The 2005-2006 academic year marks the 125th anniversary of the University of Southern California, as well

as the 100th anniversary of engineering at USC. As we embark upon this celebratory year, it is essential to

look back at the history, people, events, contributions, collaborations and research that brought us to this

milestone. However, it is equally important to look to the future and to the bright stars that will illuminate our

path for the next hundred years. On the following pages, you will read about our past. You will also discover

more about current research and the engineers who are burning a path toward tomorrow. Our destination has

always been the future. The journey is one hundred years old and yet the feeling is, we’ve only just begun.

 

In 1905, the University of Southern California, which had been founded with the support of the Methodist Church 25 years earlier, had President George Finley Bovard, brother of USC’s first president Marion Bovard, at the helm. The university’s physics department, adapting to the times and its environment, began offering classes in engineering. Los Angeles was a growing western city in the throes of an oil boom in a nation that was rapidly being electrified. The first courses were Direct Current Principles and Machinery, Alternating Current Theory and Machinery and Dynamo Laboratory. During the same 1905-06 academic year, the mathematics department began a course in surveying.

 

The Dynamo Laboratory

The first engineering professor, John B. Johnson, was hired in 1908, the same year that USC awarded its first engineering degree, a B.S. in civil engineering, to Omar R. Turney. The recipient of the first USC electrical engineering degree was Austin Byrant Gates, who graduated in 1911. In 1921, USC awarded its first mechanical engineering degree and its first master’s degree in chemical engineering. Oddly, USC had yet to grant a single B.S. in chemical engineering. The first degree in architectural engineering was in 1926 and the first petroleum engineering degree was not awarded until 1927. By that year, USC had awarded 254 engineeringmdegrees, mostly bachelor’s degrees in civil and electrical engineering.

 

The year 1927 was a milestone in another respect. Two decades after USC offered its first engineering courses, it established a separate College of Engineering with five departments — chemical, civil, electrical, mechanical and petroleum engineering.

 

Professor Philip S. Biegler, chair of the electrical engineering department, became USC’s first dean of engineering. Under Biegler’s leadership, the new College of Engineering moved from the “Red Barn,” a temporary structure put up during World War I, to headquarters in Bridge Hall. Biegler began laying a foundation for further growth by recruiting a number of excellent teachers and expanding into the new Petroleum and Chemical Engineering Building. One of the recruits was alumnus Robert E. Vivian (BS CHE ’17), who arrived in 1937 to teach chemical engineering. He found USC engineering’s physical resources to be unimpressive and the Master of Science was the highest engineering degree awarded.

 

Dean Philip S. Biegler

“The electrical engineering department was still in the same basement laboratory ... where I had taken courses in 1917-18,”Vivian wrote in his memoir, The USC Engineering Story, “and as far as I could tell, the equipment was the same as I had used then.... It is safe to say that all the equipment of the College of Engineering, including the few surveying transits and levels and drafting tables, could have been purchased for $10,000.”

At the time, the college had 10 full-time faculty, one secretary and 230 students. “In spite of the lack of equipment and small budgets,” Vivian wrote, “there was optimism, initiative, cheerfulness and a willingness to work hard on the part of faculty and students. These are the elements which make progress possible.”

 

 

And progress continued. USC’s first Ph.D. in engineering was awarded in 1939 to one of Vivian’s chemical engineering students. The college completed its first building, the 28,000-square-foot Engineering Building (now Biegler Hall). The building cost $86,000, an extraordinary bargain even for 1940, made possible because a USC engineering tradition — close ties with industry — was active even then. A member of the school’s Engineering Advisory Council, a contractor and close friend of a USC alumnus, had agreed to build the new building at cost.

 

Dean Robert E. Vivian

In 1940, Vivian became acting dean, an appointment that was made permanent in 1942, and he presided over nearly two decades of solid growth. He can be   credited with starting an upward trajectory that is still accelerating today. When Vivian took office, USC engineering was devoted almost exclusively to teaching.

 

“You should leave the research to Caltech,” a trustee bluntly told Vivian at one point. World War II changed that.

