With a new dean, the School of Engineering is working to redefine itself as a research powerhouse, while trying to maintain its focus on its undergraduate education.
Abriola arrived at Tufts this September after leaving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she'd been for 19 years. As the director of the Environmental and Water Resources Engineering Program at Michigan, Abriola garnered several awards, and was the first woman at Michigan to hold a chair in engineering.
Since arriving in the Boston area last August, Abriola has continued to balance her commitments to both Tufts and Michigan, which she flies between every three weeks to work with her former students. "But now, some of my students out there are starting to move here," she said.
Abriola has plenty of praise for the University after her first year.
"I love how Tufts' Arts and Sciences and Engineering schools are so close-knit," she said. "It creates such a balance in the environment."
Over the last few months, Abriola has also been to New Orleans for a national deans' meeting, and to the Duke University School of Engineering for a former Michigan student's Ph.D. defense.
"You do get to travel a lot with this job," she said.
Students, however, expressed that Abriola's extensive travel responsibilities have had an impact on their ability to really connect with the dean.
"We always had so much contact with [former School of Engineering Dean Ioannis Miaoulis]. People came to Tufts just because of him -- he was so active within the student body. Now we have this new person who we don't know at all," senior engineering student Kathryn Wepfer said. "Plus, the whole woodshop thing hasn't helped at all."
Engineering students felt they were not well-informed of Abriola's decision to replace the woodshop with her new water lab this spring.
The Associate Dean of Engineering, Vincent Manno, who served as the interim dean between Miaoulis' departure for the Museum of Science and Abriola's arrival at Tufts, acknowledged Abriola's busy schedule, but said that her first year has gone over well with the faculty.
"She's a really terrific addition to the school, and I think the vast majority of the faculty believes that she is taking things in the right direction," he said.
The direction that Abriola is aiming for is to take the School of Engineering toward a more research-focused environment -- something that was a large part of her time at Michigan, and a direction that the School of Engineering has been heading toward for a long time, according to Manno.
"Research is reflective of the quality of an engineering school, and if you look at the profiles of the various other engineering schools that our students are interested in -- the Cornells and the Browns, and even schools like Duke and Columbia -- you see that research is a large part of the undergraduate program," Manno said.
Abriola's Integrated Multi-Phase Environmental Systems Lab (IMPES) lab, known as the water lab, will be used for evaluating water samples for hazardous chemical, organic and metal contamination.
She agreed to come to Tufts with the condition that the School of Engineering created a space for her to continue her research that she started at Michigan.
Abriola would also like to increase the size of the engineering faculty by 25 percent, and she hopes that the money needed for the growth can be raised during the University's next capital campaign.
"I just think it's important to get the faculty to do more research, and when you have more faculty, you can get more done," she said.
"The engineering school has terrific faculty and students and like most of our schools, needs significant advancements in its research infrastructure," Bharucha said.
Abriola would also like to see the School of Engineering's classroom and research space increase. "I'd like to see that space doubled, but that will certainly have to be a long-term project," she said.
"The problem is that, if we want to keep upgrading our technology and labs, we need space for those. That's the reason why I had to use the [woodshop's] space for the water lab -- there was absolutely no other space for it," she said.
Other plans include forming inter-disciplinary programs between the School of Engineering and Tufts' other graduate schools, incorporating more leadership opportunities into the undergraduate engineering curriculum, and growth in the biotechnology department.
Abriola was not entirely happy at Michigan and when she was notified of the search for an engineering dean at Tufts, she decided to investigate.
"I wasn't looking to be a dean, but rather to just be a professor of engineering at a different school, and I really didn't know much about Tufts at all," Abriola said.
Her first visit to Tufts, in 2003, ended up having a positive impact on her.
"I really like the size, the professors' dedication to teaching, and how all the professional schools have special programs that work together with the undergraduate curriculum," she said. "The president [Larry Bacow] and provost [Jamshed Bharucha] were absolutely amazing. I thought, 'I'd really love to have those guys as my bosses.'"
