14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) announce that they have been recently awarded more than $7.5 million for starting renovations on infrastructure. The goal is to produce so-called “collaboratories,” which are in effect collaborative labs focused on sustainability research. The money was awarded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF).
The organization instructed the UCLA to funnel the entire sum towards repairing core mechanical, electrical and plumbing infrastructure in the university's Boelter Hal beginning this August. This building is the current host of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science's departments of chemical and biomolecular engineering, civil and environmental engineering, and computer science. When work here is completed, four new collaboratories would have been created, the grant proposal says.
Some of the goals the new laboratories will have include conducting new studies into renewable and alternative energy production and storage, as well as in sustainable infrastructure, and environmental engineering. The Boelter Hall will have a collaboratory designed to investigate sustainable water systems, another that will look into energy research, another aimed at researching sustainable infrastructures, and a fourth that will look into biomolecular engineering–enabled sustainability.
“Adequate state-of-the-art research infrastructure is very much needed to maintain the excellent upward trajectory of our school. We are thankful to the NSF, as this is a great opportunity for us to create better and more suitable space for the significant research that our faculty conducts on a daily basis,” says the dean of UCLA Engineering, Vijay K. Dhir.
“Several of our faculty are interested in using this information to study not just how energy and utilities are being utilized in different ways by very different types of research but also how they can disseminate this information and encourage human behavioral change. We are pursuing some very unique ideas here for the first time. It's very exciting,” UCLA Engineering's associate dean of research and physical resources Jane Chang says. The new NSF award was funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA 2009).