SEAS gift to help build new facility

Melvin Levine, a 1946 Wharton School graduate, donated $5 million for a new computer science building. New Jersey businessperson and 1946 Wharton graduate Melvin Levine and his wife Claire have donated $5 million toward the construction of a new facility for the the School of Engineering and Applied Science, University officials announced Friday. Interim Engineering Dean Eduardo Glandt said the Levine donation will be used to enlarge the University's Institute for Advanced Science and Technology -- a series of high-tech buildings that house "centers of excellence for science and technology." The gift will contribute to the funding of a new $15 million, 40,000-square-foot computer science facility that will join the Towne Building and the graduate research wing of the Moore Building on the eastern end of campus. The facility is slated for the space currently occupied by a parking lot between the two buildings. Though officials have not yet hired an architect for the project, they are confident it will be completed in two years. The remainder of the funding for the new facility will come from a $10 million grant from the United States Air Force, Glandt said. The new building will encompass offices for faculty and graduate students, computer labs, classrooms and meeting rooms. The General Robotics and Active Sensory and Perception Laboratory, which is currently located in the 3401 Walnut Street complex, will move into the new facility in an effort to centralize the Engineering School's operations. "We want undergraduates to work in the labs? and having a remote research facility deprives us to a great extent of being able to involve everybody," Glandt said. "So we are very happy to have [the new addition] here." He added that the Engineering School is composed of eight buildings, four of which are adjacent to one another. The other four -- the Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories, Hayden Hall, the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter and the GRASP Laboratory -- are disjoined, creating "intellectual barriers." According to University President Judith Rodin, the facility will accommodate "the expanding size of computer and information technology." Computer and Information Science Department Chairperson Mitch Marcus said that "this building will give us space to expand our faculty and to expand our research activities, which means a wider range of courses -- both for CIS majors and for students outside of CIS -- and increased research opportunities for undergraduates." "We've been very lucky to be chosen as one of the areas for growth," he added. According to Glandt, the enhancement of computer and information science "is a realization of one of the University's six academic priorities that are listed in the strategic plan, [the] Agenda for Excellence" -- Rodin's five-year plan for campus improvement and academic innovation. CIS and Mechanical Engineering Professor Vijay Kumar said the new facility will benefit the Engineering School in a number of areas, but he said he would have liked it to have come earlier. "I believe the new building will directly impact rankings, the ability to hire star faculty members and to recruit top undergraduate and graduate students," Kumar said. "I only wish this had happened five years earlier. About five years ago, the Air Force gave several million dollars to the University to begin the Vagelos Laboratories, the first phase of the IAST project. The Vagelos building, which was completed in November 1997, contains two interdisciplinary research centers -- the Institute for Medicine and Engineering and the Center for Excellence in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. Levine, a native of Philadelphia, enrolled in Wharton in 1943. After two semesters, he joined the United States Navy and was selected for the Victory-12 program -- a college training program that evolved into the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps. The V12 program sent Levine back to the University, where he took a number of Engineering courses in the Towne and Moore buildings, near where the new facility will be constructed. He received his naval commission as he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Economics in 1946. Levine is currently president and director of the Egg Harbor, N.J.-based Atlantic Plastic Container Corp.

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