Content area
Full Text
An Australian dean wants to overhaul how engineering is taught and practiced.
Elanor Huntington describes her journey to engineering education as "a series of accidents." After earning a bachelor's in physics from the Australian National University 1995, she realized it wasn't the science that she loved so much as using science to help others. Switching to engineering, she pursued quantum optics-a continuation of her research on very stable lasers-and earned a Ph.D. from ANU in 1999. She built lasers that were the progenitors of gravitational wave detectors and went on to work on photon teleportation. In 2011, while at the University of New South Wales, she achieved a major breakthrough in the drive to make quantum computing a reality.
Back at ANU as dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science-the first woman to hold that position-she has shifted her focus from tiny packets of light to the big picture. "I'm really trying to put people back in the center...