Dear Alumni and Friends,
It is a uniquely exhilarating and complex time to be leading Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Following a $100 million gift — the largest in Cornell Engineering history — from David A. Duffield ’62, MBA ’64, we are adding more than 130,000 square feet of new and renovated space for teaching, research, collaboration and maker spaces in Duffield Hall. The improvements will include a full, embedded, low-vibration, quantum-ready research wing for work in quantum computing, as well as additional lab space to support work in artificial intelligence, robotics and semiconductor materials and devices.
This is a truly transformative gift for our school, and I am incredibly grateful to Dave Duffield for his generous support of our researchers and students. His gift will develop and empower generations of engineers and leaders.
I am also extremely appreciative of the grace and flexibility shown by the family of Ellis L. Phillips Sr., Class of 1895. He was one of our earliest and most prominent graduates, and his foundation provided the funding for Phillips Hall, which opened in 1955 and served as our home for seven decades. I am glad we have found an appropriate way to extend Phillips’ legacy by, among other things, naming our school’s directorship in his honor. It is a highlight of my tenure to now serve as the inaugural Ellis L. Phillips Sr. Director of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Alongside these exceptionally positive developments, as well as others that you can read about in this magazine, we are also dealing with unprecedented threats to the work that we do to advance technology, educate students, and make a difference in the world. Since World War II, the federal government had funded competitive, fundamental research in an unspoken contract with research universities to drive innovation. As I write this letter, this contract is being broken and research is being inexplicably halted and publicly devalued in ways that will have ripple effects throughout our institution and society.
No collection of stories could capture the full magnitude of our impact since graduating America’s first electrical engineering graduates in 1885. However, the stories gathered here will provide you with some sense of how our research continues to contribute to society — including by informing and enhancing our ability to produce outstanding and productive graduates, such as yourselves.
In good times and in difficult ones (and in times like the current moment, when we have extreme versions of both coinciding), I greatly value and appreciate your engagement with and support of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Please stop by whenever you’re in Ithaca or the Cornell Tech campus in New York City, and please continue to champion research wherever you go!
Thank you,
Alyssa Apsel
Ellis L. Phillips Sr. Director of Electrical and Computer Engineering
IBM Professor of Engineering