Taylor’s engineering department received a $2 million grant that will provide cutting-edge technology and new spaces for students.
The new additions will include a rapid prototyping studio and an engineering innovation and collaboration studio on the ground level of the Euler Science Complex. There will also be new equipment and renovations in the machine shop and more space for new equipment in one of the laboratories in the Nussbaum Science Complex.
“This year, we're focused on engineering innovation and collaboration spaces and additional machining and prototyping equipment,” Danielle Nobles-Lookingbill, department chair and assistant professor of engineering, said.
She referred to the machinery that Taylor University will be getting as what the industry considers 4.0, and what she believes is 5.0 advanced manufacturing equipment.
When the application for the grant was written, the engineering faculty were asked for their wish list of equipment that would propel the program forward. Many of their requests fit in with the new initiative, Nobles-Lookingbill said. The upcoming enterprise would integrate the Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering program with a Certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
The Don Wood Foundation gave the grant to the university.
This foundation was named after a man who started an industrial manufacturing company in his fifties. Provost Jewerl Maxwell said that because Wood was focused on entrepreneurship in the engineering world, the university felt confident about qualifying for the grant.
The foundation anticipates a greater need for workers who are advanced in manufacturing and engineering in Indiana in the future. The grant will help prepare Taylor graduates to fill that void, Maxwell said. Because Indiana is considered the leading state for this type of manufacturing, Taylor University wants to connect its graduates with local companies that are at the forefront of the industry.
The combination of mechanical engineering with innovation and entrepreneurship would set Taylor apart, as the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology is the only other university to feature this program in Indiana, Maxwell said.
Junior CJ Dawalt, a physics engineering major, found out that the department received the grant when she walked into the engineering office suite and saw the announcement written on the whiteboard.
“I was like, what a gift,” Dawalt said.
This grant would give the department the ability to welcome more people and do additional projects. Dawalt found this special because the students could get a lot more experience in the workforce building things.
The department’s upcoming purchase of new 3D printers and a laser engraver excited her. These printers would produce a product that has higher quality from the normal stiff model. She has loved using the engraver in her spare time, learning how it works.
She saw the department as being in a season of expansion with more students and believed that the area for teaching and learning needed to increase as well.
“If we're increasing people, we're going to need a little bit more classes and we're going to need other professors to teach us classes just so that our professors don't get overloaded,” she said.
Nobles-Lookingbill believes that the engineering students at Taylor University have already shown in capstone projects that they have the capability to do advanced work. She wants to expose them to new types of equipment to increase learning and challenge them.
“They really are getting a master's level research experience at the undergraduate level, which is very unique to Taylor, and that means that we really have an opportunity to grow beyond that,” she said.
