From the Editor

This entire issue is devoted to the National Science Foundation’s Department Level Reform (DLR) Initiative. Mandar Dewoolkar, who was actively involved in the redesign of the civil and environmental engineering programs at the University of Vermont (see the Hayden, et al paper in this issue), has done an outstanding job of marshaling these dozen papers through a rigorous review, and in many cases, re-review process. As a collection, they describe an important NSF initiative, which as John Daniels, Sally Wood and Sue Kemnitzer point out in their paper, was greatly influenced by the NSF’s Engineering Education Coalition program, which preceded the DLR program. In all, 80 DLR planning grants were awarded, followed by 20 implementation grants in the period between 2003 to 2005. The last of the implementation grants ended in 2009, but, as described in this issue, both implementation and assessment efforts continue at a cross-section of the country’s engineering programs. As noted, we present papers describing twelve of these twenty programs, which were funded at levels between $400,000 to $1,500,000 each. Professor Dewoolkar provides a guest editorial to introduce the issue, followed by the Daniels, Wood and Kemnitzer paper, which provides an overview of all twenty projects, including a summary table of the issues that each addresses…

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