Higher education, like much of the world, has entered a period of rapid change.

Traditional approaches to teaching and research need to evolve to better equip students and professors with the tools they need to tackle the planet’s most pressing problems.

As part of this shift, individual faculties and departments at every university must examine how they operate and how they can become more effective.

At Carleton University, the Faculty of Engineering and Design’s new dean, Larry Kostiuk, is prepared to take on this challenge — and he’s hopeful about all of the new directions and discoveries that could emerge.

“Historically, universities haven’t been structured around the stress points of society,” says Kostiuk, who began his five-year term on July 1 after more than 25 years in a series of increasingly senior roles at the University of Alberta.

“Typically, we were organized around a set of processes and principles. But our society is facing some serious issues and the old model — the expectation that there’s somebody off campus, such as government or the private sector that assembles the knowledge we create into something more useful and tangible — doesn’t hold anymore.

“Because the world is changing, more ‘self-assembly’ is expected on campuses. Universities see needs, demands and challenges, and we can put together teams and choreograph our activities to take on these big problems. The world has lost patience with the old model.”

How this transformation will continue to roll out at Carleton remains a question — or, rather, an array of questions, as dozens and dozens of critical conversations take place in the months and years ahead.

But Kostiuk, who has only been on the job for a few weeks and is still in the process of meeting his new colleagues and collaborators, is eager to dive in. Even, perhaps especially, if that means venturing into new territory.

At Carleton, for example, the “Design” component of the Faculty of Engineering and Design (FED) blends in disciplines, such as architecture and urban planning, that aren’t a natural fit for people like him with a pure engineering background.

Kostiuk sees this as a chance to elevate his understanding, to bring ideas together in an interdisciplinary way, to mesh hard physical sciences with diverse ways of thinking — and to take a head-on, holistic run at wicked problems, including climate change, that we must strive collectively to address.