The Engineering Building was the first permanent building containing all engineering departments. Completed in 1940, it was later renamed Biegler Hall

 

 

During the war, USC engineering’s growth continued to be mainly in teaching. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, USC became a major center for the Engineering Science and Management War Training Program, fulfilling the war industry’s burgeoning need for technically trained managers and supervisory personnel. Some 50,000 students swarmed through the program, the largest single-campus effort of its kind in the country. Simultaneously, the college was giving naval officers crash courses in various engineering disciplines. Engineering teachers put in 12 to 14-hour days. Almost no graduate degrees were awarded during the war as students went immediately into the military or the war industry upon graduation, or even before graduation.

 

After the war, the college’s proficiency and efficiency in teaching advanced-level engineering led to another notable industrial collaboration that continues to this day. Hughes Aircraft Co. contracted with USC to offer master’s-level instruction to its engineers under what was called the Cooperative Engineering Program. Hughes employees received tuition, books and flexible work hours, enabling them to get advanced degrees.

 

The activity that would become a prime driver of USC engineering’s expansion in the ’50s and ’60s — defense research — began in the war years. The first research contract, in 1944, was for $10,000 from Lockheed Aircraft to study spot-welding aluminum alloy.

 

Continued defense spending on technology and a flood of veterans using GI Bill benefits to build careers in engineering, transformed the school into a major center for the development of new engineering science and technology.

 

By 1948, the College of Engineering had 100 graduate students. A decade later, in 1950, the count had quadrupled to 400 in the renamed “School of Engineering.” For USC’s Diamond Jubilee 75th anniversary celebration in 1955, Vivian was able to boast that the school had “graduated 5,000 engineers, 4,200 of them since 1940. They worked for more than 600 companies. Ninety-four were presidents, vice presidents or chief engineers of companies in this country.”

 

 

Vivian retired in 1958, one year after USC’s first computer, the gift of an alumnus, had been installed in Biegler Hall. That same year, Zohrab Kaprielian joined the engineering faculty.While Alfred C. Ingersoll became dean in 1960, it would be Kaprielian who, over the next decade, transformed the school into a major research institution.

 

Dean Alfred C. Ingersoll

Kaprielian had an uncanny ability to communicate his vision to others. Between 1958 and 1963, though remaining a professor, he behaved as a department chair and succeeded in recruiting a number of researchers from Bell Laboratories and other strong research institutions. George Bekey, who was recruited in 1962 to start programs in computers, controls and biomedical engineering, recalls how Kaprielian interviewed him. “He was not the chair of the electrical engineering department, but he was clearly in charge. What I recall most was his vision of the future of the School, his vehemence and his commitment to its future.

 

“Most of us who came to USC in those early years were convinced by the force of Kaprielian’s personality, and not because of anything we saw when we came for interviews.”

 

Perhaps Kaprielian’s greatest moment came when he did become chair of electrical engineering. During this period in the 1960s, he worked to persuade the Department of Defense to award USC one of the coveted Joint Services Electronics Programs. The problem was that he did not have sufficient faculty to do the work. So Kaprielian took the possibility of this award to USC President Norman Topping and obtained authorization for 10 new faculty positions.

 

By 1965, the graduate school of engineering had grown to one of the largest in the country with more than 2,000 students, including many from abroad. It ranked only behind MIT in numbers of M.S. degrees awarded, many of them attributable to the Hughes outreach degree program. Today, the USC Viterbi School is first in the country in the number of M.S. degrees awarded.

 

In 1968, electrical engineering professor Jack Munushian, who had become friends with Kaprielian when they were both graduate students at UC Berkeley, expanded this successful industrial outreach to a new medium for instruction — television. By broadcasting lectures via closed-circuit television into the corporate offices of Hughes and other companies, it became easier than ever to complete class work. Students at the remote sites could even ask questions, thanks to an innovative two-way hookup. The Instructional Television Network (ITV), decades ahead of its time in 1970, was the precursor to today’s Distance Education Network, which has distance education’s most advanced high-speed Internet interface.

