Corporate executives, academic elites, senior administrators and a handful of alumni flocked to Science Drive this weekend for a slew of events honoring the opening of the Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences.
Completion of the almost $100 million center--home to interdisciplinary research initiatives in biology, photonics, materials and integrated sensors--marks the latest in a series of moves to expand the Pratt School of Engineering under Dean Kristina Johnson's guidance.
Panels and discussions held during the two-day celebration focused on the University's potential to remain on the cutting edge via cross-disciplinary, inter-curricular study.
"I have always said that it's good for an engineer to go to a liberal arts school," Johnson said. "[Students] need to know the societal implications of the technology they're studying." CIEMAS, she added, represents a shift from myopic, departmentalized teaching to a more holistic and practical approach.
Assembled faculty and notable guests also discussed obstacles facing young engineers, including the overwhelming trend of job-outsourcing to foreign workers. Increased undergraduate research, interactive learning and industry-relevant training are seen as ways to return jobs to American engineers. These new learning approaches, all championed by Johnson and others in Pratt's administration, will now be possible with the added facilities.
"Leadership is not so much taught as it is revealed," Johnson said. "We need to educate leaders to be well-rounded--that's the stuff that sustains major innovation. I don't think you can outsource leadership."
The four new buildings, which combine for a total of more than 300,000 square feet, more than double existing teaching and research space. This increase allows for the ease of integrating different disciplines such as photonics, genomics and environmental engineering.
Another cited aim is for CIEMAS, through its architectural design, to foster a more social atmosphere conducive to faculty-student collaboration, which was noticeably absent in the past. "If you were an engineer before, where did you hang out? In the street? There was nowhere. There was no sense of belonging to a place. There was no sense of meeting your friends and gathering in a place," Executive Vice President Tallman Trask said. "Now there's a real big sense of it."
Landscaped pathways, courtyards and a new Engineering Quadrangle are designed to integrate the building fluidly between the Medical Center and the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. Other highlighted features that encourage increased faculty-to-student and student-to-student communication include several interactive common rooms called "intellectual collision spaces" as well as a new cafe.
Decoratively speaking, architects spared no detail. Glass windows were etched with patterns chosen in a Pratt-wide contest--one a Leonardo da Vinci sketch, the other a bio-networking "tree" symbol. The genetic code for breast cancer is tiled on the women's bathroom floor, and the configuration of a protein molecule is tiled in the men's bathroom.
Construction began on CIEMAS in May 2002 and was finished on schedule this past August. The four buildings of the complex are named for the benefactors who made their construction possible, most prominently Michael and Patricia Fitzpatrick, Trinity '70 and Woman's College '69. Now completed, the state-of-the-art facilities are also intended to attract more famed faculty and talented students; Pratt currently seeks to expand by 200 students over the next four years.
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