Winter 2018 - Letter from Department Head Peter Livingston
A Letter from Department Head Peter Livingston
Hello everyone! I am so pleased to give you a brief update on how our department is doing as the Spring quarter commences. There are 200 bioresource and agricultural engineering majors and 126 agricultural systems management majors enrolled in the department, with 17 students expected to graduate in the winter and an additional 40 students anticipated to graduate in the spring. The department is excited to introduce a major change to our senior design classes this year and we are piloting a group of students who will use BRAE 418/419 and 421/422 as their capstone course. We will follow this up with a 462 course to tie the experiences together. This pilot is being done for several reasons, including the benefit of group projects with multidisciplinary experiences. This also allows for students to take an additional elective class. The capstone projects range from an olive harvester to a trailer that delivers hay from round bales to cattle. Thank you to our industry partners who have provided more than $25,000 in support of the various projects.
Thanks to donor support, we acquired 10 new robotic total stations last year. The state-of-the-art survey tools provide the reliable equipment we needed. I am not saying that Lecturer Tom Mastin does not still have a long wish list, but we have quieted him down for now.
Looking forward, we have plans to renovate and transform our electronics classroom into a multipurpose computing room that will include systems modeling and GIS/GPS big data computation software. This move will allow us to dedicate the downstairs classroom in Lab 4 for use as an electronics and mechatronics work space.
Another recent update is that we are currently searching for three new tenure track faculty: agricultural systems, mechatronics, and process water engineering. We hope to have these new tenure track faculty on campus next fall. If you are interested please contact me at paliving@calpoly.edu.
I am truly thankful for the opportunity to serve as the BioResource and Agricultural Engineering Department’s leader. I am extremely proud to be a Mustang because of the amazing students we provide to our industry partners. It is all about the students!
For more stories, view the rest of the Winter 2018 Newsletter