Dean Peña-Mora chats with Spec

Shortly after moving in from Illinois, Feniosky Peña-Mora, a civil engineer who grew up in the Dominican Republic and the new dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, sat down with Spectator’s Alexa Davis for an exclusive interview. The self-professed nerd spoke of his transition to Columbia from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, his enthusiasm for promoting faculty research, and his search for the fountain of youth.

Spec:
Are you finding the transition to Columbia smooth?

PM:
For me, it’s been very good having the opportunity to interact with faculty and to talk to most of the chairs and some of the students. Universities have such energy. One of the things I enjoy the most in the first day of classes is just seeing the energy—the young faces looking, wanting to learn, and experiencing a new phase in their lives, a new chapter in their books. It just fills you with energy. The job in academia is one of the best jobs because every year you receive a new shot of energy. If somebody really wanted to find the fountain of youth, he or she should just walk around a university. Every year you can feel one year younger, just seeing that energy. The beginning of the semester is better because a lot of people are very social—talking to friends and getting new friends. After the midterms, they’re all focused on studying. They want to go from one building to another building as quickly as possible.

Spec:
What have you been up to since you moved in here?

PM:
I’ve been learning about the place. I prepared a lot during the search process, during which I came to find out more about the school, what the people were doing here, and if I would be a good match for this school, because that’s important. There’s a difference between being the guest at a house and living at a house. Before, I was just a guest. Now, I’m living in the house. Most of the conversations were a little superficial. Now I’m getting in the thick of things, and every week there is a big issue that comes up, but it’s interesting and I’m learning.

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Spec:
What are you looking to accomplish in the coming years? What would you say is your mission here at Columbia?

PM:
Like I mentioned, I’m still learning a lot, but there have been some topics that have come up at different times that I have heard from different constituencies. There have been two topics that have come up very repetitively from students. One is undergraduate opportunities for doing research with faculty here and how that can be more clarified or communicated. There are a lot of activities in which students are involved in innovation, but when the Spectator announced that Michele [Moody-Adams] from the College and I were hired, it gave us a list of what were our to-dos, and one of those was undergraduate research opportunities. I take undergraduate research very seriously. When I taught at MIT several years ago, I always felt the importance of giving undergraduates the opportunity to work in research. I always involved freshmen in my lab so that they could get experience and then maybe after their second year, branch out into any of the other labs. So undergraduate research opportunities is definitely something that I would like to focus on. It may be either a matter of improving communication by integrating and centralizing the information, or creating more opportunities. I don’t know which one it will be.

The other topic that I have heard quite a bit about and which is very important to our students is career services, CCE. There is a question about how able students are to find the next opportunity or job after they finish their schooling at the University. I think there is a little bit of a question about how we can support the students in that arena.

Another topic that I think is important to improve is global international opportunities. The engineering curriculum tends to be quite rigid at times because of the type of knowledge we consider important for students to know. This sometimes makes it challenging for students to take time off to study abroad. Students have to manage their time very well in advance and really have to plan when they’re going to take their classes. They can’t just wake up one day in November and say “I want to do a semester abroad in the spring.” It’s difficult, it’s almost impossible. So we need to identify how we can actually provide our students the opportunity to get into international programs and international initiatives. One thing we will do is look into faculty opportunities during the breaks.

With respect to faculty, one of the things we’re trying to focus on is a program that we’re calling “rising superstars.” We will try to bring a number of faculty together into a cohort and have them work together to integrate the physical world, the biological world, and the digital world. We want to develop an appreciation for multidisciplinary research and address some of the challenging questions that we have in today’s society like sustainability, energy, water, infrastructure by looking at the intersection of the physical, biological, and digital. And that’s something that we’re very excited about, seeing how we can bring the faculty together and look at issues from a multidisciplinary perspective.

With respect to the issue of the school itself, I think that communication is important—how this school can communicate to our community. And community can mean the campus community, the local community, the city, the state, the nation, the world, the community at large. I think we need to better communicate to the world what SEAS has to offer and what is the impact of the work that we do here.

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Spec:
What do you see as being possible challenges that you might face this year?

PM:
To tell you the truth, the issue of space, which I’ve been informed about, might be a challenge. Space is so limited here. How are we going to be able to grow the way that we feel is necessary within the constrained space we have? There’s a great opportunity to grow in Manhattanville as there are definitely spaces there. The question is what would be the timeline that we would be able to accomplish this expansion. There is even some concern about where we are going to place students and have enough classroom space.

I firmly believe that when things grow organically, there are different ways that things can go. The growth sometimes can be very efficient, but it can be also occur not as efficiently as it should be because there’s no master plan. So there are ways that you can optimize the growth, but you don’t always want to because you don’t know what the end goal is. And if you look at our spaces, you’ll see that they have been developed over decades—the labs here may have started to develop in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s—during which the requirements for housing, equipment, and research labs in general have changed. The way that the spaces were delineated is not efficient for today. We are trying to find out what gains we can have from the buildings as they are right now. I also think it is very important that while we think about what I previously mentioned, we think about how our infrastructure can be more sustainable, more energy efficient, more welcoming. But for me, sustainability is not just from the perspective of saving energy, but also from a social perspective—that the space is more welcoming, a place where people feel at home. Sustainability involves looking both at the natural environment and the social environment.

Spec:
What would you say are some of the responsibilities that SEAS has towards its students and the community at large? What is SEAS aiming to give its students?

PM:
We have a mission to prepare the next leaders in engineering and applied science so they can work toward the betterment of the human condition—locally, nationally, and globally. It’s very important that what we are providing is an environment where the next generation’s leaders are nurtured, groomed, and educated. But we don’t want to make leaders in a vacuum, rather leaders with a social responsibility. What we do does have an impact on society. We are engineers, and though it seems a little too grandiose, we create the future, we actually build the technologies and infrastructure, and we decide what we all the creatures in the world use. I’m looking both from a social perspective and a technological perspective. I think that what our students have which is quite unique from students in other engineering programs is a great parent—if you want to think about Columbia university as that—and a great sibling—the College—that is actually a bastion in the area of the humanities, the arts, and the liberal arts and sciences. Our students are able to the take the Core, which actually provides them with a broad perspective on society and the human condition. But I think the key operating words about are mission are socially responsible leadership at local, national, and global levels.

Spec:
On a more informal note, what are your favorite things to do in the city?

PM:
I have to be a honest, I’m a nerd, so I’m not a sports person. I really like walking. Walking is just so enjoyable for several reasons. It’s a time that I have for myself to think things through, just passing by the world moving. It’s like being immersed in a movie, with actors walking by. I enjoy walking in Riverside Park. There’s so much to see all the time.

Spec:
Do you have any other hobbies?

PM:
I try to spend the only free time I have with my family—helping with homework, seeing movies at the theater. My kids and I have movie nights usually on Friday night.

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