A new College of Engineering at Illinois State University (ISU) is helping close long-standing gaps in enrollment, retention, and graduation of underrepresented and underserved students in mechanical and electrical engineering. Aondover Tarhule examines design decisions that emerged from six years of analytics, stakeholder consultations, academic curriculum planning, facilities, and site analysis. He illustrates the resulting teaching lab and maker space configurations and distinctive details that differ from traditional engineering buildings in collaboration, teamwork, and affinity group study areas. He illustrates how the adaptive-reuse building serves as a learning tool and provide space for industry partnerships.

Michigan State University’s new STEM Teaching and Learning Facility delivers 21st-century classroom and laboratory spaces geared toward gateway courses in biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, engineering, and physics. And the facility will still be capable of delivering world class education and embracing emerging pedagogies well into the future with its immersive, highly flexible, and interactive learning spaces. Nestor DeOcampo sets out MSU’s thinking on key program-enabling facility investments including an easily reconfigurable grid system, high-value casework features, enhancements aimed at the student experience, and the balancing of “science in action” transparency with instructional needs and energy use targets.

Here you’ll see renovation strategies that not only deliver state-of-the-art upgrades to legacy research buildings, but also serve as a catalyst for changing the space use culture. Randy Speight profiles a floor-by-floor renovation initiative to University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Pinn Hall which has transformed previously siloed space into glass-walled labs, offices, and conference rooms that encourage collaboration and allow for efficiencies with technology, equipment, and expertise. He sets out solutions to implementation hurdles including swing space, occupant mindset, and the incorporation of Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) capabilities, and he previews what may be in store for Phase 2.

Institutions with siloed research disciplines in 2022 are suffering a distinct competitive disadvantage when it comes to discovery, student and faculty recruitment and retention, and industry partnership opportunities; it’s time to evolve! Mary Jo Spector illustrates what it takes to transition legacy research cultures to support leading-edge interdisciplinary initiatives, including the creation of “catalyst” collaborative research environments with open, flexible, and adaptable labs, shared core facilities, adaptable offices, new non-departmental space management structures, and other proven features adapted and contextualized from peer research organizations. She sets out key decisions and investments in FSU’s new Interdisciplinary Research and Commercialization Building that ensure research facility/science program relevancy and adaptability for 20 years and beyond.

A three-phase, 10-year initiative to transform an aging science facility into an engine for education and research demonstrates the value of Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) for complex, difficult, phased reconstruction projects. Tom Haskell and Sandra Shea-Crabb deliver a case study of University of Connecticut’s Gant Science Complex and identify critical tools employed to digest and resolve huge quantities of information from university end-users, designers, energy modelers, cost estimators, and space planners. They highlight the results: a fully-repaired envelope; competitive, modern, energy- and space-efficient layouts, and class-labs with state-of-the-art experiential learning, all while responding to evolving project schedules and budgets.

Thompson Rivers University (TRU) has been a world leader in campus sustainability and here you’ll get the benefit of the university’s findings on electrified nursing building design and operation, and implications for campus infrastructure planning. Matt Milovick and Diego Mandelbaum provide a case study of TRU’s first 100% electric facility, the Chappell Family Building for Nursing and Population Health -- a state-of-the-art simulation center and research lab. They highlight solutions for recovering and repurposing energy and heat for ventilation and illustrate the tradeoffs involved in balancing operating cost with carbon benefits. They examine how lessons learned to-date are informing TRU’s sustainability plans for the future, and TRU’s decision to move forward with an electrified district energy system connecting all buildings on campus, with aspirations to be a fossil fuel free campus by 2030.

A new home for the School of Data Science and National Security Collaboration Center will set University of Texas at San Antonio apart as pioneers in big data, cybersecurity, cloud computing, robotics, and artificial intelligence. David Mongeau and Corinna Green relate the key program decisions that coalesced thought leaders from across academic lines to build a new and vital data science resource – classrooms, labs, and research space – under one highly collaborative roof. They set out design features aimed at recruiting and equipping a new generation of diverse data scientists, embedding government and industry partners, and delivering the technology resources and infrastructure these programs need to stay on the cutting edge.

This end-of-day session is where key ideas, new developments, and findings that have been revealed over the course of the entire two-day conference (including sessions you may have missed) get clarified, expanded upon, and affirmed or debated. This is also the opportunity to get answers from industry leaders and the entire audience to specific questions on key and challenging issues.  

