Envision, then create!

Friday, Jan. 6, 2023

Dedicated students, distinguished colleagues and dear friends,

Happy New Year!

As I prepared this first Friday email of the new year, my thoughts turned to a quote, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that “the most reliable way to predict the future is to create it”!

Whether President Lincoln wrote those words or not, the idea resonates with me, as I’m certain it does with many of our faculty, students, staff, alumni and friends of S&T.

As 2022 drew to a close, I shared my “retro-introspective” of some of what we accomplished over the past 12 months. As we look forward to what 2023 holds for us, I submit that none of the accomplishments of the past year happened by chance. Thanks to the efforts of our students, faculty and staff, each was the result of a focused vision, thoughtful planning, and careful implementation by bringing together all the necessary resources and capabilities. Whether the accomplishment was a new grant awarded to a faculty member, national recognition of our student teams, or international recognition of our researchers, no single accomplishment occurred without a vision and careful planning. The S&T team created the future we now inhabit and use as the launching pad for 2023 and beyond.

We enter 2023 with good news, good plans and the determination to create a productive, bright and hopeful future. Thanks to the efforts of our recently retired U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, we received the good news that S&T will receive significant federal funding to support our advanced manufacturing initiatives. This funding, combined with earlier state, federal and private dollars, puts us and the state of Missouri farther along on our journey toward making our Missouri Protoplex and Manufacture Missouri Ecosystem a reality.

The Arrival District, our new front door to campus, is on budget and on schedule. An important component of this new entrance is our Innovation Lab, which will be completed this year and will provide new opportunities for our students to envision, innovate, design and create futures yet unimagined. Also in 2023, we will break ground for our Welcome Center, which will become the first stop for future students and their families when they visit S&T.

This year will also be a year of expanded outreach. We are growing our popular summer camps for pre-college students with additional offerings this year that will attract more K-12 students to the broad range of an S&T education and the wonders of STEM. Further, we are taking S&T to our schools and communities, thanks to a new fleet of mobile STEM labs and frequent outreach events across the state. We’re also working to expand our academic offerings in 2023, with new degrees and options at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels; more on this soon.

To be clear, we have lots to do and, as we welcome 2023, we continue to implement our plans to achieve our ambitious North Star goals of elevating S&T and our research profile, gaining greater visibility, and providing more students with the chance to achieve their dreams of an S&T education.

I predict that we – our students, colleagues, research teams, managers and leaders – will continue to discover, disrupt, innovate and create a better future, not only for S&T, but for our state, nation and the world. At S&T, we truly are Solving for Tomorrow!

Warmly,

-Mo.

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Mohammad Dehghani, PhD
Chancellor
mo@mst.edu | 573-341-4116

206 Parker Hall, 300 West 13th Street, Rolla, MO 65409-0910
chancellor.mst.edu