Dear friends and colleagues,

My first few days back on campus this summer were interesting. Food service was minimal, so one day at 3 p.m. I was really famished and went foraging for food. At last, I came across a well-stocked vending machine and pounced on the pretzels. Perhaps not surprisingly, they had expired weeks earlier due to the low rate of consumption, but the good news is expired pretzels taste as good as unexpired pretzels. After that I always brought a snack to eat or planned for a leisurely lunch on Noyes Street.

It’s exciting to be back on campus among colleagues and students and for those quick, impromptu meetings that are a lot more effective than exchanging three emails to find a time to Zoom. It’s exciting to lead the department at a time of rapid growth; we welcomed more than 150 new graduate students and several new faculty and staff members. Our staff and faculty were busy all summer preparing for orientation programs and outdoor social events. I am incredibly grateful to them for their hard work.

Leading an extremely talented set of faculty and students has been a truly humbling experience for me. We organized a faculty retreat to discuss cluster hires in new and exciting areas, and in the next year you can expect to see more movement in this direction. We have an exciting lineup of fall speakers this year and the seminar series will run in a hybrid mode, with some talks in person and some by Zoom.

I hope you all have settled down well into your classes and routine now. Let’s hope for a rapid improvement in the COVID-19 situation.