 

In the same period, the engineering school began to attract, and retain, faculty of great distinction. Between 1960 and 1970, 12 young faculty, who

Dean Zohrab Kaprielian

were eventually elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering, joined the school. They were communications specialists Solomon W. Golomb (1963), Irving S. Reed (1963), Lloyd Welch (1965) and William Lindsey (1968); aeronautics experts John Laufer (1964), Hsien Cheng (1964), Tony Maxworthy (1967) and E. Phillip Muntz (1969); laser specialist Robert Hellwarth (1970, also a member of the National Academy of Sciences); the late biomathematician Richard Bellman (1965); roboticist George Bekey (1962); and future dean and electrical engineer, Leonard M. Silverman (1968). Meanwhile, the school introduced new departments — aerospace engineering (1964), industrial and systems engineering (1965) and materials science (1965).

 

By the time Ingersoll retired in 1970, the USC School of Engineering had made major improvements in both quality and quantity. The formal, and inevitable, appointment of Kaprielian as the School’s next dean ushered in a time of reorganization and consolidation. Kaprielian also rose to become senior vice president and provost at almost the same time. Professor Solomon Golomb recalls that at one point around 1970, there were five levels of administration between himself and the president of the university, “and all of them were Zohrab Kaprielian. At that time, we operated on the principle of one man, one vote,” Golomb said, “and Kaprielian was the one man who had the one vote.”

 

Kaprielian built departments by consciously targeting areas where nearby Caltech and UCLA were weak, a strategy that had particular success in electrical engineering, where USC developed great strength in the emerging disciplines of solid-state electronics, communications, signal processing, controls and computer engineering.

 

In 1971-72, Kaprielian reorganized what had been the department of electrical engineering into the separate departments of computer science, biomedical engineering, and two distinct departments of electrical engineering — EE-electrophysics and EE-systems.

 

 

During this period, the reach and scope of engineering research was being immensely broadened. While working for RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, computer scientist Keith Uncapher devised and sold to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency an ambitious plan for a large, sophisticated research agency. The agency would work directly with the Department of Defense in developing short-term solutions to specific military needs. In particular, he was interested in developing a new communications technology of packet switching. That research agency would be called the Information Sciences Institute.

 

“Vietnam was winding down,” Uncapher said, but the legacy of the war had made defense work unwelcome at some academic departments. “ISI

Keith Uncapher

was designed as a bridge between the Department of Defense and academia.”

 

Kaprielian moved with his customary decisiveness to bring ISI to USC, though not to the University Park Campus. A location in Marina del Rey was selected due to the need for far more space than USC had available.

 

Uncapher had almost immediate success in turning ISI into a national center for computer studies, attracting many of the most creative minds working in computer science. It was one of the birthplaces of the Internet, owing to the work of researchers like Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris and others. Its innovative MOSIS facility, which lets researchers across the country create prototype chip designs economically, has been serving all segments of the computer community since 1980.

 

Dean Melvin Gerstein

The USC School of Engineering’s growth in size and sophistication in turn led to a bumper crop of distinguished alumni, including astronaut Neil Armstrong (MSAE ’70), General Norman Schwarzkopf (MS ’64) and Apple Computer co-founder A.C. Markkula (BSEE ’64, MS ’66). Alumni from this era also include numerous executives of major U.S. and foreign technology companies such as Andrew J. Viterbi (Ph.D. EE ’62), co-founder of Qualcomm, and Lily Chiang (BSME ’82) of Hong Kong-based Chen Hsong Holding Co., a multinational producer of specialized machinery.

 

 

Following Kaprielian’s untimely death from a heart attack in 1981, associate dean Melvin Gerstein was appointed interim dean while a major nationwide search for a new dean was underway. Ultimately, the search converged on an internal candidate — Leonard M. Silverman, then chairman of the EE-systems department. He was appointed to lead the School in 1984. “Dean Silverman’s great strength has been his ability to provide strategic directions for the School and then move decisively to implement them,” said, President Steven B. Sample.

 

When the 44-year-old Silverman, a mathematical theorist and electrical engineer, became USC’s chief engineer, the old Soviet Union was still intact

Dean Leonard M. Silverman

and the Cold War was very much alive. Aerospace was still a big and expanding business in Southern California.Mortgage interest rates were well into the double digits, and USC’s football team had just beaten Ohio State 18-6 in the Rose Bowl. Few people owned personal computers, but if they did, they probably had 64K of memory and an operating system called CP/M.Microsoft, not yet a public corporation, was hard at work on the first release of Windows. A lonely band of researchers, including some from ISI, were working out protocols for a promising way to route electronic messages over a little known computer network called DARPANET, a network based on packet switching technology.

