Our Business is Yours Kristin Van Buskirk, Owner of Woonwinkel Your success is our success—and the success of our entire region! Our mission and purpose is clear: We support businesses of all types and sizes in succeeding and thriving throughout our region. are especially motivating for students, as it can prepare them to hit the ground running toward a career upon graduation, sometimes with intellectual property all their own. “This was something that happened at Pittsburgh, especially in computer science,” Cudd says. “Sometimes it would be a small startup company, but sometimes it was Google. ey would agree to set up here and say, ‘Here are a bunch of challenges we have right now that seem to connect with your course. Can you have your students work on these things?’ en you have some kind of agreement about how you’re going to share the intellectual property, because you want the students to own their intellectual property if it’s successful.” Cudd says programs that give students a familiarity with data science — as well as programs that emphasize collaboration and team-building in a multicultural setting — will be important pillars of the PSU experience precisely because they relate to the needs of the private sector. She also emphasizes the importance of PSU’s arts programs, saying she expects the College of Arts to play a key role in building up the arts and entertainment sector, with the hopes of revitalizing Portland’s struggling downtown, where PSU is situated. She also says the school’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative — which has already collaborated with Health Share of Oregon and Oregon Health & Science University to generate funded homelessness research — should work alongside the city to generate better, evidence-based homelessness responses. It’s a vision that plays to PSU’s strengths: e school produces of the state’s licensed social workers, according to state licensure data, and Oregon is among the leading states showing an increased demand for social workers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, which estimates a growth in social work positions in the state by . Cudd also plans for the PSU School of Public Health to continue to collaborate with Oregon Health & Science University on programming, and wants to ensure the semiconductor industry continues to build in Portland, citing the . billion available in direct federal funding from the CHIPS and Science Act. “I think our angle will be urban research and it will be community-engaged research. We have one of the only urban engineering schools in the state. One of the things that we’re good at is smart grids, and that’s a really critical need to creating smart cities and solving the grand challenge of faster computing,” she says. Through her rise through the ranks of university administration, Cudd says she still thinks of herself as a professor and academic rst. She says she has a personal interest in making PSU a place where students and sta get the most out of their time at the college. And she says she has a vested interest in keeping the liberal arts alive at the school. “I certainly hope that one day I can retire from the presidency when Portland State is ourishing, and I can come back and be a philosophy professor again,” says Cudd. JASON E. KAPLAN 20
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