When John Lach first told his colleagues that he would be taking the reins of GW’s engineering school, some of them didn’t know the University had one.

He said that gap in knowledge – that people don’t identify GW as an engineering school – is a problem his old institution, the University of Virginia, faced roughly two decades ago with its own engineering program. He said he worked to change the narrative by consulting with companies that hired UVA students to determine what skills they found desirable in UVA graduates.

Almost seven months after taking over as dean, Lach said he will work to create a “unique” brand for the School of Engineering and Applied Science that synthesizes GW’s STEM and non-STEM strengths. He said he wants the engineering school to bolster interdisciplinary programs that connect to GW’s traditional strengths, like politics and international affairs, while improving the school’s diversity and inclusion efforts.

“The thing that drew me to GW in the first place was just tremendous opportunity,” Lach said. “This is a world-class institution and in a very dynamic international city, and I’m a big believer that engineering is going to play an increasingly large role in shaping the future.”

Interdisciplinary work
Lach said that in his first few months, he has met multiple times with individual students, related student organizations and the Engineers’ Council – an umbrella student organization that facilitates interactions between student groups and the student body – to hear their suggestions about how to improve their student experience.

“A lot of my interactions with students too have been through these student groups where they have a passion, they want to achieve something and I meet with them to talk about what their needs are from that,” he said.

Lach said he met a senior at a lunch with students who told him she wanted to be a leader in transportation engineering, which she believed required her to study other topics than those in traditional engineering courses.

She enrolled in courses related to urban planning and social justice offered in other schools outside of SEAS, but Lach said she faced difficulties petitioning the school to count the courses toward her already-established major requirements.

He said he wants to make changes to the school to encourage students like her to add cross-disciplinary coursework to their schedules and to press SEAS students to experiment outside of the school.

“We should say, ‘Here are those courses,’” he said. “And we should say, ‘And they’ll count, and here’s how they’ll count.’”

Lach said he hopes SEAS can become an “outward-facing” engineering school that is more closely integrated with other schools and professional organizations across D.C.

He said the greater integration between SEAS and other schools may lead to opportunities to meet University President Thomas LeBlanc’s goal of increasing the share of STEM students to 30 percent of the undergraduate body without removing the students from schools that tilt heavily in favor of the liberal arts, like the Elliott School of International Affairs.

“That’s right in line with what I saw as the best opportunity for engineering at GW going forward, and it also is in line with my own personal interests,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in interdisciplinary education and research.”

Lach said he has taken “a lot of time” interacting with the deans of some of GW’s other schools to look for opportunities for a bridge between STEM and non-STEM disciplines. He said he asked for one-on-one meetings with as many current deans as possible during his interview as a finalist for the dean position to plan for possible partnerships.

He said one of his most “vivid” memories during that process was his meeting with Reuben Brigety, the outgoing dean of the Elliott School, about ways for engineering and international affairs students and faculty to collaborate on refugee-related issues.

He and Brigety discussed how international affairs students can apply their knowledge of the problems refugees face to temper the solutions engineering students are able to devise for the problems they anticipate that refugees encounter.

“If it’s engineers who are building those technologies without understanding what the real issues are that the refugees are facing – the political, social, health lives, all of that – we’re going to be creating technical solutions to problems that don’t exist or are our misunderstanding of the problems,” Lach said.

He said one of the responsibilities SEAS officials should take on is to make its courses more accessible for non-STEM students that may lack the quantitative background needed to succeed in STEM coursework.

He said officials debuted the “CS for All Initiative” earlier this academic year to make computer science and programming more accessible for students who might not have as much familiarity with the fields.

“I think that’ll be a good sort of test run for us of how it is that we need to approach making STEM, making engineering more accessible to others,” Lach said.

Diversity in engineering
Lach said improving the number of female and underrepresented minority faculty and students in SEAS is “one of the most important” questions that officials must confront as an engineering school and as an academic institution.

“I’m a big believer that if we are going to make progress on solving grand societal challenges, not only does it require an interdisciplinary approach, as we’ve been talking about, but it’s going to take just different life perspectives, different lived experiences, brought to the table,” he said.

He said GW shows a lot of promise with respect to gender diversity – the number of female engineering students at GW is about twice the national average – but he is focused on bringing in more female faculty, which he said female engineering students have relayed to him would fix one of their main concerns about the school.

“Having that strength of our undergraduate gender diversity to build on, we’re actually expanding that now to say, ‘Let’s talk about diversity of other types at the undergraduate level,’” he said.

He said he has discussed expanding the reach of the SEAS Center for Women in Engineering to highlight and promote other forms of diversity than gender with Rachelle Heller, the center’s director. The center opened last May to identify and solve problems that women in engineering face and to increase the number of female faculty and students in the school.

“You can have diversity, but you might not have equity and inclusion,” Lach said. “And if people aren’t feeling engaged with our community, then we’re missing out there as well.”

Parth Kotak contributed reporting.