The Centennial Engineering Center

Why We Need a New Facility

1. Crowded classrooms, outdated labs, inadequate research facilities
Many of the significant accomplishments of the School of Engineering have occurred in outdated classrooms and run-down laboratories. Wagner Hall and Tapy Hall, which house Civil Engineering classrooms and laboratories, were built in the 1950s and are no longer compliant with building standards and codes. There are crowded classrooms with poor ventilation and old wiring, outdated labs with run-down equipment and inadequate research facilities.

2. Maintenance costs
The costs to run these older buildings is staggering. Campus wide, the average cost to maintain a building is $1.70 per square foot. They cost nearly three times that much - $4.50 per square foot.

3. Need to upgrade technology
The School must significantly upgrade classroom, auditorium and laboratory technology. Computing has transformed the way students live, work, and learn. Engineering and computer science students must have access to the advanced information technology that is now an integral part of their professions.

4. Inadequate office space
The current office space for student services, faculty, graduate students and administration is inadequate and scattered in several buildings.

5. Limiting resources
Current School facilities clearly are not representative of the highly professional and progressive quality of its programs or of the University of New Mexico. This directly limits national recruitment of top students and faculty.

This building is essential to every engineering program at UNM by providing:

• New classrooms with modern learning technology to replace crowded, outmoded facilities.
• State-of-the-art teaching labs for educating students in key areas of technology.
• New research facilities for biomedical engineering and other areas for education and economic development.
• Compliance with ABET accreditation reviews that recommended replacing existing buildings.
• New facilities to support increased diversity and to promote student success.
• Reduced maintenance costs. (The cost to maintain the current buildings is nearly three times the cost campus wide.)

UNM engineering programs are vital to the prosperity and well being of the citizens of the state of New Mexico. These programs:

• Provide a technical workforce for existing and future New Mexico companies in such areas as civil and construction engineering, information technology and digital media, nanotechnology and semiconductor manufacturing, and aviation and aerospace.

• Facilitate collaboration on critical medial research with the UNM Health Sciences Center.

• Enable new and stronger collaborations to support local companies.

• Allow more competitiveness in pursuing research grants to find solutions to key issues facing our state.

UNM Engineering's economic impact to the state:

• Increases our ability to meet New Mexico's need for new engineers and computer scientists

• $25M/year in SOE expenditures in sponsored research in nanotechnology, biomedicine, IT, robotics, the environment, and more

• Out of 12 UNM startup companies, 9 use School of Engineering patents

• Out of 51 UNM inventors campus-wide, 27 are from the School of Engineering

The Centennial Engineering Center is critical to meeting the needs of all New Mexicans.

School of Engineering Office of the Dean Farris Engineering Center 107 - MSC01 1140 1 University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001 Phone: (505) 277-5521 Fax: (505) 277-1422 email: soe@unm.edu