Powell-Focht Bioengineering Hall, the newest building addition to the Jacobs School of Engineering, opened its doors to students and faculty at the start of winter quarter. While minor construction is still taking place inside the new Powell-Focht building, lab research has started and faculty and staff have moved into the five-story building adjacent to Bioengineering Building 1 in Earl Warren College.
The building, constructed in response to the rapidly growing engineering student enrollment, caters to both undergraduate and graduate students as well as to research faculty.
“”It’s like moving into a new house: It just takes a bit of adjustment,”” said Bioengineering Undergraduate Student Affairs Assistant Marisol Nierva-Magnano. “”But it’s absolutely beautiful and our students love it.””
Construction of the building started in the summer of 2002; the effort was entirely privately funded.
“”It’s important to notice that this building is the first fully privately funded building on the UCSD campus,”” said Interim Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering Frieder Siebel.
The 109,000-square-foot building cost about $37 million. Donations were made primarily from the Whitaker Foundation, the Powell Foundation and the Von Liebig Foundation.
Two more engineering buildings are currently being constructed adjacent to the current buildings; both the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and the Computer Science and Engineering Building are slated for completion in 2004.
A number of laboratory rooms in Powell-Focht’s basement floor are still empty, but are scheduled for shell build-out in May 2004. This, according to Director of Capital Planning Brian Gregory, happened because the use of these labs had not yet been determined when the building was designed in 1999.
According to Gregory, the new building and the two buildings to come are helping ease crowding. A number of faculty members from Engineering Building Unit 1 will relocate to the other buildings, making room for hiring new faculty.
The physical growth of the Jacobs School of Engineering comes as a response to its growth in both popularity and demand. Because applications are on the rise UC system-wide, the school plans to increase enrollment to about 20 percent of UCSD students, according to Siebel. Current enrollment numbers are at 4,200 undergraduate and 925 graduate students, but are expected to grow to 4,380 and 1,250 by 2006, respectively. In 2002, the school received 5,200 graduate applications. The school has nearly doubled in size in the past two years and was recently ranked 14th in the nation among engineering schools by U.S. News and World Report. This ranks the school below UC Berkeley, which ranks second, but above any other University of California, including UCLA, which ranks 21st. According to Siebel, the school will be the biggest school of engineering on UC campuses upon completion.
According to Jacobs School of Engineering Director of Communications Denine Hagen, the increase in student applications grows not only from an increase in students’ interest in a quickly rising reputation, but also from an increase in companies’ demand for highly trained engineers.
The $102.5 million Cal-IT2 building will focus on interdisciplinary research, with a focus on wireless technology, the Internet and other forms of communication. Faculty from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and from the School of Medicine will be included into the institute’s research programs, in addition to other UCSD faculty from a wide variety of departments, students, visiting scholars and industrial partners. The building, which is state-funded, will include a new media arts facility, in which a two-story virtual reality theater will be constructed. This theater will be designed to enable visualization of research and of new types of artistic expression. Also included will be a rooftop antenna garden, wireless communications laboratories and a state-of-the-art “”clean room,”” among other laboratories. The first floor will also house the new Warren College Provosts’ Office.
The $41 million Computer Science and Engineering Building, which is also state-funded, in part by Proposition 147, will relocate the current computer science and engineering departments, currently in Applied Physics & Mathematics, to Warren college.
According to Siebel, one more building, tentatively named Engineering Building Unit 4, is anticipated for completion by 2010. State funds have not yet been allocated for it, nor will planning begin until next year, but according to Seibel, this building will hopefully house structural engineering and be the last major engineering building to be constructed before engineering growth at UCSD is expected to plateau in 2010.