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Guest Editor Letter - March 2023

ECE Resources ECEDHA Source eNewsletter March 2023 Guest Editor Letter - March 2023

March 2023

 

Guest Editor Letter

Entrepreneurship is all about creating value in any context

By: Badri Roysam, University of Houston

Dear Colleagues,

With Spring Break upon us, it is time to perhaps, take a deep breath and smell the flowers, or at least, maybe, take a sip from the firehose of new ideas sweeping through the ECE community.

In this issue of the ECEDHA Source, we are delighted to feature a fascinating ECE Conversation with Doug Melton, Program Director for the entrepreneurial engineering program at the Kern Family Foundation. 

Among the many pearly words of wisdom spoken by Doug, one passage was especially valuable to me. He said “... the entrepreneurial mindset is not necessarily about creating new startups, and this is a good moment to pause and digest that. It is a mindset about creating value in any context. As we know engineering is a team sport …  the entrepreneurial mindset in any context will create some success for that individual, but also create success for society .. that’s why the Foundation has decided it is the place to place its chips …” I love this type of “first principles” thinking that invigorates our discipline and inspires to change the world, yet again.

I hope you attend Doug’s keynote speech at the 2023 ECEDHA Annual Conference and ECExpo Conference: March 17-20, 2023, and ECExpo: March 18-19, 2023 in scenic Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico. Remember that the Electric Power Engineering workshop on the topic of “Building a Robust Workforce in Electric Power Engineering” will also take place just prior to the Conference on March 16-17, 2023. The conference schedule is packed with informative sessions, and we are pleased to feature the “erVa Listening Session” below. Curious? Read on.

By the way, would you like to be part of the next ECE Conversation at the conference in New Mexico? The ECEDHA staff will be conducting ECE Conversation tapings to capture the perspectives of our ECEDHA members. If you are interested in participating, please visit the registration counter or contact Michelle Klein at mklein@ecedha.org. We encourage you to contact us if we can discuss a matter of broad interest to ECE Chairs with you in a comfortable video podcast format. Here are some of the topics of current interest:

  1. The many impacts of AI on ECE education and research;
  2. Strategies and Experiences in meeting the semiconductor re-shoring challenge;
  3. The growing footprint of healthcare-related research in ECE departments;
  4. Growing the workforce for the future electronics-intensive defense industry;
  5. The new ECE Chair experience, the ups, and the downs; and
  6. Strategies and best practices for developing future ECE faculty.

As always, we welcome short articles from ECE department heads & faculty on topics of broad interest to our community. If you have any thoughts on such a topic, let us plan to meet and have another great ECE Conversation in New Mexico.

Wishing you a restful and invigorating Spring Break,

Badri Roysam, D.Sc., Fellow IEEE, Fellow AIMBE
Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor
Chair, Electrical & Computer Engineering Department
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-4005
Phone: 713-743-1773
Email: broysam@uh.edu