Our History and Mission
Founded in 1870 by “America’s First Family of Inventors,” the Stevens family, Stevens Institute of Technology is a premier technological research university with a legacy of leadership in fields including engineering, finance, cybersecurity and coastal resilience.
Stevens graduates co-founded both General Motors and Texas Instruments, engineered the world’s first urban power plant, engineered and erected the steel frames of New York City’s Empire State Building and Chrysler Building, and directed the design and preparation of spacecraft modules for NASA’s Apollo moon launch missions. From Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, and Mark Crispin (inventor of the IMAP email protocol), to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frederick Reines (discoverer of the neutrino, confirming the ‘big bang’ theory), artist Alexander Calder (inventor of the hanging art form known as the mobile), award-winning journalist and political commentator Richard Reeves and cloud-software pioneer Gregory Gianforte, Stevens has produced a long line of technical and business leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs.
Stevens laboratories and facilities continue to enable groundbreaking research. The Davidson Laboratory features the fastest wave tank complex located at a U.S. university and has played a role in virtually every major maritime and coastal engineering advance of the past century and a half, including the development of modern submarines and the re-engineering of Apollo space capsules. The Hanlon Financial Systems Lab features a state-of-the-art simulated Wall Street trading room complete with Bloomberg terminals streaming real-time market data and a full suite of leading-edge software tools for financial analysis. The Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), a Stevens-led consortium of approximately twenty institutions, is supported by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), producing important insights in the creation and evolution of complex systems and the development of systems engineers. The Immersion Lab enables high-definition visualization of complex concepts and data for professional audiences and non-professional audiences and stakeholders. Stevens is home to three National Centers for Excellence, research facilities selected by the U.S. government to lead national research, development and education efforts to address critical global needs including port security, ship design and development and systems engineering.
The Stevens mission is clear:
To inspire, nurture and educate leaders in tomorrow’s technology-centric environment while contributing to the solution of the most challenging problems of our time.
We believe that the solutions to many of the critical problems that face humanity can be found in the improved use and understanding of technology, and that it is our duty to produce engineers, scientists and business leaders prepared for this challenge. This vision is embodied in our Stevens curriculum, which uniquely blends hands-on innovation, entrepreneurship and marketing education with engineering and technical training with the goal of helping students learn to think outside of the box and develop real-world products, services, applications and intellectual property. Stevens’ small size and multi- disciplinary environment provides students and researchers alike the opportunity to continually collaborate in projects that cut across departmental lines.
Our vision — outlined in our strategic plan, “The Future. Ours to Create.” — is to become a premier, student-centric technological research university.
We will achieve this goal through five key strategic priorities:
Student-Centricity. Stevens will place an extraordinary emphasis on the development of its students, their academic and leadership development, career preparation and personal growth.
Excellence in All We Do. Stevens will maintain an unrelenting commitment to excellence in all that it does.
Through Collaboration, Impact. Building on our agility and collaborative spirit, Stevens will break down internal barriers to collaborative education and research to maximize the impact of the work of our faculty and students.
Technology at Our Core. Proud of our legacy, we will embrace the power of technology as a differentiator to offer a distinctive educational experience to our students, drive our research and scholarship programs, devise novel teaching and learning methods and enhance our administrative, outreach and communication activities.
Strengthened Reputation, Increased Prestige. Stevens alumni, faculty and research have made a significant positive impact on the world for more than 140 years. We will continue to ensure that our graduates continue to play a critical role in solving the technology-based problems of the future.
Stevens will directly address key areas of societal and global interest including healthcare and medicine, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education, finance, coastal resilience and systems engineering through a comprehensive research program and new course and degree offerings.
As we move forward into the future together — a future that will be defined by the nation’s and the world’s appropriate and ethical use of technology for societal benefit — Stevens will continue to be at the forefront of discovery and innovation, and we will continue to train designers, inventors, managers and leaders for this exciting new era.