Doug Tougaw Takes the Reins at the College of Engineering

Doug Tougaw ’05 MBA, Ph.D., P.E., has dedicated his adult life to enriching the student experience at Valparaiso University’s College of Engineering. On Monday, Feb. 14, 2022, he was officially announced as the leader of one of the nation’s premiere engineering institutions.

The call to go into teaching came to Dean Tougaw in his late teens thanks to his own experiences as an undergraduate. While working toward his bachelor’s degree from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Dean Tougaw had the opportunity to experience firsthand the joy of helping others succeed in their education.

“I found that I was tutoring my classmates and friends. That helped me to see how rewarding a life of service in teaching would be,” Dean Tougaw says. “I just went back to my 30th college reunion, and many of them told me that if I hadn’t been there they wouldn’t have graduated.”

After obtaining his B.S. in electrical engineering, Dean Tougaw went on to earn his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. In 1996 he found an institution with an enthusiasm for education that matched his own, and he accepted a faculty position at Valparaiso University.

“Their passion for teaching matched my life’s ambition, which was to be a professor,” Dean Tougaw says. “They had the same vision that I had for my life.”

Having successfully found a role in teaching, Dean Tougaw briefly felt that his time as a student was over. When Valpo introduced its master of business administration program, however, he realized how much he still wanted to learn.
“I was excited to be the very first student ever admitted to that program,” Dean Tougaw says. “I took classes for three years while teaching at the College of Engineering, or as I called it ‘working full-time plus’.”

Then-Professor Tougaw was also considering a new career ambition: working toward the position of dean of the College of Engineering, which meant even further education in the form of a master of higher education administration from North Park University.

Throughout his 26 years at Valpo, Dean Tougaw has worked to provide the students of the College of Engineering with all the experiences and opportunities for success that they would find at a larger institution. One of the biggest ways in which Dean Tougaw has provided students with opportunities for excellence has been his tireless work in undergraduate research.

“Undergraduate research gives students the opportunity to dive deeply into a topic that they’re really passionate about,” Dean Tougaw says. “I believe students who do undergraduate research are much better prepared and have a good feeling for what it’s like to discover something new rather than discovering it out of a textbook.”

Dean Tougaw has been the co-author of more than 20 papers involving undergraduate research, and has found them to be a great way to not only work with students, but learn from them.

“They bring a creativity to the problem that I may not bring after working in the field for so many years,” Dean Tougaw says.

A member of the electrical and computer engineering honor society Eta Kappa Nu as a student, he was instrumental in bringing the organization to Valpo. While the society takes care to maintain a separate identity from Tau Beta Pi, the main engineering honor society, Dean Tougaw feels the opportunity to attain honors in a specific discipline gives Valpo engineers an edge.

“Having the chance to show that they were both a member of Tau Beta Pi, as well as a departmental society, to show they want to display leadership and academic excellence, are opportunities I want our students to have,” Dean Tougaw says.

While he and his department work to make sure the students who can excel have the opportunity to do so, Dean Tougaw also values making a difference in the academic careers of students who may need extra assistance.

“These are the students who might not succeed at another school,” Dean Tougaw says, “When I see one of those students walk across the stage at graduation, knowing that they have an engineering degree and are technically prepared to be an engineer because of the work that we did to help them here, that’s the best part of my job.”
Whether they’re students who excel or students who need assistance, Dean Tougaw stresses the importance of growing as a well-rounded person on top of gaining technical skills.

“When I started, engineering was a field where you could be very technically skilled, and only technically skilled, and have a very successful career,” he says. “Today, projects are so collaborative that you have to have them people, professional, and communication skills to be successful as an engineer.”

To make sure students have the non-technical skills they need to succeed in the modern field of engineering, the College of Engineering has integrated more writing, speaking, and presentation assignments into the coursework. Select students also complete training through the Dale Carnegie training program to ensure they are ready to be leaders as well as experts.

“You wouldn’t want to go into a fight with one hand tied behind your back, so we want to prepare students with the full set of tools they’re going to need to be professionally successful,” Dean Tougaw says.

Another aspect of the evolving engineering environment that Dean Tougaw wants to prepare students for is the increasing level of diversity becoming prevalent in the field.

“Students are going to need to know how to work with people who aren’t exactly like them,” Dean Tougaw says. “We do our students a disservice if we don’t prepare them for that. One of the ways we can do that is to have a diverse student body. We need to make sure that the students who come here who don’t look like everyone else are going to feel entirely welcome.”

The College of Engineering has made great strides in fostering a welcoming and inclusive community under Dean Tougaw’s leadership. While he served as interim dean, the College was recognized by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) for making measurable progress towards inclusion, diversity, and degree attainment outcomes.

ASEE is a nonprofit organization of individuals and institutions that look to further engineering and engineering technology education by promoting worldwide leadership, fostering the technological education of society and promoting excellence in instruction, research, public service, and practice. For Dean Tougaw, who joined the organization in 1997, ASEE was a chance to join a community of like-minded professors that shared his experiences in education.

“It’s good to talk to someone whose school you’ve never been to, but discover they have exactly the same challenges and exactly the same opportunities that you do,” Dean Tougaw says.

ASEE members include over 12,000 deans, department heads, faculty members, students, and government and industry representatives from all disciplines of the engineering field. After 10 years as a member, Dean Tougaw decided to give back to the organization, providing other members with the benefit of his knowledge and experience. In March 2022, he was elected president.

Outside of campus and University activities, Dean Tougaw enjoys the outdoors and taking advantage of all the wonderful opportunities his local community has to offer.

“The parks here in Valpo are really amazing,” he says. “It’s a beautiful town. Spending time downtown is great. The restaurants are amazing, and the places to shop are fantastic. It’s just a great place to live.”

As a married man with three children, he says the biggest priority is his relationship with his loved ones.
“The opportunity to spend time with my family is precious at this point in my life,” Dean Tougaw says.

Dean Tougaw’s goals as the head of the College are to increase the size and diversity of the student population, increase the diversity of faculty and staff, foster stronger student-professor relationships, and give students all the opportunities he can for hands-on education. He believes that Valparaiso University and the Valparaiso community are excellent for students looking to find personal and academic growth.

“Both the university and the town are just the right size,” Dean Tougaw says. “If we were a smaller school I don’t think we’d be able to present the same opportunities to our students. If we were bigger, those opportunities would be less accessible. The same thing is true for the city.”

For Dean Tougaw, putting his efforts toward researching, teaching, and promoting the field of engineering is helping change the world in the best way he knows how.

“I love engineering because we take the knowledge of math and science and we use it to make the world a better place,” Dean Tougaw says. “We improve people’s lives by the work that we do, whether it’s by building a huge building, like civil engineers do, or building a tiny cell phone like an electrical or computer engineer would do.”