Meet An Outstanding Woman Engineer: Terri Fiez

Story Posted: Wed, Feb 20, 2002

Bringing Women To OSU Engineering

By Gregg Kleiner

One of the cornerstones of building a top-25 engineering school at Oregon State University is attracting professors who are the best and brightest in their fields, born leaders who infuse their departments with vision and excitement, who inspire everyone from faculty and students, to children in the local community--people who burn so brightly they illuminate the way to the top. This is precisely how Dean Ron Adams describes Terri Fiez, OSU’s Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and passionate advocate of young women becoming great engineers.

"A ball of fire," Adams says. "Terri is spectacular! Her coming here has created, at OSU, one of the top 10 academic research centers in analog and mixed-signal (broadband and wireless) design in the nation. And she’s bringing more female students to OSU Engineering than ever." If the dramatic changes Fiez has set in motion during the short time since her arrival at OSU are any indication, she’s going to create an entire department destined for the top--one that includes a growing number of women and minorities.

Fiez returned to OSU in the fall of 1999 to lead the same department from which she earned her doctorate just a decade earlier. "I had a really, really good PhD experience here at OSU," Fiez says. "Which is probably why I’m a professor today." Her graduate years at OSU were highlighted by lots of individual attention, a close mentoring relationship with her advisor, Dave Allstot, and the excitement that comes with being an intimate part of cutting edge research. "At OSU, you weren’t a small cog on a huge wheel," she says. "You were part of the wheel, and you had to help make the wheel run. The faculty never treated me as anything less than an equal."

But during the 10 years that Fiez was away working as an associate professor at Washington State University, where she single-handedly built the microelectronics program, a lot changed at her Oregon alma mater--mainly the result of devastating tax cuts.

"I left OSU in 1990, just as Measure 5 hit," Fiez says. "When I returned, there had been 10 years of cuts. We’d gone from 27 faculty down to 20, and from 400 students up to 650. That’s 50 percent more students and 30 percent fewer faculty. It killed me having class sizes like we had--it just killed me." Undaunted, Fiez rolled up her sleeves and set to work, tapping her powers of creativity and vision to find unique solutions in the face of limited funds. "You’ve got to think out of the box," she says. "You’ve got to come up with some very creative ways to do things."

The first is spinning a dynamic web of community among students, faculty, and industry by building bridges between the groups: encouraging faculty to go out into industry and do paid consulting (which puts OSU faculty in the midst of what’s happening in the field and makes budget-limited salaries more competitive); bringing industry leaders to campus to engage with students and faculty; and improving and expanding internships so students can apply what they learn in the classroom out in the real world. "It’s just a total win-win," Fiez says.

Second, Fiez is reaching out to industry to help fund innovative teaching programs like TekBots™, where students design and build robots their freshman year, then apply what they learn in classes over the next three years by adding features and functionality to their robots. TekBots™ is funded by Tektronix, which contributed $500,000.

Third, the department has targeted several research areas--including Fiez’ own, wireless and broadband--to be among the best in the nation. "We’ll do this by hiring great faculty and making sure that they’re successful," she says. In addition, Fiez is aggressively recruiting more women and minorities to the department. "The top eight students who got perfect SAT scores in Oregon were women," Fiez says. "So if we can increase our number of women students, our incoming quality will go up substantially."

Fiez firmly believes that if students and faculty in her department are excited about learning, inspired by teaching, and given opportunities to be creative, ECE graduates will help make the world a better place. "Ultimately," she says, "we have to create an environment that gives students--and faculty--opportunities to be creative, to explore and be successful and feel what success feels like, to get excited about what they’re doing."

The excitement that Terri Fiez is building department-wide is electrifying--and catching. A leading professor in the department recently turned down a very lucrative position with industry because he wanted to stay and be part of the changes underway. "People are starting to get excited," Fiez says. "There’s a buzz. I run into people all the time who say, ‘Oh, wow, this is great! We’re definitely watching to see where things are going.’ "

With Terri Fiez at the helm, the direction is clear: up. And the path to the top will be very well lit.

Terri is the featured speaker at the Society of Women Engineers Banquet to be held at the CH2MHill Alumni Center on February 25th.