Q & A

JOSEPH HELBLE, dean of the Thayer School of Engineering,

recently announced that the school will hire seven new professors during the next few years as part of a plan to focus on three areas: energy, the interface between engineering and medicine, and complex systems. DAM caught up with the dean to learn more.

Why the focus on medicine? "Not only do we have a first-class medical school here on campus and a medical center not two miles away, but Dartmouth is small enough that it fosters collaborations. When I arrived just a year and half ago I discovered that 40 percent of our faculty already had some kind of interactive relationship with Dartmouth Medical School faculty."

Can you give us an example? "Meredith Lunn '06, Th'07, wrote a senior honors thesis about the design of a device used in pediatric cleft palate surgery. She made the connection through an engineering course that was co-taught by Joe Rosen, a surgeon from Dartmouth-Hitchcock. He got her into the operating room, where she observed. She talked with the physicians, then built a prototype that would improve what they were doing."