A major investment from a long-time supporter of the university promises to significantly boost LMU’s ability to prepare students in STEM fields to participate in new technologies, research and careers of the future.
The Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Foundation has established a $25 million matching gift for LMU’s new Engineering Innovation Complex (EIC), a planned capital expansion for the LMU Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering. The gift is the largest capital gift in university history and the largest from a living donor.
Spanning two buildings, the EIC will feature a module-based layout that will provide flexibility in reconfiguring teaching and research spaces to respond to both changing needs and opportunities in key areas of investigation.
In addition to housing classes in engineering, computer science, physics and health care systems engineering, the facility will support interdisciplinary research programs. Collaborative spaces for learning, research, teaching laboratories and community spaces will enable Seaver College students and faculty to work with others in STEM fields both within and beyond the university, especially among neighboring institutions along Southern California’s technology corridor.
Mahsa Ebrahim, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, looks forward to pursuing research and working with students in the EIC. She teaches thermal-fluid science and conducts research in electronic cooling, spray cooling, droplet impingement, multi-phase flows, interfacial flows, and phase interactions.
An invaluable lesson for students is the opportunity to observe faculty working on their projects. “We can inspire one another,” Ebrahim says.
Ebrahim says the EIC promises to have a tangible impact on her ability to do experimental research and will help her ability to teach foundational aspects of the experimental research process to her students. An invaluable lesson for students is the opportunity to observe faculty working on their projects. “We can inspire one another,” she says.
“The more you do experimental work,” Ebrahim explains, “the more you learn to predict the outcome and where to troubleshoot. I try not to give my students all those answers, because they need to learn to do that themselves. Without facilities like the EIC, students are missing that part.”
Ebrahim says facilities like the EIC can be like a second home, a safe, comfortable and creative place where students can work together on the kind of engineering projects that drew them to LMU in the first place. In that sense, the EIC will operate as a kind of “idea factory,” she calls it, where students can collaborate and pursue research together.
“Words like ‘innovation’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ sometimes sound like buzz words when it comes to funding science research,” says Tina Choe, dean of Seaver College. “But the future of science research is increasingly the result of pulling together and integrating the best and most innovative advances in various fields. The EIC will open exciting new avenues of collaboration and experimentation for our students and faculty, helping spur important achievements in STEM at LMU. I am both grateful and inspired to have the support of visionary donors like the Leavey Foundation who are deeply aligned with our mission and share in our vision for the future.”
The Leavey Foundation has supported LMU for the past eight decades. “The LMU of today would not be possible without the Leavey family’s enduring partnership,” says LMU President Timothy Law Snyder, Ph.D. “Indeed, the Leaveys are in our DNA. Shaping the future requires a rigorous commitment to anticipating and addressing the yet-to-be-known, the seemingly impossible. This is more than a gift; this is a testament to our shared values and bold vision for igniting a brighter world.”