After more than two years of construction, a new $78 million engineering and design center will greet students at the University of Maine when they return for classes next week, marking the largest project of its kind in UMaine history and a boost for the university’s engineering offerings.
UMaine on Wednesday formally opens its new Ferland Engineering Education and Design Center.
The 115,000-square-foot, three-story facility will house UMaine’s mechanical engineering department and biomedical engineering program, and give the university the capacity to grow engineering enrollment by a third — adding 600 students a year — to meet a high demand for people with engineering skill sets.
There were six entry-level jobs in Maine for every UMaine electrical engineering graduate last year, and four for every civil engineering graduate, said Dana Humphrey, the longtime dean of the UMaine College of Engineering. That shows the state has a surplus of jobs in engineering fields, but not enough qualified workers to fill them, he said.
“The workforce desperately needs them,” Humphrey said. “We do not have enough. My role and my vision during my 16 years as dean were: How do we recruit students? How do we have the capacity to educate those students so we can fill the needs of Maine’s workforce?”
The engineering center’s opening is a capstone of sorts for Humphrey’s career. After 40 years at UMaine, including the last 16 as dean, Humphrey will retire at the end of this week.
Left to right, Next Monday, the first round of students will be welcomed as classes begin in the new Ferland Engineering Education and Design Center on UMaine’s Orono campus. The $78 million facility is the largest project of its kind in UMaine history and featured a $50 million investment from the state of Maine. Credit: Courtesy of the University of Maine
The new building will have a mix of spaces for teaching as well as faculty and student research.
One feature is the Student Project Design Suite, which has 44 workbenches that will be assigned to students and includes specialized shops where students can create projects and prototypes using 3D printing, metals, wood, composites and other technologies, Humphrey said.
The new center also features a new Campus Welcome and STEM Outreach Center, which will be the new starting point for campus tours for prospective students.
The facility was designed with flexibility in mind, with large lab spaces that feature moving workstations, and customizable rooms that can easily adapt to whatever students need in a given space, Humphrey said.
With its mixture of teaching and research capabilities, the center will help reinforce UMaine’s recently attained “R1” status, a designation that classifies UMaine as a top-tier research university because of the amount of research happening on campus, UMaine President Joan Ferrini-Mundy said.
“I see the future,” Ferrini-Mundy said. “This is where the university is headed. This will be a legacy that will serve engineering for years to come.”
The building is named after Skowhegan natives E. James and Eileen Ferland, who made a $10 million donation for the project, the largest single contribution in the university’s history. E. James Ferland is a 1964 UMaine graduate. The project has also benefited from state funding.
While the building is located on the University of Maine System’s flagship campus in Orono, it will serve a role for the entire system, as the cornerstone of a new, statewide Maine College of Engineering, Computing and Information Science that is taking shape.
The new college will house engineering programs from both the University of Southern Maine and UMaine, as well as UMaine’s computer science program.
The public can see the grand opening of the new facility Wednesday via live stream.