To many people, technology and re­ligion are very different animals. Technology, after all, grows out of science and hard evidence; religion is based on faith. Yet in W. Kent Fuchs, dean of Cornell University's college of engineering, the two are intertwined. In the mid-1980s, before completing his PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois, Fuchs (pronounced "fox") earned a master's degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL. While a professor at Illinois, he moonlighted as a minister. This unusual second job taught him that community-building and communication are just as important in the development of new technologies as they are to the health of religious congregations.

Now in his third year as Cornell's engineering dean, Fuchs is taking the skills he honed in the pulpit into the technological arena. His facility as a communicator, for example, has helped him develop and garner support for an ambitious 10-year strategic plan that includes new research thrusts in biomedicine, sustainable energy, and complex systems. And Fuchs believes that Cornell's 12 engineering departments should engage with society at large, just as a church must engage its surrounding community. Last November, he signed an agreement at Tsinghua University in Beijing that is among the first to let U.S. and Chinese universities share students and intellectual property. "My faith really makes me understand the importance of taking technology and making it of use and benefit to society," he says. "Not just to improve the U.S. economy, but to promote global health, to bring up the standard of living worldwide."