 

“I made the appointment of Len Silverman as dean of engineering,” said the late Cornelius J. Pings, former USC provost. “I regard it as one of the best decisions I made.”

 

Silverman recalls that his first priority was space. A defense buildup was in full swing, but in order for the School to fully participate, it had to have room to grow. So Silverman revitalized the School’s development effort, which had only a single fundraiser when he arrived.

 

He personally reached out to allies in the industry which led to the Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Building in 1990. Additional square footage became available in 1989 with the opening of Kaprielian Hall, which included a well-equipped structural engineering laboratory in its basement and the Robert Glenn Rapp Engineering Research Laboratory. Altogether, in the five-year period after his appointment, the School of Engineering raised $60 million. Silverman added nearly 90,000 square feet, doubling what the School had when he started.

 

Silverman also moved quickly to improve and diversify activities going on within these buildings. One target was undergraduate education. In 1989, after making some changes, the School embarked on a systematic, multi-part effort to improve offerings below the graduate level.

 

Silverman said he was always “attempting to build on strengths,” and followed Kaprielian’s model of bolstering areas where local rivals Caltech and the UC campuses — UCLA, UCI and UCSD — were not focused.

 

Two major initiatives began in 1985 that would shift USC engineering in a new, non-defense direction. One was the Biomedical Simulations Resource. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, it is a unique and pioneering application of an established engineering technique — modeling — to the medical field. The BMSR continues today and is the longest running NIH program at the University Park Campus.

 

Equally important was a center for the study of photonics — devices designed to use light, rather than electrons, as the medium for information transmission and processing. The Center for Photonics Technology started as a USC organized research unit. The idea was to develop it into something that could achieve recognition and funding as a U.S. government designated research center.

 

The key faculty member was P. Daniel Dapkus, who found Silverman’s door open. “I remember approaching him with Professor Armand Tanguay to describe the concept of a directed effort in photonics that was circulating among a few members of the faculty and that built on existing faculty strengths,” Dapkus recollects. “He was enthusiastic and supportive and immediately grasped the importance of the field and of acting fast.”

 

As a result, Dapkus recalled, “When we approached him with quality faculty candidates, he provided the startup funds necessary to attract additional high quality people and things took off from there.” The USC Photonics Center became the DARPA-funded National Center for Integrated Photonics Technology (NCIPT) in 1992.

 

And as the program developed, Silverman led an effort to acquire funds to build a clean room fabrication facility that resulted in the construction of the W.M. Keck Photonics Research Laboratory. The lab is a centerpiece of the photonics effort which now serves all of USC with stateof- the-art research device fabrication facilities.

 

Near the end of his long tenure as dean, Silverman tapped Merwyn C. Gill (BS ’37), universally known as “M.C.,” for a $7 million gift that named the Merwyn C. Gill Foundation Composites Center. Gill, a Pasadena industrialist, had once planned to go into the oil business. Instead, he started his own company in his garage and built the M.C. Gill Corp. into the world’s largest manufacturer of aircraft baggage compartment liners and one of the largest manufacturers of composites. A longtime avid fan of all things Trojan, Gill, a member of the Board of Councilors, continues as an enthusiastic Engineering supporter.

 

Merwyn C. Gill

The move toward diversification from a heavily aerospace industry dependent department helped the USC School of Engineering weather one of its most challenging periods. Historically, USC had received major support from tuition paid by aerospace companies for advanced education of their employees through the innovative Instructional Television Network (ITV). With the fall-off in defense spending at the end of the Cold War, this revenue dried up and harsh decisions had to be made.

 

“I think Len masterfully guided the ship through some very rough times in the early 90s,” said Alan Willner, a specialist in photonics.

 

Silverman managed to make the required savings through attrition, while still recruiting promising junior faculty even through the worst of the slowdown. The number of faculty members in the School declined from 160 to 136, but USC assistant professors were at the very top of the charts in winning Young Investigator and other special incentive awards for junior faculty.

