UMaine’s new Ferland center to feed ‘incredible demand’ for engineers

Courtesy / University of Maine UMaine College of Engineering Dean Dana Humphrey, seen here at the new Ferland Engineering Education and Design Center, said the center and new program investments position the university to provide skilled workers and innovation.

Write a Comment

By Laurie Schreiber

The $78 million E. James and Eileen P. Ferland Engineering Education and Design Center, the largest project of its kind at UMaine, officially opened its doors last week.

The 105,000-square-foot center, with capacity to increase engineering enrollment by a third, represents a new chapter in engineering education to better meet the needs of students and employers.

The center houses the department of mechanical engineering and the biomedical engineering program; teaching laboratories for the mechanical engineering technology program; a student project design suite; shops for biomedical engineering, electronics, 3D printing, vehicles, metals, wood and composites; and a campus welcome and STEM outreach center.

UMaine College of Engineering Dean Dana Humphrey said the center, coupled with a Harold Alfond Foundation investment in the Maine College of Engineering, Computing and Information Science, positions the university to provide industries, communities and employers with the skilled workers and innovation needed to meet demand and move Maine forward.

Humphrey has been with UMaine since 1986 and dean since 2007. As he prepares for retirement — his last day on the job is Wednesday — he shared further thoughts about the program’s potential. Here’s an edited transcript.

Mainebiz: How has engineering education and design evolved over the years?

Dana Humphrey: When I became a faculty member, we were still teaching students drafting with a pencil and a triangle. That’s completely gone. The ability to have low-cost, personal computers and every student owns one — that is probably the biggest single change.

MB: Has the subject matter evolved?

DH: The fundamentals of engineering have stayed the same. But we’ve made great strides with applications such as designing with composites, designing in ways that are more sustainable, advances in how we produce our energy that we need for daily life. That’s changed a lot.

MB: Could you discuss the need for more engineers?

DH: We are not graduating enough engineers. For example, last year in Maine, there were six entry-level job postings per graduate for electrical engineers and four civil engineer job postings per graduate. The placement rate for our graduates in the last two survey years was 100%. That all speaks to incredible demand. The Ferland building will give us the ability to increase the number of undergraduates we have by about a third, or 600 students. And it will give them a completely different learning experience, so the quality of the engineers we’ll be graduating will go up.

MB: Could you provide an example of this ‘completely different learning experience?’

DH: The student design suite has 44 workbenches that we can assign to students for a semester or a year. That’s their space and they’ll build their projects there. We’ll have multiple disciplines working together, because that’s what happens in the real world. Engineers work in teams across disciplinary boundaries.

The bench area is surrounded by shops. Students will be able to go to the shops, fabricate their components, return to their benches, and put together their projects.

MB: How did students manage before this setup?

DH: We’ve had hands-on projects for a long time, but they were spread through our five engineering buildings, so they weren’t getting the same cross-disciplinary experience we wanted them to have and they needed to have. The suite gives them that opportunity.

MB: Could you provide an example of a cross-disciplinary project?

DH: One project a couple of years back was a collaboration between our biomedical engineering students and mechanical engineering technology students. If someone is injured in a remote location, you want to get them connected with a doctor as soon as possible. The students built an unmanned aerial vehicle that carries an instrumented glove. It flies to the injured person, drops the glove, the patient puts on the glove, it starts taking vital signs, then it beams the vital signs to the drone. The drone has a much bigger battery, which means it has a much more powerful antenna that can broadcast the data to a hospital, so the hospital can get real-time information about the person who’s in the woods and can start directing the medical care the individual receives.

With the new building, that collaboration will be so much easier because we have an electronics suite, the facilities to fabricate unmanned aerial vehicles, and our biomedical shop. All of this combines to allow these great hands-on projects across the disciplinary boundaries.

MB: How does this capability for collaboration translate to the workforce?

DH: In the workforce, you have multi-disciplinary teams working on big projects. A different example: in Maine, we have many strong companies that work in the space of power distribution. That’s a multi-disciplinary problem. You need electrical engineers, civil engineers, mechanical engineers. That’s what our students will experience in the real world. The building allows us to do that here. We did it some in the past, but now this is on steroids.

MB: Do you anticipate this capability will allow students to launch into productive careers more quickly?

DH: Absolutely. And it’s necessary today. Because of the shortage of engineers in the workplace, our graduates have to come up to speed much more quickly. When I first entered the workforce, the first projects I was working on were pretty darned simple. That’s not the case for our graduates now. They have to be ready to be multi-disciplinary team players from the get-go. We’ve modified our education to give them that experience.

MB: Will the new center be useful for recruitment?

DH: I think this will recruit both faculty and students. Today is the first day we’re teaching classes in the building. It’s very gratifying. Students are streaming in and out. Incoming students walk into the building and go to this wonderful campus welcome and STEM outreach center. They look to their left through the glass into the design suite. They walk down the hall of this bright beautiful building. This will be a magnet, not just for engineering students, but for students from all disciplines, both from Maine and from out-of-state.

MB: How many engineers does Maine need?

DH: In a typical year, there are 2,000 jobs postings for engineers in Maine. That’s been pretty constant, even throughout the pandemic. We just don’t have enough. We live in a world that is increasingly technologically advanced and it needs engineers.

We’re also in a period when people my age are moving out of the workforce, at the same time that demand for engineers is going up. We need replacement engineers and we need engineers for new positions.

Guidoboni named dean of UMaine College of Engineering

Courtesy / UMaine

Giovanna Guidoboni

Giovanna Guidoboni, associate dean for research and professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Missouri, has been named dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Maine, effective Jan. 16, 2023.

She will fill the dean position left by Dana Humphrey, who is retiring Aug. 31 after a 36-year career at UMaine. Mohamad Musavi, UMaine College of Engineering associate dean and professor, will serve as interim dean, effective Sept. 1.

Guidoboni is a professor with joint appointments in electrical engineering and computer science, and mathematics. Her research focuses on mathematical modeling and data science applied to engineering and life sciences. She collaborates nationally and internationally in areas such as ocular blood flow and risk factors associated with ocular diseases; cardiovascular function and noninvasive health monitoring; and physiology of the lower urinary tract.

Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the European Commission.

Before joining the University of Missouri in 2017, Guidoboni served on the faculty of the University of Houston, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, and the Université de Strasbourg. Since January 2021, she has served as associate dean for research in the University of Missouri College of Engineering.

Guidoboni is the founder and manager of the consulting company Gspace LLC, which provides modeling and computational solutions for complex problems in engineering and life sciences. She also is co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Modeling and Artificial Intelligence in Ophthalmology.

Her awards include a Fulbright Scholarship and a Chair Gutenberg. Guidoboni serves on the editorial boards of Scientific Reports (Nature), Frontiers in Neuroscience (Frontiers), and Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering (AIMS Press). In 2022, she was elected a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Guidoboni has a Ph.D. in mathematics, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in materials engineering from the University of Ferrara.