The UTD Mercury

Robert Helms, outbound dean of the Jonsson School of Engineering, is looking forward to having time to reflect, developing ideas for research and pursuing academic hobbies, including understanding global warming.

Helms will step down on August 15. His exodus will take him no further than a new office in the Natural Science and Engineering Research Laboratory (NSERL) building, which he said was the most visible, but by no means the most important, achievement made during his five-year term at Jonsson School.

He sees UTD's future in the more than 30 faculty hired while he was dean.

"If you want to build any kind of successful program, you've got to focus first, second and third on people," he said. "We've hired some junior faculty members who are the top people in their fields, and they'll be here for 50 years."

During Helms' term, the Jonsson School has more than doubled its research funding and Project Emmitt, a $300 million partnership between Texas Instruments (TI), the University of Texas System and city and state government funded the construction of the NSERL.

Helms said he's also proud of partnerships that benefited other schools.

During Helms' tenure as dean, Jonsson made one of the initial investments in the in the Center for Brain Health. Jonsson also footed a large portion of the bill for the Motion Capture Lab, a collaboration between computer science and arts and technology (ATEC) driven by ATEC director Thomas Linehan, he said.

"I think some people in the Jonsson School wondered why I did that, and thought, 'That's our money'," Helms said. "But, we need to do what we can to help the grand plan, not just the engineering school as if we're an island."

Born in Wichita, Kan., Helms moved to California with his family and discovered he was a year ahead in school. After three years, he'd taken most of the classes offered, he said, but he couldn't graduate without a fourth year of English.

"Berkeley accepted me as a high school dropout in 1964," he said. "I got an interesting education there. They'd just had the Democratic Convention in San Francisco and the Free Speech Movement was beginning to take hold. It wasn't what I or my parents anticipated."

He majored in engineering physics and then went to Stanford University for his doctorate in electrical engineering. He remained there until he moved to Austin in 1992 to work for TI.

As a faculty member, Helms said he'll research strategies to efficiently use water as communities grow. He said he'd like to explore team-teaching partnerships with faculty at UTSA and other local schools.

Global warming research is a "hobby" he said, because "those of us in technology owe it to ourselves and others to understand how global warming works before deciding what, if anything, we can do about it."

Oft hear people talk about energy and the envt adding water into the equation. Out of research for a while, but just before I left stanf in early 90s water uses in manufacturing and engineering solutions showed them how to save a lot of water in the fap operations

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