 

Silverman also continued to look for new directions. The School successfully sought money from government to retrain laid-off aerospace engineers to work in other specialties including civil engineering and multimedia. It sought and won funding for work in civilian areas including transportation and manufacturing.

 

In 1991, USC established the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology to research a range of topics in the post-Cold War economy. Earlier, in 1987, Silverman established a graduate program in systems engineering under the leadership of National Academy of Engineering member Eberhardt Rechtin. This program continues to flourish today.

 

Silverman hired another National Academy of Engineering academician, F. Stan Settles, to take over and revitalize the department of industrial and systems engineering. While Settles had a distinguished record in industry, he did not have the usual academic credentials. Settles recollected, “Len brought me in with tenure, as a full professor. I think it took guts to back the appointment of someone without the traditional research track record.”

 

But it was multimedia, under the leadership of C. L.Max Nikias, which became a signature of Silverman’s deanship and a springboard for greatness for USC engineering. The competition for the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in multimedia and Internet technologies was intense, with Berkeley, Columbia and dozens of other engineering schools energetically trying to win the prize.

 

Ronald Tutor

Nikias persevered and the result was a big win for USC, one that made front-page news in the Los Angeles Times. Nor was the success isolated, for it was followed by a series of major coups — the Institute for Creative Technologies, the BioMimetic MicroElectronic Systems (Center) and the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, all of which built on the resources of both IMSC and ISI. The department of biomedical engineering also became the base for the $112 million Alfred E. Mann donation to establish an institute which would include numerous new biomedical faculty.

 

Additional triumphs in fundraising included a $10 million gift in 1997 from trustee Ronald Tutor for what was then to

Jim Baum

be called the Engineering Academic Center. This center, which would later be re-named Ronald Tutor Hall, would be a building project that spanned two deanships, and Tutor’s construction company, Tutor-Saliba Corp., would complete the building in 2005.

 

In 2000, another $2.5 million gift came from the Baum family to name the Baum Student Center, a student study and meeting room within Tutor Hall. It had been the late Dwight C. “Bill” Baum, a long-time supporter of the School, who first proposed the idea of building a student center. His son and current Board of Councilors Chairman, Dwight C. “Jim” Baum, worked with two deans to fulfill the dream.

 

After 18 years at the helm, Silverman decided to step down. Once again, a national search was launched and a strong internal candidate emerged. In retrospect, it almost seemed that the national search was a waste of time, so strong were the attributes of the choice for the next engineering dean, C. L.Max Nikias.

 

Although he would be dean for just four years, the shortest tenure of all the USC engineering deans except for those who served in an interim capacity, he had a huge impact on USC engineering. Nikias was quick to point out that he took over “an excellent engineering school.”

 

“I feel we have an extraordinary opportunity to move into that top group of the nation’s great engineering schools,” he said at the beginning of this tenure.

 

Much like Silverman was confronted with the end of the Cold War, Nikias faced a sudden unexpected challenge when the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 triggered an atmosphere of economic uncertainty. It also quickly brought tighter visa procedures for international students attending American universities. This had great impact at USC, long one of the top academic destinations for such students.

 

Nikias declared a six-month budget freeze and undertook a reorganization of the School. He reduced administration to redirect resources to faculty and at the same time made a significant investment in new communications and development staff. He leveraged ISI’s technical acumen to transform ITV almost overnight from a TV-based delivery system to an innovative, high-speed Internet based delivery system that was renamed the Distance Education Network (DEN). DEN quickly became, and continues to be, the largest e-learning operation in graduate engineering education.

 

C.L. Max Nikias

The budget freeze worked. At the end of six months, the School’s reserves were healthy enough to support several new faculty hires. Spectacular enrollment growth in graduate programs, led by DEN, provided new resources. Nikias rewarded existing faculty with a one-time salary adjustment and a year-end raise averaging about nine percent.

 

Nikias viewed nurturing and hiring top-notch faculty as the key to greatness. He outlined his thinking in what he called a “positive feedback loop.” It boiled down to a familiar USC dictum — “building on excellence.”

