Intelligence having fun!

Friday, May 30, 2025

Dedicated students, distinguished colleagues and dear friends,

Happy Friday! Happy National Creativity Day!

As Einstein famously said, “Creativity is intelligence having fun.” In that sense, we, here at S&T, have been having fun for over 150 years and, in the process, have made critical contributions to critical national and global challenges. After all, in the words of Peter Drucker, “innovation requires hard, focused, purposeful work,” and that is exactly what we have been doing all those decades.

To enhance our contributions to the process of creativity and possibility thinking, in 2022, we established an entire college: the Kummer College of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development. Just last year, to encourage collision of ideas and to increase cross-disciplinary engagement of our students and faculty, we dedicated our Innovation Lab – a 50,000-square-foot facility with active learning classrooms, labs for group work, digital content creation studios, maker spaces, the Student Success Center and an Innovation Forum. The Innovation Lab draws from every educational discipline from across the campus and beyond. Students must transcend their own disciplinary boundaries, work in teams, and draw from science, art, technology, and, most importantly, imagination, to invent, design, develop and deploy disruptive concepts. Human-computer interaction, design for sustainability, biometric integrated systems, adaptive design and many more exciting fields that are ripe for innovation will be up for grabs for our students and faculty of all disciplines.

One of the fastest growing areas of confluence on our campus is at the intersection of engineering, technology and biology – biotechnology. To capitalize on this growth area of increasing importance, we have created our fourth and newest Kummer Institute Center for BioInnovation and Medical Engineering. In fact, last month we broke ground for our largest, most ambitious teaching and research facility to house our biotechnology initiatives. The Bioplex will serve as a destination of choice for students, faculty and research scientists interested in enhancing and advancing our human health-related education and research. To kickstart the center, our inaugural conference with the same name will bring to campus participants from universities, life science organizations, pharmaceutical companies and other national research and development centers.

Here at S&T, we have implemented innovation and entrepreneurship programs at both the undergraduate (Kummer Vanguard Scholars) and graduate (Innovation and Entrepreneurship Doctoral Fellowship) levels.

To guide our “from the lab to market” efforts, Dr. Christine Karslake, a nationally recognized expert in growth of intellectual property (IP) generation, has joined us. Dr. Karslake will help develop strategies to streamline our disclosure, patent and commercialization processes. Interestingly, in an article titled “Universities must become active launchpads for innovation,” the authors highlight that “… the traditional contributions of universities — advancing knowledge through research and patents — remain fundamental to America’s economic and national security dynamism.”

It is fair to say that careful inquisitiveness almost always reveals innovation embedded in university research, particularly in application-driven and solution-inspired research — the type of research that we are mostly engaged with here at S&T. The question, though, is how creatively are we able to visualize the hidden gem, and how deep are we willing to dig to realize the breakthroughs we seek?

So to all on this National Creativity Day and during National Inventors Month, I say let’s keep inventing and let your “intelligence have some fun” along the way.

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
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