Contemporary engineering facilities must support a wide range of academic programs requiring highly specialized spaces --including robotics, automation, materials, structural design, prototyping, fluids, heat transfer, and thermodynamics. In this session, the Stantec Team demonstrates strategies for balancing specialized and modular spaces, and identify designs for space efficiency that are economical to build and operate. They deliver a decision matrix for when to integrate instructional and research labs, examine additions to specialized labs that amp the ability to accommodate a variety of functions, and demonstrate unique attributes of these space types to consider. 

Adaptive reuse is an increasingly attractive options for institutions tasked with accommodating program growth and strategically managing physical resources and capital. Session leaders examine the positive aspects of facility renovation and adaptation approaches, including attractive locations, “good bones”, sustainability, and cost, as well as workarounds for negatives including floor to floor heights, infrastructure, and floorplate sizes. They provide case studies from University of Wisconsin and Northwestern University and illustrate the kind of research spaces that can be created as well as solutions for historic building limitations.

Making the transition from a campus master plan to new building construction can be filled with challenges, even for the most experienced project teams. Presenters lay out an efficient, data-informed, and participatory programming and implementations process that delivers optimal building footprints, user groups compositions, and space types, while creating high-value backfill opportunities. They demonstrate how to closely integrate teaching and research with broader campus engagement spaces while leveraging campus resources. They examine key advantages of this process for better aligning future master plan projects with the institutional strategic vision. 

What should owners budget for cost escalation in the post-pandemic economy? What are effective ways to procure projects in a post-pandemic market? Mounting pressure on construction costs will impact all research projects on the drawing boards and in the pipeline. Attend this session to see new pathways to better pricing and more accurate budget figures. The Vermeulens team delivers construction cost forecasts based on economic conditions, commodity prices, and cost data as the pandemic-induced recession comes to an end. They profile what organizations are doing to develop bid and procurement strategies that strategically minimize exposure to construction escalation.

Highly competitive STEM programs are pushing to attract and retain students, increase capacity, and improve student outcomes -- and key to meeting those goals are cross-disciplinary convergence, experiential learning, and collaboration areas, and leveraging the entire building as learning and maker space. In this session, RFD charts the emerging trends, metrics, and layouts for world-class STEM facilities, and the facility design solutions that successfully balance complex building system requirements with inspirational environments for learning and discovery. They identify must-have program-enabling facility elements and profile recently completed projects from across the US, highlighting design and layout strategies and pitfalls to avoid. 

The Anna Hiss Gymnasium on The University of Texas at Austin campus is a prime example of a successful adaptive reuse project designed to support high-growth research and academic programs and industry partnerships. Session leaders detail the process that identified vital decision makers from Aerospace Engineering, Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Fine Arts to enable robust capital project decisions for immersive environments and cross-functional innovation teams. They scope out cost variables, funding models, and ownership considerations, and strategies for maintaining the historical significance of a legacy building.

The 21st-century campus has ushered in new innovation models that converge traditional science, engineering, and health disciplines with new technology interfaces, industry partnerships, and shared resources in ways previously unimagined. This requires a new facility model combining highly adaptable, specialized advanced technology spaces in support of interdisciplinary, team-based exploration. Session leaders profile three recent construction initiatives and distill key building components that leading-edge universities are leveraging as they redefine engineering facility benchmarks and support the next evolution of engineering and innovation programs.

The easy answer to increased demand for science and innovation space is to build a new facility, but underappreciated and underutilized older buildings are too often overlooked as a potential resource. Presenters examine build new vs. renovate decision-making rationales being employed to meet increased research space requirements, and they identify cost mitigation effects of responsive programming and facility reuse. They enumerate key functional needs for a diverse range of research labs including bioscience, automation, artificial intelligence, robotics and sustainable design that respond to the increasingly team-based, collaborative, and interdisciplinary activities. They highlight metric and benchmarks from recently completed projects.

Collaborative workspaces are crucial to successful research outcomes for both experimentalists and theorists, and this session offers new tools and design strategies to make interaction and collaboration a reality at your institution. Session leaders call upon case study of Princeton’s Environmental Studies and School of Engineering and Applied Science (ES+SEAS) building to illustrate flexible collaborative environments aimed at meeting unique departmental requirements, enhancing community, and supporting intellectual exchange. They demonstrate how campus standards were leveraged to create a building capable of evolution and discuss how these collaborative environments facilitate the integration of undergraduates into Princeton’s research culture.

