Scientific discovery involves refinement and rethinking, skills that are in abundant supply across the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences.

Just take a stroll across the college’s buildings. In Farrell Hall, you’ll find faculty and students working on cross-disciplinary projects such as crowd-sourcing the electric grid. In Votey Hall’s Fab Lab, students are finding the sweet spot between art and technology, tapping 3D printers and laser cutters to bring their creations to life.

With interdisciplinary research pushing ahead at CEMS, the University of Vermont is readying a major commitment to re-envisioning how its students and faculty engage in the so-called STEM fields, or science, technology, engineering and mathematics. During the next four years, the university will create a $104 million STEM complex to promote teaching and research within those fields, securing UVM’s reputation as a “public ivy.”

The project represents both an investment in CEMS and a reevaluation of the needs of students and faculty in the STEM fields. The university will create a new literal and figurative heart of the campus, dramatically changing its face with two new campus buildings that are designed to encourage the type of interdisciplinary efforts that are becoming the hallmark of CEMS.

“Imagine teaching and learning spaces without walls, without barriers, and without limits. Highly flexible, rapidly adaptable, and infinitely reconfigurable – to accommodate changing needs, evolving priorities, and new opportunities,” Provost David Rosowsky recently told the university’s board of trustees.

Under President Tom Sullivan’s leadership, creating a new STEM center for the university became a priority, and the university’s board of trustees approved the project’s $104 million budget this May. Construction will start next year according to Jesse Beck, one of the architects on the project and president of Burlington-based Freeman French Freeman.

About three-quarters of the project’s cost will be covered through bonding, while the university is seeking $26 million from non-debt sources, such as private gifts.

STEM Growth

For CEMS, the new buildings come at a crucial juncture. President Obama has called for the nation’s colleges and universities to produce 1 million new STEM graduates over the next decade. At the same time, jobs in STEM fields are projected to grow at 1.7 times the rate as occupations outside those fields, according to the Department of Commerce.

To attract those STEM-minded students and new faculty University of Vermont’s leaders realized its buildings needed “to be brought into the 21st century,” notes Bob Vaughan, University of Vermont’s director of capital planning and management.

Two buildings from the 1960s – Cook and Angell Lecture Hall – will be torn down and replaced with two new buildings offering more than 180,000 square feet of offices, laboratories and classrooms, while Votey will undergo an extensive renovation to create more spacious, updated labs and classrooms. Aesthetically, the new buildings will connect to what Vaughan calls “the face of the university,” the late 19th century buildings that line University Place.

The goal for the new complex goes far beyond ensuring UVM offers state-of-the-art STEM facilities, notes Michael Lauber, president of Boston-based architecture firm Ellenzweig, which is designing the project with local Freeman French Freeman. Because so many STEM fields engage in cross-pollination, the plan is to create physical spaces – like shared labs and office space – where computer science faculty can work closely with electrical engineers, for instance, or physics majors can brainstorm with mechanical engineers.

In one sense, the physical design of the STEM complex will reinforce the type of cross-disciplinary research that’s already earning CEMS faculty international recognition. Take the Vermont Complex Systems Center, which has been featured by the BBC, The New York Times and CNN.

The group includes computer science professor Josh Bongard; math professors Peter Dodds, Chris Danforth and James Bagrow; engineering professors Paul Hines and Yves Dubief; and Computer Science chair Maggie Eppstein. The group’s approach addresses far-ranging questions such as whether crowd-sourcing can help improve energy efficiency, and how to track the world’s collective mood with Twitter.

The group includes computer science professor Josh Bongard; math professors Peter Dodds, Chris Danforth and James Bagrow; engineering professors Paul Hines and Yves Dubief; and Computer Science chair Maggie Eppstein. The group’s approach addresses far-ranging questions such as whether crowd-sourcing can help improve energy efficiency, and how to track the world’s collective mood with Twitter.

Votey’s Legacy

When Votey Hall was built in 1964, engineers still worked with slide rules, and the nation’s first computer science department, created at Purdue University, was only two years old.

Updating the CEMS physical plant would likely be wholeheartedly endorsed by the late Josiah William Votey, who served as the dean of UVM’s College of Engineering from 1901 through 1931, and whose legacy was celebrated half a century ago when the university named its then-new engineering building in his honor. Votey, who himself graduated from UVM in 1884, not only educated generations of UVM scientists, but he was credited with modernizing Vermont’s roads and water systems in the early 20^th century.

Votey Hall was built at a time when the U.S. was expecting a surge in college enrollment, as well as a boost in interest from young men and women in science, engineering and technology jobs.

Today, the STEM fields are likewise creating flourishing job opportunities. Local businesses such as Keurig Green Mountain and Dealer.com have looked to CEMS for their interns and new hires. Other CEMS graduates are finding jobs in Silicon Valley, with alumni moving to firms such as LinkedIn and Tesla Motors.

Votey Hall will be “given a makeover so that it meets today’s program needs,” Vaughan notes. Some of the labs “look like they were built in 1964, which they were. We have advanced somewhat since 1964.”

A skybridge will connect Votey to the new 80,000 square-foot building that will be built where Angell stands today, while the engineering building’s renovations will include new foyers that will provide sunnier and more welcoming entrances to the building.

The math department, which is currently split between four buildings, and computer science, which is currently based in Votey, will move into one of the new STEM buildings. That will allow the classrooms and labs in Votey to be renovated with larger footprints, as well as to bring in more sunlight and a more open feel by adding glass walls, Freeman French Freeman’s Beck notes.

As Vaughan sees it, the STEM complex will transform the campus, both from a physical and academic standpoint, similar to the way the Dudley H. Davis Center created a vital new student center while also providing an updated entrance to the campus. All the STEM fields will be integrated into the complex, rather than more silo-based structure used today.

“It won’t be, ‘This is chemistry, and this is engineering,’” Vaughan notes. “It will be, ‘This is a floor that has all of them.’”