At the University of Alaska Anchorage, you can pursue your dream of becoming an engineer,
computer scientist, or project manager while living in Anchorage--the business, industrial,
cultural, and recreational center of Alaska. Located near all major Alaskan employers
of engineering, computer science, and project management talent, 74% of our job-seeking
students have jobs before they graduate!
The Alaska Department of Labor has projected the state will need 300 new computer
and engineering professionals annually through 2022 -- 96 new positions and 204 to
replace retirees. UAA's College of Engineering is committed to producing cutting-edge
graduates ready to energize the state's growing engineering community.
In 2002, a large earthquake (Mw=7.9) struck in the Alaska Range near Tok, inflicting
severe infrastructure damage to two sites: the Tok Cutoff highway near the Slana River
and the Northway Airport by the Canadian border. This may sound like old news, but
in UAA’s College of Engineering, researchers are still uncovering valuable findings
from this disaster — findings that may help the Alaska Department of Transportation
& Public Facilities (AKDOT&PF) better prepare for future earthquakes.
For Peter Renner, the last four years have felt like sprinting a marathon. He went
into Texas A&M’s mechanical engineering Ph.D. program in 2018, right after graduating
from UAA, and just four years later he is now a postdoctoral fellow at Sandia National
Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That means he blasted through his coursework,
exams and dissertation in practically record time — even with the coronavirus pandemic
and a newborn daughter thrown into the mix.
If you spent much time around the Engineering and Industry Building this last year,
you were almost guaranteed to see UAA College of Engineering Professor Getu Hailu
carting industrial sized thermoses in and out of the building. It turns out the thermoses
were not for his lunch. They contained freezing cold liquid nitrogen for use in his
NASA-funded research into how extreme cold affects different materials.
The University of Alaska Anchorage is excited to announce a new partnership with the
Bellingham Technical College (BTC) to further educational opportunities for students
and meet the high-demand needs for today’s Geomatics workforce. The new partnership
offers a pathway for students in BTC’s associate degree in Engineering Technology
- Geomatics to continue their education and finish with a Bachelor of Science in Geomatics
at UAA.
Anchorage’s Ted Stevens International Airport is one of the top five busiest cargo
airports in the world. Anticipating this increase in northern shipping, UAA professor of structural engineering
Scott Hamel, P.E., Ph.D., began researching the determination of ice crushing forces
on vertical piles with tidal-accreted ice, which was one of seven UAA research projects
selected for the 2020 ConocoPhillips Arctic Science and Engineering Endowment Awards.
At a small, masked ceremony on the third floor of the Engineering and Industry Building
in December 2021, UAA’s chancellor, the College of Engineering’s (CoEng) dean and
others gathered to rename the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) Lab
in honor of Jan van den Top, a 1973 Master of Science in engineering alumnus, whose
generous endowment will enable UAA’s mechanical engineering program to remain on the
cutting edge of teaching and research. In fact, this endowment is the latest in a
long line of investments he has made in UAA, and is an example of a philosophy that
has been one of van den Top’s guiding principles.
Student speaker for the fall 2021 graduate degree hooding ceremony Cody Kapotak, B.S.
Civil Engineering '20, M.S. Project Management '21 discusses his journey to engineering.
With his Bachelor of Science in civil engineering and Master of Science in project
management, Kapotak now has his sights set on his Ph.D. in geotechnical engineering,
which he will begin in fall 2022 at UAF after some much-deserved downtime.