In tandem with MSU’s plenary session presentation, here we dig deeper into the new STEM learning facility at Michigan State University with a focus on distinctive features setting a new high bar for STEM building design. This includes next-level-flexible learning labs for emerging pedagogies, the use of mass to support carbon-neutrality goals, and adaptive reuse of a historic facility for inspiring STEM spaces. They scope out the up-front vs lifecycle costs of extreme flexibility, how mass timber changes the equation for design decisions and budgets, and where student support space metrics are headed.

The demand for science spaces at research-oriented universities remains high, and post-pandemic campus planning has created new opportunities for repurposing non-science spaces into spaces for research. Session leaders examine the challenges and strategies employed to convert traditional commercial office space into BSL2/CL2 labs for the University of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine. They detail design solutions creating adaptable, flexible labs instead of labs tailored to a single PI/research focus. They demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaboration and iterative design can deliver efficient, agile, and cost-effective labs and support spaces. 

Integration of the Arts into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curricula has been accelerating for many years, but what is the best way to approach the STEAM initiative in new building design? In this session, presenters call upon a case study of the Instructional Laboratory and Innovative Learning Building (ILSQ) at Texas A&M how the building was designed so science and architecture students intentionally and productively collide. They illustrate how to anticipate and reconcile conflicting program requirements to create a culture of collaboration and pave the way for additional, future program combinations.

Campus electrification is gaining ground as a viable CO2 emission mitigation strategy, and making campuses cleaner and more energy efficient. In this session, presenters demonstrate the strategies higher education institutions should put in place now for campus electrification, and how to get buy in from a diverse set of stakeholders. They illustrate alternative approaches to higher ed campus design that respond to the cleaner electrical grid, and they scope out solutions for overcoming building electrification hurdles, including the application of new systems and equipment now coming onto the market.

All higher education institutions are now being challenged to accommodate the research and learning goals of individual departments while balancing the needs of converging interdisciplinary programs. In this session, presenters deliver a case study of the new Ford Robotics Building at the University of Michigan to demonstrate design solutions creating behavior shifts in support of interdisciplinarity and program convergence. They illustrate how the institution’s ‘Theory-Make-Test’ research drives the design of shared learning spaces, makerspaces, and active learning labs to generate idea exchange, while still retaining specialized spaces for intense research and individual program requirements.

Electron beam lithography, electron microscopes, and new ultra-precision instruments on the horizon are becoming critical for the success of nanotech, materials, and life science research programs and facilities, and building vibration is a potential program killer you need to get ahead of! Steve Ryan details how to plan for the extremely low-vibration environments demanded by nanoscale and other advanced technology spaces, including passive vibration isolation, massive isolated plinths, and point-of-use inertial active vibration control pedestals. He examines case studies of new construction and renovations at higher education engineering and advanced technology facilities.

Successful maker spaces manifest in many different forms in response to unique institutional strategic goals and industry research partnerships. Session leaders illustrate the influence of varying program emphases, business models, and operating cost targets on maker space design solutions, and deliver findings pertinent to all engineering and advanced science space initiatives. They contrast strategic drivers and results for three diverse maker suites serving the fields of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and computer science, including a post-occupancy evaluation of a BIG 10 engineering school's maker space. They detail programming metrics and space utilization strategies, and design features supporting entrepreneurship and team-based collaborations.

Many institutions are moving away from purpose driven research labs to maximize long-term facility viability through flexible systems and infrastructure. In this session, Leslie Sims and Angel Flores provide strategies to deliver intense, uber flexible lab environments with infrastructure and MEP systems that can be reconfigured for a range of science programs, augment carbon neutrality, and reduce energy use. They examine multiple recent case studies to compare and contrast purpose-built labs with flexible labs in terms of costs, equipment, operating and safety considerations.

Here you’ll get new concepts and recent benchmarks for translating unique institutional goals and visions into buildings reflecting the latest collaborative multi-disciplinary environments and shared resource concepts. Presenters profile five case studies with similar ambitious science program goals, and illustrate the influence of each institution’s distinct campus culture in shaping unique buildings that support larger institutional missions. They set out strategies for engaging with university thought leaders, focusing and communicating key values, and ensuring projects stay aligned with culture and vision targets throughout design and delivery processes.