An Inside Look at Duke Engineering

State of the School 2025

Update from the Dean

Spring is commonly celebrated throughout the world as the season of renewal. But for me, the season of renewal has always been fall. With the return of students to campus who arrive filled with excitement and wonder at what the coming months might bring, I get swept up in their enthusiasm as we head into a new academic year that is full of promise and opportunity.

For Duke Engineering, this fall is an especially poignant time for this sentiment. Over the past two years, our faculty and staff have been reflecting on how our school can best fulfill its overarching mission of knowledge in service to society over the coming decades. To this end, we have developed an ambitious and thought-provoking Strategic Vision. Informed by our emerging strengths and a rapidly changing landscape due to the forces of technology, it is a bold look into the future of engineering and its essential role in solving some of our society’s most complex challenges —one that we look forward to sharing with all of you in the coming year.

I am confident that even our most intrepid goals will be realized because of the incredible talent, brilliance, and hard work that our faculty, staff, and students are globally known for. If you need proof of what we are capable of, look no further than some of the recent accomplishments of our students.

Informed by our emerging strengths and a rapidly changing landscape due to the forces of technology, [our Strategic Vision] is a bold look into the future of engineering and its essential role in solving some of our society’s most complex challenges.
Jerome Lynch Vinik Dean of Engineering

One group of recent seniors saw promise in a construction site scheduling service they originally built years earlier during their First-Year Design class. Leveraging entrepreneurial support from our Christensen Family Center for Innovation and experience with cutting-edge AI gained from their classes, they launched a startup called QuikCal that was acquired by an industry leader before the students even graduated.

Another group of seniors working in their mechanical engineering capstone design class built a responsive manikin for training parents how to perform CPR on their infants. Their design was so successful that Duke Hospital requested several more, showcasing the power of teaching engineering design throughout our curriculum with real-world clients.

Little girl giving CPR to manikin baby. — *A team of undergrads took on the challenge of designing a responsive CPR training manikin for their MEMS senior design capstone.*

And leveraging our long-standing close collaboration (and proximity) with the Duke University School of Medicine, members of our BME Design Fellows course built a screening tool for hearing loss in children. Low-cost, affordable and easy to use, the device could help prevent 75% of the hearing loss suffered by children in underserved communities around the world due to ear infections.

These are just a few examples of the many stories that speak to the power of a Duke Engineering education. Through our focus on real projects that make a real impact for real people, our students build the technical know-how and soft skills required to transform brilliant ideas into practical solutions. They also reaffirm our unwavering commitment to serving the greater good of society.

Educational Initiatives

As technology and society around the world continue to evolve, so must our best-in-class educational programs. Along with the ability to embrace emerging fields such as genetic engineering, robotics, machine learning, neural implants, and sustainable materials, we are also focusing on training engineering leaders with the ethical and philosophical savvy required to implement solutions that will benefit all.

One of the programs I am proudest to see flourishing is our Character Forward initiative. Led by Prof. Rich Eva, the program is working to help our faculty embed ethical lessons and considerations within even their most technically minded courses. With several success stories already well in hand, this initiative will be even further bolstered in the coming year with the addition of Retired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. Formerly the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, Brown will undoubtedly bring an incredible array of experience and knowledge as he helps develop and teach modules in the Character Forward program.

Along with the ability to embrace emerging fields such as genetic engineering, robotics, machine learning, neural implants, and sustainable materials, we are also focusing on training engineering leaders with the ethical and philosophical savvy required to implement solutions that will benefit all.
Jerome Lynch Vinik Dean of Engineering

Duke Engineering is also working quickly to become a leader in the exploding field of AI; not just in teaching our students how to build it, but integrating this powerful technology into our curriculum. Our Center for Research & Engineering of AI Technology in Education (CREATE) is engaging students at every level in the AI revolution while also pursuing efforts such as building customized large language models around critical lesson plans to enhance student learning.

This semester, we are also excited to launch our new Master of Engineering in Robotics and Autonomy program. Led by Prof. Siobhan Oca, the program provides students with a solid foundation to immediately enter industry positions as full-stack roboticists, even if they have little or no previous experience with robotics. We are also leveraging our historical strength in using computational approaches to design futuristic materials by piloting a new Master of Engineering for AI Materials program.

