After months of planning and designing, the University of Houston broke ground on the new Multidisciplinary Research and Engineering Building (MREB) on Monday, October 6.
Construction on the MREB will officially begin next month with a scheduled completion for summer 2016. The four-story, 120,000 gross square feet building will house research labs, computational training facilities, visualization lab, a high performance computational server room, and an NMR spectrometer lab. It will stand in the shadow of the old “Y” building, between the engineering complex and Calhoun Lofts Apartments.
“This is certainly a milestone for the University of Houston and for the Cullen College of Engineering,” said Joseph Tedesco, Dean of the Cullen College, at Monday’s ceremony. “We are here this morning to break ground on this new facility because of the leadership of Dr. Renu Khator and her vision for the University of Houston and Cullen College of Engineering to expand its size and to rise among the top engineering programs in the United States.”
“This building brings together a very different vision,” said Renu Khator, Chancellor and President of the University of Houston System. “This building has an eye on expanding research, this building has on eye on bringing researchers from across the campus, from different colleges, together to focus on a common task. Engineering is on a mission, they have a quantifiable goal."
Over the next several years, the Cullen College of Engineering’s mission is to catapult into the top 50 engineering programs in the nation. By 2020, the Cullen College will double its student body and increase its faculty members by 50 percent. The MREB will help the college to achieve these goals, in addition to allowing the college to establish new research collaborations with private industry, federal government, and researchers from institutions across the country and around the world.
Click here to learn more about the MREB, and watch the full video from the groundbreaking ceremony below.