that laboratories dispose of the hierarchy. Ours is way too small of a school to have hierarchical structure in laboratories where one person drives everything. I found it much more appealing to have a whole variety of people in the laboratory, each of whom is very different from me in their background and their approach to education, and even their expertise. Because that's how we're going to solve these really sticky problems that might be materials science, mechanical engineering, metallurgy, biology, and then you inject a little bit of legal and economic and government regulation in there, just to keep it spicy.

But we need experts in every one of those areas if we're going to come up with a solution that's truly durable. And because of that, bringing folks in the collegial environment where everybody feels like they have the freedom to question me, to question each other, and provide genuine input to the problem, that's where we've made most of our progress.

Collier: So, just to sort of close a little bit of our biomaterials experience—towards the end of your PhD, I was teaching a course in biomaterials and you wanted to get some teaching experience. We talked to the students in the class, how would they like to have you do some of the lecturing? And in fact, you did essentially all of the lecturing. Do you remember that one?

Van Citters: I do. One of the greatest gifts I could have been given was the opportunity to work with those students. And some of those students in that class remain very close friends. 

I probably spent a week developing the first ninety-minute lecture, which, I was so nervous, I delivered it in sixty minutes. And then I had only forty-eight hours to deliver the second ninety-minute lecture. 

You gave me some wonderful feedback and reminded me that I was still the expert, but I still had to question myself as I delivered the material. But getting up in front of a classroom and explaining biomaterials pushed me to better understand the field, not just my area, but other folks' areas, and listen to the students carefully about what interested them.

And so, in fact, the class shifted gears a number of times. And what I came to realize is that the students needed to emerge from that class in the same way that, when we studied tissue engineering, I had to be able to teach myself. 

It quickly became apparent that the goal for that particular class was it was a terminal course. The students had to exit the class knowing how to engage with the primary literature and with the surgeons, the scientists, the engineers, the patients—the folks who would benefit from biomaterials, or who might be harmed by them on day one.

So the class quickly morphed into a course where I was training students to teach themselves and engage with the primary literature in ways that I think was really fun for them. And it honored their maturity and their depth of science, and I continued doing that for fifteen years as I taught that course.

Collier: I have to tell you, it was one of my most rewarding experiences, because if you remember, I was in the class all the time, so I was learning from you. And then after class, we'd go for coffee and talk about what works, what doesn't work, how do we modify things? And so it was an interactive class that I wish I could have had when I went through school. So it was fun to be able to do it with you.

Let's move ahead a little bit. So now you've graduated with your PhD. You are here as a research assistant professor, and you and I get the opportunity to teach 89/90, which is the two-term capstone course that all the BEs have to take. And sort of concurrent with that, we got to know all of the BEs for years going through, and you did the vast majority of the advising for all of the BEs outside of class.

The thing that impressed me is the way you took over 89, which has all the lectures in it. And one of the most exciting parts of it—and I think you did it to sort of build up the intensity—was the way you had the students pick their projects and pick their teams in an intensive session that went into the night. Do you want to describe that?

Van Citters: We described this as the lightning round. There was a time when the graduating class size at Thayer was small enough that you could actually use an optimized computer program to assign students and teams. And it worked for the most part, but it wasn't scalable for whatever reason. As the number of students went up, the solution set went with a cube or something of the number of students, and so it started to fall apart. 

So we did it much more on the human-centered side. We would have students evaluate projects. And again, to keep it interesting, I threw a couple of projects in there that were just physically not possible, meaning they would have violated the laws of physics to complete this project, and the students were responsible for picking those out. And yet at the same time, the students at the end of an evening had visibility into every single project. They knew how to do a quick assessment of whether or not a project was viable, and they knew who all the other people were in the classroom.

It was a bit of a lift, but it meant that when they selected projects over the next twenty-four hours, it was very efficient and they were happy with what they got. Every year for five or six years, ninety-percent of the students got their first or second choice, and I think it got to ninety-eight percent. One student didn't make it, so it also gave us visibility into the projects and gave us some opportunities to see where these might start to fall apart in the future.

But teaching that class and advising the students, it allowed me to think more about engineering. Recall as a doctoral student, your singular job is to become the world's expert in one thing. And then in 89/90, it was my job to actually know something about everything in engineering because we're non-departmental, and every student in the BE class goes through the singular capstone design course.

So I went from knowing everything you needed to know about polymers and their behavior in the human knee to having to know something about microgravity, and how do you deal with humidity and microgravity if you want to send somebody up on the Vomit Comet to experience microgravity. 

