New Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson greeted Gainesville Rotarians on Monday at the civic club’s luncheon.
Peterson became a Yellow Jacket in April when the university system Board of Regents unanimously approved the engineer and longtime educator as Georgia Tech’s new president. Peterson succeeds Wayne Clough, who served as president of Georgia Tech for 14 years and is now secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Peterson said Tech has strong ties with Hall County. Area high schools have turned out more than 200 students who are studying at Georgia Tech. The annual $525 million research program at Tech is top-tier and has worked with the Georgia Poultry Federation to apply students’ engineering expertise to improving poultry processing, productivity and sanitary methods.
Tech also has a Regents Engineering Transfer Program partnership with Gainesville State College that streamlines student transfers from the Gainesville school to the technology institute. Peterson and Gainesville State College President Martha Nesbitt acknowledged the eight-year partnership as a great success, with the vast majority of Gainesville transfer students completing their undergraduate degree with high marks.
“It allows students to stay a little closer to home for those first couple of years and then transfer to our campuses in Atlanta or Savannah,” Peterson said.
Rick Boyd, president of Rotary Club of Gainesville, said the club invited Peterson to speak because members wanted to hear about Georgia Tech’s future.
Peterson said it has been a recent priority to address increasing safety concerns at Atlanta college campuses by working with Atlanta police officers to have more patrol officers on night duty. There are four more officers on duty between 6 p.m. and 3 a.m., Peterson said.
“I think we’re getting on top of that,” he said. “... It’s a very, very serious concern of ours.”
Peterson said also the institution’s research program is flourishing despite the recession. He said he expects a 30 percent increase in Georgia Tech’s research funding because the federal government is funneling stimulus money into fundamental research, which Peterson believes drives America’s best assets of innovation, creativity and new product development.
He’s also toying with new “big ideas” for the institution such as an educational guarantee policy that allows Georgia Tech graduates access to undergraduate courses for life to promote lifelong education. In addition, Peterson said he’s exploring the possibility of having a classroom full of avatars, where students attend class in a hologram-like form.
“Imagine a class where everybody is a virtual reality creation and everyone there is there to help me learn the material,” he said.
Peterson said ultimately, he has one goal for his time at Tech: to provide students with an education that prepares them for the increasingly fast-paced and high-tech jobs of the 21st century.