Office Hours: A Visit With UW President Mark Emmert

Welcome to the first edition of Office Hours for this Academic Year.  You know, 
last year was a really extraordinary one for the University of Washington.  Our 
faculty, our staff, and our students all performed amazingly well in every part of 
their work.  The University as a whole achieved something it’d never done before.  
We reached the $1 billion mark in total funded research, keeping the University of 
Washington number one among all public universities and number two overall 
against all universities in the nation.  

We had faculty win every key award that you could want to win.  First of all, 
Marshall Horwitz of the School of Medicine won one of the most prestigious 
awards in his field when he was labeled an NIH Pioneer award winner for his 
incredible work in genomics.

Yoky Matsuoko became our new MacArthur Genius award winner for her work 
in Computer Science and Engineering.  Overall it’s been a great year for our 
faculty.

We also had some wonderful team wins this year.  Over in the Business School, 
with the incredible support of the Foster Foundation, we are able to name the 
school for the first time with a $50 million gift - The Michael G. Foster School of 
Business.  Those gifts will support students and faculty and programs and have a 
tremendous impact on our school for years and years to come.  

And then over in oceanography, finally, after more than a dozen years of hard 
work, the commitment and dedication of John Delaney and his team in 
oceanography has allowed us to begin the Neptune Project, winning from the 
National Science Foundation an award that will start this amazing new way to 
understand our oceans.  

Every fall universities are renewed. Their renewal comes in the form of new 
faculty arriving to teach and do research, new undergraduates, many away from 
home for the first time, new graduate students, expanding their educational and 
research horizons with their faculty colleagues. 

And speaking of renewal I’m here in the newly renovated Architecture Hall.  
Architecture Hall was part of the original 1909 Alaska Yukon Pacific Exhibition 
that really established this place as the home of the University of Washington.  
It’s terrific to see this grand, old building brought back to life and ready for the 
architects and construction managers of the future.

So what does this years entering class of students look like?  Well the Freshmen, 
the class of 2011, is indeed a very special class.  There’s 5300 of them all 
together, and they’re extremely well prepared and a very diverse lot.  First of all 
in academic preparation, they have on average a 3.7 GPA and their aggregate 
SAT score is over 1200.  Nearly 50 of them are National Merit Scholars and 
around 250 of them have settled on joining our honors college.  We also have a 
group that’s very interested in science and technology.  About 2,000 of them have 
said they’re interested in either science, engineering, mathematics or some other 
technical field.  And finally, they’re geographically diverse.  While most of them, 
of course, come from the state of Washington, 39 other states are represented all 
together, with heavy representations from Oregon, California and Hawaii.  We’re 
very proud of this class.  I’m excited about what they’re going to do.   

The rest of the entering students are equally impressive.  We have more than 
1,400 students transferring in to fill out our Junior and Senior classes as 
undergraduates.  And we’ve got more than 5,400 Masters and Ph.D. and 
professional students joining them as well.  These students are remarkably well 
prepared.  In fact, what we’ve seen since 2003 is a doubling of the number of NSF 
funded students at the University of Washington, adding 91 in fact this year alone.  
It’s a very impressive group of students and we’re delighted to have them here.  

We’re also welcoming 232 new faculty members this fall.  They’re roots are truly 
global, coming from over 15 countries including, China, Brazil, Australia, Greece, 
Finland, Korea, United Kingdom, Israel, and Germany.  We’re excited to have 
each and every one of them part of the University of Washington.  Let me 
mention just a few of these great, new faculty members.

Andrew Connley, for example joined us from Google, where he developed Sky 
for the Google Earth program we all know so well.  We also had Louise Fraga 
leave Stanford University and join our political science department.  Mark 
Courtney left the University of Chicago to come to us and join our School of 
Social Work and Chris Murray has recently joined us from Harvard University to 
start our new Global Health Metrics Institute.  

This cycle of renewal is one of the things I enjoy most about academic life.  And 
here at the University of Washington it provides us with one more opportunity to 
focus on the things that are most important to us: the transformation of the lives of 
our students and our citizens.  Let’s make sure that this academic year, we do that 
well.  I also hope this year you’ll find time to leave me notes about your thoughts 
and ideas.  You can post one on our message board of just send me an email.  
Enjoy the new year!