Dean's Message

The Faculty of Engineering and Computing(FENC) is  the largest Engineering and Computing programme that we know of in the English speaking Caribbean with over some 2500 students across our undergraduate and graduate programmes. We pride ourselves as a community of innovate scholars in this industry 5.0 society led by  Artificial Intelligence(AI) technologies that drive our large scale  engineering and computer networked systems. To this end our curriculum has been updated to reflect this currency and relevance. 

Both our staff and students are working and solving complex challenges to improve the quality of life for communities ,whether by designing applications to handle cybercrime and data protection including training in these areas, working toward more resilient and sustainable environments by looking at the need to drive electric vehicle mobility systems, assessing climate change by evaluating Jamaica’s resilience through its building structures to assess the proximity risk of disasters and zonal analytical studies to help with national readiness.  We have also been active in the design of new software tools in natural language processing (NLP) to improve the customer service experiences of our student and staff environments as a part of our tier-1 services to our University stakeholders, and similarly as a part of commercial environments particularly in retail banking.

As a community we have also been actively engaged in the design of  new energy conservation systems with hydrogen modelling , analyzing and constructing complex data mining algorithms to serve large scale human computer interactive graph based systems to support data visualization environments.

As a deliberate approach to promote greater diversity and inclusion, we have boosted  our student enrollment by another One thousand (1000) through scholarships to assist the marginalized communities within our society. To this end the FENC has received some JMD$2.4 billion in Government of Jamaica (GOJ) funding to support development in Science, Technology , Engineering , and Mathematics (STEM) graduates  over the next five(5) years as we produce the country’s first ever Knowledge process outsourcing(KPO) industry.

We have a cadre of teaching and research faculty that are not only passionate about what they teach but how they fuel curiosity and provide new opportunities for students to explore inside and outside the classrooms. In the rich environment of the FENC, the students discover and develop their passions for Entrepeneurship through call for startup campaigns , ideathons and hackathons , global outreach through international competitions, strong team leadership, societal impact and more. Students lead a wide range of clubs focused on everything from the Institute of Electrical Electronic Engineers (IEEE) software and robotics competitions, Association of Computing Machinery(ACM) software development contest, pursue work and study abroad programmes, entrepreneurship training, and more through co-curricula activities across the University- gaining experiences and skills that prepare them to become leaders in industry, academia among many other professional pursuits. 

No matter what inspires you, you will find that the FENC is a community vested in your success and prides itself on producing work ready leaders. We value the different perspectives and backgrounds our staff and students bring to our community, and strive to empower each individual on their journey of self-discovery, education and the application of engineering and computing knowledge and practice to positively impact the world.  With respect to undergraduate and graduate education, in research , in entrepreneurship and in service, we are committed to leading boldly to shape this technological era by creating an environment that enables our community to achieve great things for the benefit and impact to our society. 

I welcome you all for this new academic year 2023/24 and sincerely express my best wishes in you having a productive year.  

Professor Sean Thorpe,
Dean-Faculty of Engineering and Computing