 

It works this way: In an academic body, great faculty does great and important research, raising the school’s reputation. As reputation improves, higher-quality students seek admission and when they graduate, those students attract superior employment offers, both in industry and academe. When friends and alumni of the school notice the climb in quality of faculty and students, they increase their support, as do government agencies, foundations and corporations. Resources pour in and the school is able to attract more top faculty, thereby attracting even higher quality students, and so on in an upward spiral of success.

 

This was more than just a theory. Nikias made it work.

 

The Nikias approach to recruiting faculty was a little unconventional, but it was effective.

 

“We don’t have openings; I don’t allocate positions,” he said. “We identify critical areas where we want to recruit faculty and then I authorize searches in those areas. If no top-notch hire materialized in the search, the job evaporated.” The three critical areas were information technology, biomedical technology and nanotechnology, and Nikias launched initiatives in all of them. All three areas were interdisciplinary, vital to the economy of the 21st century and related to the four critical pathways outlined in USC’s strategic plan at the time (communications, life sciences, the arts and the urban paradigm).

 

Whenever faculty candidates came to campus, Nikias found time to personally interview every single one of them. He pushed hard to find underrepresented minorities and women, getting support from USC’s unique Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program to help put together attractive start-up packages for female faculty.

 

In h

Daniel J. Epstein

is first two years, he hired 26 tenured or tenure-track faculty, including bonafide superstars like biomedical engineering professor K. Kirk Shung, perhaps the world’s foremost ultrasound researcher, and a trio of renowned supercomputing heavyweights — Priya Vashishta, Rajiv Kalia and Aiichiro Nakano. The latter three all had appointments in the USC College, for Nikias had long been an active USC collaborator. He hired promising younger faculty like computer scientist and cybersecurity specialist Leana Golubchik and musician and operations researcher Elaine Chew.

 

The drive for quality faculty was not confined to tenured and tenuretrack faculty. For every one of those, he added two new research professors, adjuncts or lecturers. They included multimedia whiz Paul Debevec, who created the special effects technology used in the movie Matrix; Laura Marcu, a top researcher in molecular imaging; Ann Chervenak, a grid computing specialist; and Jennifer Swift, an expert in earthquake engineering.

 

The energetic dean moved swiftly on the fundraising front as well. Though an ambitious seven-year initiative with the goal of raising $300 million was not announced until the fall of 2003, it actually began the day Nikias became dean, if not before.

Mark Stevens

John Mork

The first major gift, $10 million, came from Daniel J. Epstein (BSISE ’62), a USC Trustee and San Diego real estate entrepreneur who named the department from which he received his degree, The Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

 

Mark Stevens (BSEE ’81, MS CENG ’84), also a USC Trustee and a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and his wife Mary stepped forward with $22 million to start the Mark and Mary Stevens Institute for Technology Commercialization (SITeC). The institute was created to stimulate USC’s technology transfer efforts and to provide students with a solid grounding in technology issues.

 

John Mork (BSPE ’70), an energy entrepreneur, his wife Julie and their family donated $15 million to name the newly merged Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science.

 

But the crowning fundraising achievement and the high point of the Nikias deanship, as well as a milestone in the School’s 99 year history, came on March 2, 2004 when Andrew and Erna Viterbi gave $52 million to name the School the USC Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering.While the monetary gift was the largest ever to name an existing engineering school, the Viterbi name was priceless.

 

“The gift by the Viterbis will be a powerful catalyst for bold research and innovation and will forever associate USC’s en

Andrew Viterbi

gineering school with one of the most illustrious names in the history of engineering,” said President Sample the day of the announcement. Viterbi, who received his electrical engineering Ph.D. from USC in 1962, is a USC trustee, the co-founder of Qualcomm and the creator of the Viterbi Algorithm, which is embedded in almost every cell phone in the world.

 

Another significant triumph for the School occurred on Feb. 2, 2005 with the opening and dedication of the $50 million Ronald Tutor Hall. With 103,000 square feet for research labs, classrooms and student activities, as well as a café, it quickly became the new heart of the Viterbi School.