A four-legged, white, dog-like robot walks through four different terrains. — *A new Duke-developed AI system fuses vision, vibrations, touch and its own body states to help robots understand and move through difficult in-the-wild environments.*

Research Advances

One measure of the success of a research endeavor is how much its results make an impact, either within its field or out in society. But to make such a real-world impact, our faculty must partner with industry to translate their findings into products. That is why I am excited about recent strides being made by our NSF Engineering Research Center for Precision Microbiome Engineering (PreMiEr) and our NSF AI Institute for Edge Computing Leveraging Next Generation Networks (Athena).

PreMiEr is our multi-institutional effort to understand and engineer the microbial communities that coinhabit the built environment in which we live, work and play. This summer, representatives from Novonesis, Illumina, PacBio, Nexilico and others gathered on campus to engage with the transformative technologies being developed by our efforts. Similarly, Athena hosted a summit for industry and government partners to showcase the progress it has made in on-device AI systems, which promises incredible benefits such as faster computational times paired with energy efficiency and cost effectiveness.

One measure of the success of a research endeavor is how much its results make an impact, either within its field or out in society. But to make such a real-world impact, our faculty must partner with industry to translate their findings into products.
Jerome Lynch Vinik Dean of Engineering

Over the past year, I have also been excited to see positive results from our own in-house seed grant program called Beyond the Horizon that supports highly interdisciplinary, potentially transformative research. Two projects from our initial cohort have secured follow-on funding to build on their promising early work. One is investigating biological condensates, like drops of oil forming in water, to engineer new therapeutics, while the other is engineering new hardware to make AI applications more power efficient.

We have also been celebrating several high-profile awards for some of our up-and-coming young faculty stars. Two won prestigious NSF CAREER awards, which are five-year grants given to outstanding early-career faculty to build their research enterprises. Prof. Tingjun Chen’s award will help him study the performance of sending analog radio waves directly across fiber-optic cables, which might help telecommunications infrastructure meet rising data needs. And Prof. John Hickey’s award will support his work to develop new methods to study how cells in the same environment coordinate and develop into different states.

Last but certainly not least, we’re also celebrating Prof. Amanda Randles winning the inaugural Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature for her work developing “digital twin” technology (check out our conversation about it above). This futuristic approach integrates wearable-informed computational models to provide personalized insights into health care decisions. Bringing together faculty from across the school mixing computational modeling with health care, Randles also launched our new Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation this year.

Uplifting Community

With a constant focus on creating knowledge and engineering solutions that benefit all of society, I am pleased to see the continued growth of our Community-Based Innovation program. Touching on every aspect of our integral mission, its efforts help ensure we are strengthening local and global connections through community-engaged research, transformative learning and impactful STEM outreach.

This year, we were proud to welcome a new director for this program, Alisha Brice, who has more than a decade of experience connecting problem-solvers with opportunities to do good for institutions of higher education. None of these efforts would be possible without the generous support of incredible donors, whose support is a shining example of what Duke Engineering can accomplish with strategic partnerships.

Through ongoing contributions to our Engineering Annual Fund, which touches every aspect of our critical mission, we know that we are MADE FOR THIS moment…a time ripe with incredible opportunities to positively impact the world.
Jerome Lynch Vinik Dean of Engineering

In fact, none of the accomplishments celebrated throughout this letter would be possible without your generous support. Through ongoing contributions to our Engineering Annual Fund, which touches every aspect of our critical mission, we know that we are MADE FOR THIS moment…a time ripe with incredible opportunities to positively impact the world.

As part of the Duke-wide MADE FOR THIS campaign, I am also excited to highlight our impending plans to renovate and modernize Hudson Hall. Over the next several years, these efforts will preserve Old Red’s historic legacy while infusing it with some of the best features of our newer engineering facilities, ensuring that Duke Engineering is positioned to lead for decades to come.

To stay up to date on this exciting transformation as well as all of the school’s news throughout the year, be sure to engage with us through our regular newsletters and social media channels. From robot dance competitions to F1-style racecars, you never know what you’ll see “zoom” by when you watch us in action!