RICHARDSON, Texas (Aug. 25, 2004) — When Dr. Bob Helms took over as dean of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) last year, one of the first things he did was set a goal that the school would be ranked among the top 50 engineering schools in the United States by 2008. The mantra became: “Top 50 in Five” — a rather ambitious undertaking considering that Jonsson was founded less than two decades ago.

The Jonsson School already has made considerable progress toward that goal, however, in part as the result of a unique public-partnership code-named “Project Emmitt” and involving Texas Instruments, the State of Texas and the University of Texas System. UTD expects to receive an infusion of as much as $300 million as part of the deal – about $85 million of which will go toward construction of a state-of-the-art Natural Science and Engineering Research Building on the north end of campus.

On Oct. 22, as part of the Jonsson School’s popular annual Distinguished Lecture Series, Dr. Ben Streetman, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the top engineering schools in the nation, will provide UTD some pointers on the subject of achieving engineering excellence when he delivers a talk titled “Building a Top-Ten Engineering School.”

Dr. Ben Streetman
Dr. Ben Streetman

“This is an opportunity for us to hear one of the top engineering deans in the country talk about how his school has achieved greatness and national recognition,” said Helms, who was one of the key drivers behind Project Emmitt. “We in the Jonsson School can learn a great deal from Dr. Streetman, but I think interest in his lecture will go well beyond the UTD campus.”

The lectures for the fall semester will kick off on Sept. 17 and conclude on Nov. 17. All will be held in the Texas Instruments Foundation Auditorium (Room 2.102) in the south building of the Jonsson School complex and, including the question-and-answer period, will run for about an hour and 20 minutes.

The lectures are free and open to the public.

The schedule for the fall lecture series is as follows:

Friday, Sept. 17
11 a.m.

Dr. Philip Bernstein, National Academy of Engineering
Senior Researcher, Microsoft Corporation
Generic Model Management: A Database Infrastructure for Schema Manipulation

Friday, Oct. 1
10 a.m.

Dr. Larry Hornbeck, TI Fellow
Texas Instruments, Inc.
MEMS Engineers Develop Widgets & Gadgets that Revolutionize Film & TV

Friday, Oct. 15
11 a. m.

Dr. Leslie Lamport, National Academy of Engineering
Researcher, Microsoft Corporation
Thinking for Programmers

Friday, Oct. 22
11 a.m.

Dr. Ben Streetman, Professor and Dean
University of Texas at Austin, College of Engineering
Building a Top-Ten Engineering School

Friday, Nov. 12
11 a.m.

Dr. Christos Papadimitriou,
National Academy of Engineering
C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science
University of California at Berkeley
Networks & Games

Friday, Nov. 19
11 a.m.

Dr. Janie Fouke, Professor and Dean
Michigan State University, College of Engineering
Modern Bioengineering

About UTD

The University of Texas at Dallas, located at the convergence of Richardson, Plano and Dallas in the heart of the complex of major multinational technology corporations known as the Telecom Corridor®, enrolls about 14,000 students. The school’s freshman class traditionally stands at the forefront of Texas state universities in terms of average SAT scores. The university offers a broad assortment of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs. For additional information about UTD, please visit the university’s Web site at www.utdallas.edu