Milwaukee School of Engineering will host a groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday to celebrate the start of construction for its new Robert D. Kern Engineering Innovation Center.
The $76.5 million academic building will span four stories and 97,000 square feet at the southeast corner of Milwaukee and State Streets. The Robert D. Kern Engineering Innovation Center will also house MSOE’s new Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence Education.
The Robert D. Kern Engineering Innovation Center is part of MSOE’s “Next Bold Step: The Campaign to Accelerate Innovation,” a $125 million campaign that will also support the creation of the Dwight and Dian Diercks School of Advanced Computing. MSOE announced the campaign and innovation center project in March.
MSOE will host a ceremonial groundbreaking at 1 p.m. on Saturday at the site of the future facility.
Dwight Diercks, a MSOE graduate, and his wife Dian Diercks, have pledged $20 million to support construction of the Engineering Innovation Center. Dwight Diercks is a MSOE regent and senior vice president of Santa Clara, California-based tech firm NVIDIA.
“We’ll need modern classroom facilities where students can learn, experiment and teach each other, while still going to classes where computer science majors can work with mechanical engineers to construct an autonomous robot, where software engineers can work with biomedical engineers to apply AI to our most personal of engineering problems — health care — or designing the future of manufacturing, something that Milwaukee has been so great at for so many years,” Dwight Diercks said in March. “The future of manufacturing is in AI.”
The Kern Family Foundation is also partially funding the innovation center. Robert Kern was the founder of Town of Genesee-based generator manufacturer Generac and a major supporter of MSOE.
The innovation center will have labs, classrooms and public spaces designed to integrate AI learning across disciplines, MSOE announced in March. There will be a particular focus on incorporating AI and machine learning into each of MSOE’s engineering programs. The new facility will offer robotics and AI workshops, as well as an outdoor sustainability lab.
MSOE’s Mechanical Engineering Department; Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering Department; Civil and Architectural Engineering and Construction Management Department; and the User Experience program will be housed inside the Robert D. Kern Engineering Innovation Center.
The new building will be connected to MSOE’s Allen-Bradley Hall of Science and the Fred F. Loock Engineering Center.
Pewaukee-based VJS Construction Services and Milwaukee-based Ramlow/Stein Architecture + Interiors are the construction and design partners for the project.
