Lance Collins recognized at Washington Business Journal Diversity in Business Awards
Lance Collins, vice president and executive director of the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus, has been recognized with a Diversity in Business Award from the Washington Business Journal. The publication held its 17th annual program on March 21 celebrating diversity and inclusion in the workforce and honoring inspiring business leaders of color in Greater Washington.
The Diversity in Business Awards celebrated the entrepreneurial drive, creativity, and success of 25 leaders from the region. The honorees were judged based on professional accomplishments, community leadership and philanthropy, as well as awards and milestones.
Collins and Shinta H. Hernandez, founding dean of the virtual campus at Montgomery College, represented academia among the honorees.
Collins provides strategic direction for the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus which is set to open in January 2025. Under Collins’ leadership, the Innovation Campus established the goal of becoming the most diverse graduate technology campus in the country. For fall 2023, the Innovation Campus has 31 percent women and 23 percent underrepresented minorities in its Master of Engineering programs (read progress on our diversity enrollment).
Since taking the helm at the Innovation Campus in August 2020, Collins has expanded the Innovation Campus from a staff of two to an organization featuring 47 faculty and administrators. For the quarter ending December 2023, the Innovation Campus faculty and staff had 53.3% minority representation, and 46.7% of its employees were women.
Collins joined Virginia Tech from Cornell University where he served as the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering for 10 years. He was also part of the leadership team that successfully bid to partner with New York City to build Cornell Tech, which opened its Roosevelt Island campus in 2017. As the engineering dean at Cornell, Collins accelerated efforts to diversify the college’s faculty and student body, increasing the proportion of underrepresented minority students from 8 to 19 percent and undergraduate women from 33 to 50 percent.
Collins, a professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, serves on the board of trustees of the MITRE Corporation, the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce, the Society for Science, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Foundation. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. In 2021 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
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ABOUT THE VIRGINIA TECH INNOVATION CAMPUS
The Virginia Tech Innovation Campus shapes the future of technology. Through our Master of Engineering program, we equip graduates to become leaders in their careers while helping them gain real-world experience solving urgent challenges alongside researchers, industry executives, and national policymakers. With a research focus on AI/ML, Wireless and Next Gen Technology, Quantum Information Science, and Intelligent Interfaces, the Innovation Campus is powering a pipeline of premier tech talent and building the foundation for a new era of technology. The 11-story, 300,000 sq. ft. first academic building for the Innovation Campus, located in Alexandria, VA, is set to open in spring 2025.
