Maryland Now | UMD Dedicates Strategy Factory

Fernandez speaks at IDEA Factory dedication ceremony

The Plan Factory’s movable walls and shared areas will endorse dialogue among college students, entrepreneurs and faculty who are doing work in fields these as multimedia, robotics, rotorcraft and quantum engineering. Specifically hanging is a façade dominated by an massive window created from laminated glass addressed with a film that creates radiant color shifts, primarily based on wherever viewers are standing.

“Engineering delivers collectively excellent minds—people with different backgrounds and perspectives, on the lookout at the similar challenge in distinctive ways—to collaborate on remedies that serve humanity. The Idea Manufacturing facility will catalyze those collaborations,” mentioned Clark University Dean Samuel Graham, Jr. “When the entire world appears to be like for solutions, it arrives to Maryland Engineering. We are exceptionally appreciative of our supporters for providing our pupils, college and staff members a new put to do cutting-edge do the job.”

The making is named for Emilio Fernandez ’69, a Maryland engineering alum, entrepreneur and inventor who holds dozens of patents, which includes one particular that described e-examining products and is the most-cited U.S. patent at any time issued. Numerous of these patents were being co-invented with his close friend, company associate and fellow Terp Angel Bezos ’69. Their inventions and their firm, Pulse Electronics, transformed railroad functions. The building’s cornerstone present came from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation’s Developing Together: An Financial commitment for Maryland in 2017.

Fernandez reported he hopes the Concept Manufacturing facility will accelerate the inclusive collaboration that our modern society wants in buy to remedy its grand problems. “Today’s troubles are complex, and they need interdisciplinary solutions,” he claimed. “We have to combine our specialties so that our knowledge evolves into products and solutions and services that enable humanity.”

The new Plan Manufacturing unit is the most current infrastructure addition to UMD’s vivid innovation ecosystem. It contains UMD’s Discovery District, as perfectly as the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer system Science and Engineering (2019), a hub for know-how, collaboration and discovery A. James Clark Hall (2017), designed to foster development of transformative engineering and biomedical technologies to advance human well being and the Actual physical Sciences Complex (2013), produced to give great ailments for scientific collaboration, investigate and innovation with partners across campus and at local federal organizations like the Nationwide Institute of Benchmarks and Technology, NASA Goddard and the National Institutes of Health.