Having to know something about human eyes, having to know something about hydroelectric generation in austere areas, it was so much fun. It was so stimulating for me, because it was the type of engineering that I love to do.

Collier: The thing that intrigued me about watching you do that, because it was so different than I'd seen before, and you were still very early in your teaching career, is you brought in the people. You went out and found the projects and required that if you wanted to supply the project to the course, somebody had to come and describe it to the class. So you got everybody from industry coming in, and then you ran this first round where students were assigned a project and a group, but not necessarily the group they were going to have or the project they were going to have, and most likely not.

They'd had to learn about a project they didn't care about and present it to the class, and then the third round, you got to go for your project. So the level of intensity and excitement I think you brought to the whole thing was just awesome.

Van Citters: It was really fun. And again, it's where I met some of my best friends. Actually, two of my first graduate students came out of those first offerings of the class, because I got to know their work ethic. I got to know what made them tick and what they wanted out of their graduate career. And it was a perfect match for what I was able to offer them at the time.

Collier: And then you did a whole bunch of other teaching as well and a whole bunch of other advising, and I think that that worked out very well. I came to your talk at the 50th reunion this year and, whatever it was, the 10th reunion, and in both cases, students came up to me and expressed their excitement of you being the dean, and then went on into either their 21 project, or their 89/90 project, or both.

Now, more recently as a faculty member, you got involved in something that was dear to you as an undergraduate, which was the bonfire. Can you tell us that story?

Van Citters: So the homecoming, Dartmouth's great tradition, reaching back many decades, had reached a point where it was tall. The town of Hanover had observed, appropriately, that for multiple years, it was not actually imploding, it was falling over sideways. At the same time, to meet insurance needs and safety needs, the town of Hanover and local police and fire stations had a lot of folks stationed around the bonfire with their backs to it. The end result is that you have a fire that could potentially fall over sideways and our first responders not actually watching that happen.

At the same time, the student body wasn't necessarily having the experience that they all wanted. Many of them were having a good experience, but not all. And so, the community was actually becoming a little bit fractured around this. So the town of Hanover at the time had elected to not renew our permit for the outdoor activities that would allow us to have the bonfire, and the provost at the time asked me to see if I could help.

So I was charged with originally, colloquially, fixing the bonfire. And yet, at the time, what that really meant was, I was chairing the committee that was charged with first changing the human factors, what happens during Dartmouth night, during homecoming celebrations on Friday, and identifying whether or not the bonfire needed to change. 

I took a complete ENGS 21, 89/90 approach, and we started from scratch. We started from, what's important? What does a solution need to have? Not, what does it look like? And we went everywhere, including, should we have lots of little bonfires? Should we have a laser light show? Should we have fireworks? What do we do with the student body? Should we have bands?

It turns out that the solution continued to involve a bonfire because when you do the entire selection matrix, the bonfire is what comes out as being optimal ...

Collier: ... and traditional.

Van Citters: ... and traditional. And the chair of the committee then was charged with fixing, actually fixing, the bonfire to prevent it from falling over sideways. So that's where I did work at a one-to-twelve scale for the bonfire through the summer to design a new structure that was within the height restrictions set by the town, was within the area restrictions set by the town, and it only imploded, there was no way for it to fall over. 

So the design of the bonfire you see today came out of a summer of modeling a fire at smaller scale and tipping it over with high speed video to analyze how it fell over, over and over and over again.

Collier: My understanding was, there were some real questions about this from the other members of the committee. And so you actually built, what, made 500 mini logs? You machined them?

Van Citters: Yes.

Collier: So you could actually build this whole thing in real time and then challenge them to try to get it to fall outside its footprint?

Van Citters: Exactly. And because of the mechanics, there was no way to make it fall outside of the footprint originally set. Now, I started with many hundreds of sticks, but it turns out that I had a puppy at the time and the dog actually ate my bonfire. 

I'd made all these sticks and I put them in a bag and two days later, I was leaving on vacation for a cross-country drive. And so I took the bag of sticks and I put them in the back of the car, which is where the dog also rode. And so, we were driving across the country and the dog rolls up to the front seat with the bonfire in its mouth as a chew toy in the minivan between the two front seats. It worked out just fine in the end.

Collier: So now, you've gone from being a faculty member who's actively involved and teaching—and it turns out that our former dean, Alexis Abramson, got a different offer that really worked for her—and you became an interim dean. 

I remember chatting with you at the very beginning of this, that this was really going to be an opportunity for you to try to figure out, is this something you wanted to do? I think you had reservations, and over time, it became clear to me that you were having more and more fun and enjoying it more and more. 

