The IDEA Factory's unique spaces and labs will enable students, faculty, and staff to address 21st century challenges while also serving as venues to translate basic research into invention and invention into product.
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After a Fall 2018 groundbreaking and an ensuing period of fundraising, construction on the dramatic 60,000-square-foot facility next to the Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building begin in early 2020. Because we recognize that creativity is organic, we are designing a building that is unconventional in every way. In fact, the IDEA Factory will be drastically different from any other building on campus. The building design will spark innovation, encouraging a collision of ideas across engineering as well as the arts, business and science. Its movable walls and shared spaces will promote dialogue between students, entrepreneurs and faculty who are working in diverse fields such as multimedia, robotics, rotorcraft, and quantum engineering.
The ground floor will house the ALEx Garage, a student competition space that Clark School teams will vie to use for set periods of time, as well as a rapid prototyping lab equipped with 3D printers and other in-demand gear.
Lockheed Martin gave $2.5 million to equip the Alfred A. Gessow Rotorcraft Center, which will occupy the fourth and fifth floors of the building, continuing its nearly four-decade mission of carrying out interdisciplinary research on the aeromechanics of rotorcraft systems.
The second floor will be a glass-enclosed “engineering community hub” including a café with extensive seating and two conference rooms/lounges and a large outdoor patio.
The Maryland Robotics Center's Robotics and Autonomy Laboratory will occupy the third floor with lab and office space dedicated to advancing robotics systems, underlying component technologies, and applications of robotics through interdisciplinary, systems-based research and educational programs.
Maryland Robotics CenterThe ground floor will also serve as the new home of Startup Shell — a student-run coworking space and incubator that provides a pipeline and network for student-run startups to scale out of the college campus. Startup Shell was founded out of a storage closet in 2012 with the mission of creating an entrepreneurship community for students at the University of Maryland.
Startup ShellThe Quantum Technology Center (QTC) is a new joint center between the A. James Clark School of Engineering and the Department of Physics, and will focus on translating quantum physics into innovative technologies. UMD has initially committed 4 new faculty lines to this Center, which aims to become a nexus for a National Quantum Initiative.
Quantum Technology Center
