The Steering Committee has come to consensus on a framework for the strategic plan that identifies four overarching goals and three cross-cutting topics.

Overarching goals

A Powerful Engine for Public Good

The College’s commitment and obligation to create impact that improves lives, communities, and our planet.

A Distinctive Research Agenda Recognized Worldwide

The College’s particular responsibility to produce research that is locally responsive and, where possible, scale it to become globally relevant.

Increase and Diversify CoE’s Partnerships

Boundary-crossing—among traditional disciplinary lines as well as among the College and the public, private, and nonprofit sectors—that remains a core element of the College’s culture.

Strong and Sustainable Financial, Human and Physical Resources

To provide value to the people of Washington State and others who benefit from innovative engineering solutions—and to achieve the goals of this strategic plan, the College of Engineering must have:

• A stable and sustainable foundation of financial, human, and physical resources
• Supportive College and University policies and processes
• Collegiality and common cause as a College that allows CoE to project a clear and beneficial identity to the outside world

Cross-cutting topics

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

• A College environment that is welcoming and supportive for students, faculty, and staff of diverse backgrounds and experiences
• Teaching, research, and service that directly address the challenges to being a diverse nation that is also inclusive and equitable
• Research and teaching that examine disparate impacts on people as a result of race, gender, disability, economic status, and other facets of human difference

Innovative Engineering Education

Curricula, pedagogies, mentorship, and advisement at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral levels that produce engineers with a strong commitment to the public good who are prepared to address the grand challenges of this century and the next.

Technology Translation and Entrepreneurship

Putting CoE discoveries, inventions, and solutions into practice quickly and with demonstrable impact and creating a mindset attuned to such translation via traditional and non-traditional avenues.

Seven subcommittees composed of faculty, staff, students, and external partners have been formed to recommend specific strategies and initiatives that CoE can undertake on the ground to address these goals and topics. The subcommittees are charged to identify aspirational, ambitious and, ideally, distinctively CoE/UW strategies and initiatives that will move CoE demonstrably closer to achieving the given goal or topic.