Can you talk about that transition from the day you walk in looking around, "Is this where I want to be?" to where you are now, which you are the dean because you really wanted to be the dean.

(Photo by Catha Mayor)

Van Citters: The reservations were not necessarily because of the job, but because of the job I thought I would have to give up. I love my research, I love my laboratory, I love teaching, and I love advising students. And my biggest hesitation around academic administration is that I would have to start to shrink away from my lab, from the classroom, and most importantly, my student advisees.

Over the course of the interim period, a couple of things became apparent. First, I maintained my laboratory. I got to keep working there. In fact, it became an outlet for me. It's where I knew how to behave. I knew where I could have a lot of fun with my students. I knew I could mentor. I still had a chance to teach. I actually taught the 21st century American University Athlete with a number of other faculty members, including our president. But it was super fun to remain in the classroom and I hope I get to keep doing that.

I still mentor students, particularly student athletes and elite student athletes because Dartmouth is a very unique place where you can be an engineer and, whether it's a varsity athlete or a musician or an artist or a double major or a researcher or somebody who's never even seen engineering before, and you want to get into the science a little bit more. I was able to mentor those students and still have an impact on them. And so because of that, that fear was put aside.

But one of the things that I realized over the course of being an interim dean was that there were problems to solve. This Thayer School is a giant machine that works very well, but from time to time needs maintenance or even some repair. And I know how to analyze that and fix it. 

But I also get to think about engineering at the broadest scale once again, going back to our 89/90 discussion. The thing that made 89/90 fun was I got to think about engineering in every possible field that we teach. And now I get to do that once again. Some 30 years later, I'm now thinking about engineering at the broadest scale while still getting to focus on orthopedics at least a couple of times a week.

Those are the things that make being the dean really fun and rewarding, especially when you enable a faculty member or a student or a postdoc or a staff member to be absolutely outstanding at something because, for whatever reason, you got something out of their way, or you gave them that one extra resource that they needed to really take their work to the next level.

Collier: Well, the other part of it, I suppose, is the fundraising, which could be daunting. Except I think in your position, you get to go out and see all your former students.

Van Citters: And I rarely think about it as fundraising. I think about it as going out and telling the story of, what is Dartmouth today? How does it connect to the Dartmouth that I experienced in the '90s, in the 2000s, as a faculty member in 2010s and 2020s? And I can faithfully tell students who you and I both had, or my classmates or my friends, much of what made Thayer School so special remains, and yet we've improved it. 

There's so much that's gotten better about it. Even in a period of growth, we've doubled over the course of twenty years, it's gotten better and it's still the community that we love. And because of that, it's not fundraising, it's telling the story of what's true and what I've experienced.

Collier: Let me ask a bit more about that because when you started, Thayer was pretty much one small building. And then we had this big McLean building added on. So we doubled our size, and we worried that that might affect the community feeling, and in fact, it really didn't, because we had the atrium. 

And now it's doubled again, and so you are overseeing a really big building with multiple times the number of students, multiple times the number of faculty than it was when you came. How do you keep that community spirit, and how do you make a big place feel cozy?

Van Citters: It's a good question, and I think that might be the biggest near-term challenge that I face. And we are starting to asymptote in our growth plans. We've reached the point where Joe Helble and his initial solicitation for ideas for growth—we've reached that point. So now, my challenge is to ensure that we don't lose the community that's so important to the way we learn, the way we teach, and the way students interact with us after they've graduated.

Because you're right, we've doubled the footprint of the school. We've doubled the faculty size, the student size, and the staff size. We've way more than doubled the budget of the school. And what we need to do then is make sure that we have opportunities for folks to come together as a community, as a research community, and as students so that we don't lose those special points.

So what are those? First, class sizes and the fact that we teach in a hands-on environment. So courses need to keep the laboratory components. They need to keep the team and project components. And in order to do that, we can't let them balloon. We have to add more sections. That way the students get to engage with each other. They get to engage with their faculty.

We also need to make it so that the faculty have opportunities to come together in projects. We have to have the faculty see individual excellence. They need to be able to prove that their science for them is super exciting and something that they can write individual investigator proposals for. But at the same time, we need to facilitate the team science that brings together six, twelve, eighteen faculty members into a single project so that they can work together and solve really challenging problems.

And we need to do it in a way that the staff and graduate students all feel like they own this, too. And so my biggest challenge for the next, say, couple of years, is going to be to make sure that that platform is in place before we start to think about the next great thing for Thayer School.

