Welcome back to the East Village, 41 Cooper Square, and Shoop’s Stoop! We made it! We successfully completed another academic year. It’s time for me to share just a few of the exciting things that happened in the Albert Nerken School of Engineering since my last update.

To begin, you will recall that in my September newsletter, I foreshadowed my retirement at the end of this academic year. The faculty search committee did a tremendous amount of work, reviewing over 100 applications for the Dean of Engineering position. After several rounds of interviews and candidate visits to campus, an offer was made to the leading candidate, but unfortunately, this was unsuccessful. At the end of April, President McLaughlin asked me to stay another year, and I agreed. Please see the community message sharing some of the details. A faculty search committee will be constituted and begin the new search at the beginning of next academic year. Know that I remain committed to Cooper Union and excited to be the Dean of the Albert Nerken School of Engineering. This, however, is officially my second failed retirement!

The Cooper Union’s 166th Commencement on May 28, 2026, was a wonderful celebration of our amazing graduates. This year, we had a total of 108 undergraduate students and 19 graduate students graduate from the School of Engineering. For our undergraduates, this included 23 chemical engineers, 26 civil engineers, 29 electrical engineers, 25 mechanical engineers, and 5 general engineers. In addition to the undergraduate degrees, members of this graduating class were awarded a total of 60 minors: 7 mathematics minors, 20 computer science minors, 12 bioengineering minors, 4 chemistry minors, and 17 HSS minors. I will also note that five of our students completed the Dual Degree Master’s Program, where the bachelor’s and master’s degree are awarded simultaneously after four years of study!

Our students continue to punch well above their weight class at external competitions. Here are some highlights:

• A 4-student team placed #2 out of 120 teams in the Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Team (DEBUT) Challenge sponsored by the National Institute of Health.
• For the first time, Cooper Union has designed and built a concrete toboggan, a 9-student team placed #3 out of 18 teams in the Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race in London, Ontario, Canada.
  • Five first-place awards, including Best Performing Toboggan, Excellence in Student Construction, and the People’s Choice Award, and three second-place awards including the “King of the Hill Tournament” where toboggans race head-to-head in a bracketed competition. All the other teams were from Canada, and each had been competing for years.
• Geo-Prediction Competition, 3 teams, 8 students total attended.
  • A 2-student team took #1 and brought home the Mohr's Circle Trophy after placing first in the Geo-Prediction student competition.
• Cooper Union American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) teams competed at the 2026 ASCE Student Symposium.
  • Our Sustainable Solution Team competed in the ASCE Sustainable Solutions Competition against NJIT, Stony Brook University, and Stevens and placed #1. They are going to nationals in June.
  • Our Steel Bridge Team competed in the Student Steel Bridge Competition against 9 total colleges and universities in the regional competition and placed #2, entitling them to again go to nationals.
• Four students placed #2 and won $10,000 at the New York State Industries for the Disabled’s (NYSID) annual Cultivating Resources for Employment with Assistive Technology (CREATE) Symposium.

Our Fall 2026 incoming first-year class is again very strong. We admitted 124 students to the Class of 2030. There will be 29 students majoring in chemical engineering, 31 in civil engineering, 16 in computer science, 23 in electrical engineering, and 25 in mechanical engineering. Women comprise 37% of this incoming class. Additionally, 28% self-identified as the first in their family to attend college, and 11% of the class is international. Recall that we are no longer test-optional, so all applicants and admitted students were required to submit standardized tests. The Fall 2026 first-year class had a median SAT score of 1490 and a median Math SAT score of 780. By all measures, this is yet another very strong entering class! In addition, this year we have 36 entering Master of Engineering students.

This past year has again been a very busy year for full-time faculty hiring. In the Fall 2026, we will welcome another five new tenure-track faculty members. We will add three additional computer science faculty to fill out the new Computer Science Department. Dr. Lalita Devadas received the B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Columbia University and is completing her Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT with a focus on cryptography. Dr. Amna Liaqat received a B.S. in Computer Science from the Simon Frazer University in Canada and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, Canada. She will join us after completing a postdoctoral appointment at Princeton University. Her area of expertise is in the area of Human Computer Interface. Finally, Dr. Luke Evans received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation from the University of Maryland, College Park, and will fill a joint appointment with the Simons Foundation Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Mathematics. His area of expertise is artificial intelligence. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Computational Mathematics at the Flatiron Institute.  

In addition, we will welcome two new electrical engineering faculty members in September. Dr. Aaron Langham received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Auburn University and is completing his Ph.D. at MIT with a focus on sustainable energy systems. Dr. Phillip Hagen received a B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Idaho and is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Idaho with a focus on adaptive electromagnetic systems, reconfigurable RF hardware, embedded sensing, and data‑driven modeling.  

For those of you keeping score, since arriving at Cooper I have hired 21 tenure-track faculty members in the School of Engineering. With the new Computer Science Program, this number is over 50% of the tenured and tenure-track faculty in the Albert Nerken School of Engineering. In 2013, the composition of the tenured and tenure-track faculty in the School of Engineering was 6.3% women and in Fall 2026 it will remain 42% women!

Thank you again for sharing your valuable time with me on Shoop’s Stoop! I look forward to sharing additional updates in next year’s editions of Shoop’s Stoop! From all of us at Cooper, enjoy your summer!

Barry L. Shoop, Ph.D., P.E. |  Dean of Engineering  |  Albert Nerken School of Engineering