A national celebration of the achievements, opportunities and ambitions of the engineering community commences on Feb. 14 as 2010 National Engineers Week begins. As one of the nation’s premier institutions for engineering education and accomplishment, Georgia Tech will be hosting a variety of activities and events to commemorate the occasion. Chief among these will be the 2010 Georgia Engineers Week Awards Gala, which will be held on Saturday, Feb. 20 at the Georgia Tech Hotel & Conference Center.

Georgia’s Engineer of the Year competition honors engineers who have made valuable contributions to their profession and who have impacted the engineering community. The competition is open to all professional engineers throughout Georgia and to students enrolled in a Georgia ABET credited engineering or engineering technology school.

In an effort to foster the engineers of tomorrow, Georgia Tech will also be hosting the Introduce a Girl to Engineering (IAG) 2010 event, which will take place at the Georgia Tech Hotel & Conference Center on Feb. 13. The IAG program introduces middle school girls with a strong interest in math and science to various fields of engineering. Now in its eighth year, IAG brings together these students to interact and learn from established women in the fields of engineering and technology.

National Engineers Week is also a time to reflect on our own considerable achievements as a destination for the world’s top engineering faculty and a haven for promising students. Among the accolades that Georgia Tech’s engineering programs currently claim:

• Georgia Tech has consistently ranked among the nation’s top ten public universities since 1999, ranking No. 7 in 2008. – U.S. News & World Report
• All undergraduate engineering disciplines and most graduate programs rank in the top ten.  Industrial and Systems Engineering has been ranked No. 1 for the past nineteen consecutive years. – U.S. News & World Report
• The Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings identified Georgia Tech as the eighth best engineering and information technology university in the world in 2008.
• The number of faculty elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) now stands at twenty-six, which is twelve more than in 1999 and among the top ten universities in the nation.
• Georgia Tech is the top public university (second only to Johns Hopkins) in engineering research expenditures, both overall and by federal funding.
• Kiplinger’s cites Georgia Tech as a Top 15 best value in public education.
• Georgia Tech is among the top ten universities in the nation in faculty receipt of Presidential Early Career Awards in Science and Engineering (PECASE).