Science and Engineering Building Opens Soon

One of UNLV’s newest facilities, the Science and Engineering Building, opens late this fall. It will be about 200,000 square feet—nearly twice the size of the Thomas Beam Engineering Complex. William Culbreth, associate dean in the College of Engineering, notes that the building was designed to foster interdisciplinary research in the sciences, engineering, and fine arts.

The building will also be the new home of the National Supercomputing Center for Energy and the Environment, which is currently housed in the Thomas T. Beam Engineering Complex. The NSCEE provides supercomputing training and services to academic and research institutions, government, and private industry for research and development related to energy, the environment, medical informatics, and health care delivery.

The building—funded partially by private support—will also include several laboratories, four classrooms, a 200-seat auditorium and numerous faculty and graduate student offices. Among the areas that will gain laboratory space are arid lands research, radiochemistry, nanotechnology, entertainment engineering, organic chemistry, high-speed gas guns, renewable energy research, and information technology.

The nanotechnology laboratory will be the first lab on campus that can be used for the fabrication of nanostructures, which include new sensors, solar cells, and micromachines.
The laboratory is also the first scientific clean room in the state. The building will also have an imaging laboratory, bringing together several of the most powerful scanning electron microscopes on campus into one laboratory. The radiochemistry program, which is new to UNLV and one of only a handful of such programs in the U.S., will have dedicated space for research in the new facility.

Additionally, an experimental black box theater for the entertainment engineering and design program will serve as a space for students to develop sets and new techniques for live performances in the Performing Arts Center’s Black Box Theatre. The space will house a very large 3-D foam cutter that can shape large blocks of foam to be used in theatrical sets.