Last year at this time I welcomed our AE Newsletter readers to the Year 2000.   In deference to my primarily engineering audience, I was careful last year to avoid welcoming everyone to the new millennium, which technically started on January 1, 2001.  Now that I am at liberty to do so, please let me welcome you all to the new century and to the new millennium!

We start this new century and new millennium with much energy, enthusiasm and activity in the AE Department.  Four new faculty members started in AE this academic year (Dr. Jelena Srebric in Mechanical Systems; Drs. Michael Horman, John Messner and David Riley in Construction Management); and three new professional staff members were added to the Facilities Engineering Institute (Messrs. Tim Russell, David Thompson, and Jason Szotak).  Ms. Marie Fleming (soon to be Dr. Marie Fleming) from New Zealand will be joining our lighting area faculty this coming August.  Ms. Sue Poremba and Ms. Kathy Pennebaker are valued new members of our support staff.  We are now back up to “full strength,” and will, in fact, be increasing our faculty ranks with some newly authorized faculty and staff hiring opportunities.  Our increasing faculty and staff strength will allow us to maintain our solid undergraduate reputation while developing selected areas of research and development excellence in our externally funded graduate program.  It will be challenging to accomplish all of this, but I am certain we will succeed.

It is interesting and exciting for Penn State AE to be in a leadership position in the growing academic and professional architectural engineering discipline.  Your continued support and encouragement will be instrumental in enabling this department to maximize its contributions to the architectural engineering discipline and to our society.  Thank you.

Best wishes to you and your families.

Yours truly,

Richard A. Behr, Ph.D., P.E.
Department Head