Living in South Dakota until the middle of May, Dr. Bruce Berdanier, politely accepted a phone interview to discuss his new position as the dean of Fairfield’s School of Engineering.
“I think [Fairfield] is a good fit for me,” said Berdanier, adding, “It’s similar in size to [South Dakota State University] where I’m at now.”
However, Fairfield is “unique,” he explained, in that it focuses on a liberal arts education and what problems face the engineering world, in addition to focusing on a technical education. By broadening students’ educational and international experiences, opportunities for engineering students are increased, he added.
Berdanier said he hopes to bring his talents and experience in service trips to Fairfield, using his 5-year project in Bolivia as a starting point for Fairfield students to work internationally by improving drinking water and sanitation issues in other countries.
“My hope in coming to Fairfield is being able to stay [with these projects] and that some students in Fairfield [and] … SDSU will be able to go with me and we build these connections,” he explains.
Having worked in Haiti, Bolivia and Jordan, Berdanier finds his passion to be providing services such as water purification and building reservoirs for those less fortunate.
Berdanier is a professor and the department head of Civil and Environmental Engineering at SDSU. His main research and interests include studying the distribution and interactions of chemical compounds in water quality and municipal wastewater treatment.
He has worked on several service projects, such as environmental and water development in the Artibonite Valley of Haiti since 1995. He is currently directing a program in Bolivia with a Bolivian university and Engineers Without Borders, where the focus is in setting up chlorinators that use a concentration of chlorine to make the water cleaner.
Having won the Fulbright Research Scholar Award in 2005, Berdanier spent six months in Jordan sampling dust and measuring the metal content there from other industries in an attempt to uncover how dust impacts citizens.
“That was a very fortunate time … because out of that work we published five to six articles and it created my research career,” said Berdanier, adding, “The culture experience was really neat.”
Being unsure of which direction he should take Fairfield’s School of Engineering, Berdanier explained that his primary goal is to meet with the faculty and staff to figure out where the department is right now and to “come up with a vision” for the future.
He said he does see expansion of the program on the horizon, stating that he wants to increase the number of undergraduate engineering students, along with having more resources, such as new professors in the department.
Along with expansion of the program and moving the department in a unified direction, Berdanier wants to have Fairfield connect even more with other countries, and from talking to professors and Dr. Bill Taylor, the associate dean of the School of Engineering, he does want to develop a service project in Cameroon.
Besides looking forward to working with Fairfield’s faculty and students, Berdanier is also “excited to be along the ocean [after being] inland for so long.”
He will begin on July 1, filling a position previously held by Dean Jack W. Beal, Ph.D., a faculty member at Fairfield for 27 years.
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