Building for the Future

Enrollment in majors for the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences outpaces all others on campus. Kahler Slater and LMN Architects

The university is raising funds to expand three key learning spaces: the College of Engineering; the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences; and the College of Letters & Science.

More and more students apply to the College of Engineering each year, but due to space constraints, the college can only enroll just under 20 percent of them. With increasing demand for engineering graduates, a state-of-the-art building is a top priority to keep up with industry advances.

The expansion will allow the college to enroll 1,000 more undergraduates, recruit and retain first-rate faculty members, sustain its excellence in research and graduate education, and replace an aging 64,000-square-foot building with a 340,000-square-foot facility.

Enrollment in majors for the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences (CDIS) outpaces all others on campus. CDIS will complete a 328,000-square-foot hub in the center of campus to foster academic research, host partnerships with community and industry cohorts, and support growing student interest. A $125 million commitment from Tashia ’55 and John ’55 Morgridge, along with $50 million from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, is helping to launch this effort.

Designed to be the most sustainable building on campus, the new facility will establish a tech corridor that includes physics, chemistry, and engineering facilities. It will house not only the departments of CDIS but also the Center for High Throughput Computing, the N+1 Institute, the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute, and much of the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics. The colocation of these innovative programs will increase innovation and accelerate discovery.

Also shaping the future in the College of Letters & Science is a planned four-story facility that will provide modern, active-learning classrooms to better serve a growing undergraduate population. The new space, made possible by a $20 million lead gift from brothers Jeff Levy ’72 and Marv Levy ’68, JD’71, will be named Irving and Dorothy Levy Hall, in honor of their parents. The facility will be located at Park and W. Johnson Streets and is part of a larger plan to replace the aging Mosse Humanities Building. Irving and Dorothy Levy Hall will bring together departments in the humanities and ethnic studies and will create a home for the Department of History and seven other L&S departments and programs. Construction is set to begin in 2024 and finish in 2026.

Published in the Spring 2023 issue