Strategic Vision

FY 2023-28

Updated: 5/2024

Research and Innovation

We shape the world through radically interdisciplinary research that generates new knowledge and translates innovations to impact. 

Vision

ATLAS passionately pursues creative, unorthodox, and novel solutions that integrate a diverse range of disciplinary practices and perspectives. We are home to an internationally recognized faculty, a place for all faculty members to grow in their careers, and a destination for top doctoral students who thrive outside the confines of conventional programs. Our faculty comprises engineers, designers, and artists who investigate across conventional disciplines. We cultivate curiosity in a community that supports inquiry at the edges and encourages the pursuit of novel ideas and designs.

In the next five years, we will:

  • Be a well-funded institute with a reputation as a leading locus of innovative interdisciplinary ideas that have global impact. 
  • Be successful in attracting and retaining strong faculty and PhD students to build the ATLAS research community.
  • Be a champion for the power and value of radically interdisciplinary research as a critical force in solving important problems.

To enable this vision, we will:

  • Develop ongoing research relationships with industry partners that provide annual support for one-fourth of the PhD students advised by ATLAS faculty.
  • Implement incentives and infrastructure for the faculty to successfully propose sponsored research.
  • Expand to 12 tenure-track faculty and double the number of PhD students pursuing Creative Technology and Design.
  • Establish a research-track faculty.
  • Design and promote a credible and inspiring position on the value of true interdisciplinary research in solvingimportant problems.

Education

ATLAS academic programs attract intellectually diverse students and challenge their curiosity, creativity, and fearlessness to venture beyond convention. 

Vision

The ATLAS Institute’s academic programs empower the next generation of deep thinkers, designers and makers by equipping students with advanced interdisciplinary engineering expertise through project-based learning. 

In the next five years, we will:

  • Be recognized as a leading academic program that bridges design and engineering in which research and education thrive together to address society’s most critical challenges.
  • Be a thriving community that attracts, empowers and supports engineers from diverse cultural, gender, racial andeconomic backgrounds—including historically underrepresented populations—who pursue their unique goals successfully through graduation.
  • Be an institute that embraces and advances educational innovations enabling all graduates to build meaningful long-term careers, adapt to disruptive technologies, lead cross-disciplinary teams and demonstrate resilience in changing job markets.

To enable this vision, we will:

  • Create curriculum opportunities for integrating students at all levels into the institute’s research activities and culture. 
  • Attract and retain additional teaching faculty with strong STEM credentials.
  • Elevate the understanding and status of the Creative Technology & Design degrees in CEAS, across campus and globally to invite more intellectually diverse students to pursue engineering at ²ÊÃñ±¦µä.
  • Increase student retention, particularly from historically underrepresented groups.
  • Enhance our maker spaces and teaching resources to ensure students have continued access to advanced tools, technologies and techniques.
  • Demonstrate the range of industry and professional roles held by ATLAS alumni, then leverage this in recruitment efforts and program promotion.

Inclusion

The ATLAS Institute is a vibrant research and academic community that thrives because we actively support a diversity of backgrounds and intellectual pursuits. 

Vision

The ATLAS Institute holds diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and community-building as fundamental for our shared growth, success and resilience. We recruit, support and retain students, faculty and staff who have been historically marginalized and excluded. We collaborate to remove barriers to programs, resources and services. We value our culturally diverse community and strive to empower all voices in the ATLAS community as this is essential to achieving our research and education mission and vision.

In the next five years, we will:

  • Be a community prioritizing belonging among all faculty, staff and students, and valuing transparency, financial and resource equity, and a shared responsibility for the institute’s research and teaching missions.
  • Be a community with demographics that more closely reflect the diversity of the U.S. population.
  • Be a community that actively works to break down historic barriers to equitable education and research.
  • Support diverse pathways into and through our academic programs, with equitable and inclusive admissions, recruitment, and retention practices.

To enable this vision, we will:

    • Strengthen support for our present population of racial and ethnic minoritized individuals, LGBTQIA+, low economic status, and first-generation students, staff and faculty. 
    • Grow our community of students, staff and faculty from groups historically underrepresented in academia. 
    • Address structural inequalities in classrooms by applying accessible learning through self-directed and project-based work.