Provincial Engineering & Geoscience Week

8 | W I N N I P E G F R E E P R E S S P R O V I N C I A L E N G I N E E R I N G & G E O S C I E N C E W E E K New engineering facility creates buzz T here's a new face on the University of Manitoba's Fort Garry campus and its already turning some heads. The Stanley Pauley Centre, the U of M's new engineering building, welcomed its first class of students on Jan. 14, marking the unofficial opening of the faculty of engineering's new teaching and research facility. The remainder of the building will be commissioned over the next several weeks and is expected to be fully occupied and functional sometime this spring. The building's black granite masonry shell, welcoming classrooms, state-of-the-art labs and cutting-edge test facilities have been generating plenty of buzz among faculty students and staff. "I think the buzz has kind of been building for a couple of years as we went through the planning and construction phases," says Jonathan Beddoes, dean of the U of M's faculty of engineering. "Now that we're able to move in I think people have been quite excited to see what it looks like. It looks quite different from our existing building because we want to use this new building to offer different opportunities to our students and offer them an engineering education just a bit differently than we did before." The new facility is named in honour of Stanley Pauley, a well-known businessman and philanthropist who is a graduate of the U of M's engineering program. The Pauley Family Foundation provided $5 million towards the construction of the building. The new structure will provide the engineering faculty with an additional 46,134 square feet of classroom and research space. Beddoes says the additional space was desperately needed to meet the growing demand for the school's engineering programs. Total enrolment in the engineering faculty is currently at about 2,300 students and has grown by 57 per cent since 2010. "To accommodate that expansion of the enrolment we needed to expand the facilities available to students so we can properly support them," he says. "We also wanted to be able to meet our growing research enterprise in the faculty. We have roughly 500 master's and PhD students. Supporting the research all of them are doing along with faculty supervisors became increasingly difficult with the square footage we had available." In addition to offering significantly more study and research space, the new building will feature additional space for student-led design teams and two large laboratories for electrical engineering students. "Our electrical engineering enrolment at the undergraduate level has more than doubled this decade. That had created some pinch points in terms of laboratory space," Beddoes says. The Stanley Pauley Building will operate in conjunction with the school's existing Engineering Information and Technology Complex (EITC). Beddoes says every effort was made to ensure that the two facilities are fully integrated and to allow for the easy movement of students and staff between them. Two overhead walkways serve to unite the two buildings as one. "We spent quite a bit of time in the early design phase with (building designer) Stantec working through how were we going to manage the pedestrian traffic flow between the existing building and the new one. I think in the end it's turned out to be a very functional building in that respect," he adds. Beddoes says the project would not have been possible without the support of the school's funding partners. In addition to the Pauley Family Foundation, it also received significant funding from the federal and provincial governments as well as more than 700 groups and individuals through the university's Front and Centre fundraising campaign. "It's been a pretty big team effort for a number of years to get to this point," he says. That team effort included some meaningful input from the school's engineering students throughout the planning phase, something Beddoes says was critical to the success of the project. "I hope that as a result of their involvement we end up with spaces that serve the students much better than they would otherwise," he says. The new facility is expected to help launch the careers of several generations of successful new engineers in the years to come. Success isn't exactly something new when it comes to engineering students from the U of M, though. In the last year alone they have won gold at two of the world's most prestigious student engineering design competitions. Last March, a team of U of M mechanical engineering students claimed top spot with their radio-controlled aircraft at the SAE Aero Competition in Florida. They also earned a first place finish at the Canadian Satellite Design Challenge in Ottawa last spring and landed a chance to build a cubesat, a miniaturized satellite designed for space research, that the Canadian Space Agency will launch sometime in the not too distant future. "It's not surprising to me that they do as well as they have done in these competitions," Beddoes says. "At the same time it's very gratifying for me to see our students' efforts rewarded and to see that the calibre of our students is recognized by these other entities." ❚ By Jim Timlick for the Free Press The University of Manitoba's new engineering building, the Stanley Pauley Centre. Photo by Jason Halstead

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