 

In four years, Nikias would raise almost $200 million for the Viterbi School and depart with great momentum toward completing the fundraising initiative. The USC campus grew to expect big gift announcements from engineering, all accompanied by much fanfare — balloons, banners, blaring trumpets from the Trojan Marching Band and confetti cannons. But fundraising was not the only triumph.

 

In October 2003, the School won its second National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center (ERC), with $17 million in funding for the Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems (BMES). The center is a collaboration with the Keck School of Medicine at USC to develop biologically-inspired implantable microdevices designed to replace damaged or diseased parts of the human body. With this center, the Viterbi School became one of only four schools with two active NSF ERCs.

 

A month later, in collaboration with the USC School of Policy, Planning and Development, the School was chosen as the home for the first Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence. So while 9/11 brought challenges, it also brought opportunities that Nikias had been quick to recognize. The $12 million center would be known as the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events.

 

(left to right) Presdient Sample. Erna and Andrew Viterbi and Dean Nikias at the School naming in March 2004

The competition for both of these centers was intense. There were 71 competing proposals for the homeland security center and USC not only won the competition, but it was a partner on the second homeland security center when it was awarded to Texas A&M in April of 2004. The NSF said that USC’s BMES proposal was one of the best it had ever received for an ERC.

 

Many other faculty were also successful in attracting research grants so that the Viterbi School is now consistently ranked at or near the top among

The dedication of Tutor Hall in February 2005.

engineering schools in the amount of research expenditures per tenured faculty.

 

When Nikias became dean, he reached out to industry, forging new partnerships. This resulted in the Center for Interactive Smart Oilfield Technologies (CiSoft), established by Chevron; the Pratt & Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering; and the Aerospace Institute for Engineering, funded by Airbus.

 

He also reached out across the world, beginning relationships with the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Tsinghua University in Beijing and Inha University in Incheon.

 

During the presidency of Steven Sample, the quality of undergraduates seeking admission to USC began going up, slowly at first, but steadily gaining momentum so that by the time Nikias became dean, USC was competing for top students with universities like UC Berkeley, UCLA and Stanford. Recently, Sample has been noting in speeches that USC’s freshmen have a higher SAT average than Berkeley’s. The Viterbi School has been leading USC’s dramatic rise with incoming Viterbi freshmen averaging an SAT score of 1388 during the past two years — strong evidence that Nikias’ positive feedback loop was not only working, but crackling with energy.

 

Senior associate dean for academic affairs, Yannis Yortsos led an aggressive effort to revamp the curriculum for the challenges of the 21st century, particularly concentrating on engineering education’s most challenging area — retention. About 45% of students who start out in engineering fail to receive an engineering degree with many switching to other majors, especially during their freshman or sophomore years.

 

Some of the inventive changes to the curriculum included freshmen academies where students heard from working engineers to gain insight on how engineers affect society, technology, history and politics. The Viterbi School added a course in biology for engineers to the traditional mix of physics, chemistry and mathematics.

 

The number of minors available expanded and now includes 3D animation, astronautical engineering, interactive multimedia, law and Internet technology, petroleum engineering, environmental engineering, technology commercialization, video game design and management, video game programming, music technology, web technology and applications, engineering management and construction planning and management.

 

So well was the Viterbi School doing under Nikias’ stewardship, it surprised no one when Sample tapped him for USC Provost to replace Lloyd Armstrong, Jr. On June 1, 2005, when Nikias assumed the office of USC Provost, Yannis C. Yortsos became dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

 

Dean Yannis C. Yortsos

“Although this appointment is for an interim period, it is still one of great responsibility and challenge. Leading the Viterbi School, particularly after Max’s spectacular tenure, is a non-trivial task,” said Yortsos on the day he became dean. “My goal is to deliver to the next dean a School even more vibrant and promising than I received it. To this end, I will devote all my energies.”

 

The School continues to build upon the foundation of the last 100 years while looking ahead to the next great research revolutions. As its history demonstrates, the journey has been one of incredible leadership, agility, accomplishments and growth. In looking at the technological innovations of the 20th century, it is clear that one cannot even imagine what engineers will create in the 21st. But one thing is certain. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering will continue to be a leader, blazing a path toward that mind-boggling tomorrow.