Collier: And so when I think about fabrication, we spent collectively a lot of time in the machine shop and innumerable hours in Couch Lab. And as the school's gotten bigger, we still have a machine shop and Couch. Is that something that over time needs to be increased in size or cloned, or do you do something quite different?

Van Citters: Well, at the core, we have to keep the hands-on part of the education because that's where ideas become reality. It's where these ideas allow students, as I described in my ENGS 21 experience, where students actually can take an idea and realize that it's hard to make. It might be expensive to make. It may not abide by the rules of physics.

Collier: And it will break.

Van Citters: And it definitely will break. So we have to have that connection, learning engineering by doing engineering. And that means we need project spaces like this.

Now, what does the project space of the future look like? I'm not sure. In 1999, or when I graduated, 3D printing was not a thing. When I returned to Dartmouth, we had some of the first 3D printers in our machine shop and they were phenomenal. It was absolutely mind-bending that we could do something like this. And now, during COVID, we FedEx-ed an entire class—everybody in the class got their own 3D printer.

So we're now six years later, and we have 3D printers everywhere in the school. And you can buy one for less than $100, and it's highly functional. So we don't know what the fabrication facilities of the future might look like. We still need the room to house them. We need the computational power to support it. But at the end of the day, we also need those visionaries who can help students actually take their ideas and turn them into something physical.

Because one of the things that I believe you had, and I certainly had growing up, was an opportunity to turn a wrench, to work on engines, to work on things and fix them in my backyard. And not all the students who show up at Dartmouth today have that same experience. So it's incumbent on us to provide that to them here. And it's going to require facilities like this and facilities like Couch II next door and our MShop. But what we fill it with is something that's apt to ...

Collier: ... change.

Van Citters: Change, yeah.

Collier: Yes. So we're getting close to concluding here. We're up-to-date, and you have the challenge of figuring out what the next five years holds for you and what it holds for Thayer in your view. And how do you go about that? And where are you with that thinking?

Van Citters: So the first rule always is, leave a place better than you found it, and Thayer School of Engineering has been around for 160 years and it will far outlast me.

When Alexis Abramson started as the dean some six years ago, she was handed a school that was focused on engineering and medicine, engineering and energy, and engineering in complex systems. We now have, when you include our instructional and research and tenure line faculty, a faculty of eighty-six, and two-hundred PhD students. Every graduating class, meaning the junior class that will show up here in September, has two-hundred students in it.

Collier: Wow.

Van Citters: We can go beyond three focus areas, and so, one of the things that I want to do early on in these next five years is work with the faculty to identify, what are our focus areas? Where are we going to be simply exceptional as a school, and build verticals around that. 

We may not know exactly the questions we're going to answer, or even how we're going to answer them. We may not even have the faculty we need, and then it's my job to make sure that we have the resources to hire those faculty who complete us in any one vertical, to make sure that we have the resources necessary to support the students who are going to work on projects there, and the resources necessary to support the undergraduate population that pursues the education that you were able to receive at Dartmouth, and that I was able to receive. This education that's not just a technical education, but it's the Dartmouth education.

And so in the next five years, we need to make sure we grow into each other as a larger school, but also that we grow into the future and start to adapt to a future that is very, very different than it was even six years ago.

Collier: Neat. Thank you. Good luck with that.

Crew: Before we close out, can you describe to me what Doug was like as a student?

Collier: What was Doug like as a student? He was always enthusiastic and energetic, but he was also really curious. He wanted to see how things worked. And whatever you asked him to do, you got back much more than you expected. 

And the reason for that is, in my view, you're reasonably unique in that you can have a dozen things going at the same time and not get frazzled, not lose where each one of these things is, keep your perspective and humor going on all of them, and keep them all moving ahead. 

Now you had that long before we were trying to oversee fifteen or twenty or twenty-five projects concurrently in 89/90. So you brought that in. I don't know where you got that. Where did you get that?

Van Citters: My parents for sure. Both of my parents always did something like that. They always wanted to give back to the family. They wanted to give back to the community. Both of my parents volunteered everywhere.

But one of the key teachers was our colleagues, John Currier and Barbara Currier. The Curriers had a million and one things always going on. And being able to learn from them about how do you balance all the different aspects of life that include the technical, and what you're doing in the laboratory, but also what you're doing at their school more broadly and then into your family and then into your community and on and on and on. And so, it was definitely not something that was part of me to begin with. It was learned, but I had really great instructors and partners along the way.