Page 12 - Engineering Penn State Magazine: Fall/Winter 2020

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ENGINEERING PENN STATE
Engineering alumnus makes $2.5 million commitment to facilities expansion
by Ashley WennersHerron
Civil engineering alumnus Andrew Kartalis and
his wife, Katherine, have made a $2.5 million estate commitment to the College of Engineering’s planned facilities expansion.
The funds, which include $1 million to be dispersed over the next five years, will support the construction and build-out of two new research and teaching spaces for engineering on West Campus, as well as a major renovation for historic Sackett Building.
“The new space is going to provide numerous excellent opportunities for students from several disciplines to work together and collaborate,” Andrew Kartalis said. “When students from various engineering majors work together to solve a challenge, they begin to think differently. That’s invaluable.”
In 2013, the Kartalises committed $1.5 million
to support American military veterans studying engineering through a program called VETS, as well as program and laboratory support for the Bernard M. Gordon Learning Factory.
Features
A necessary expansion
The College of Engineering at University Park, which is spread across nearly 50 campus buildings, is the largest college at Penn State and one of the largest colleges of engineering in the nation. Over the past decade, student enrollment in the college has increased by more than 40% and the number of tenure-track faculty has increased by nearly 25%. Currently, there are more than 12,000 undergraduate and graduate-level engineering students and more than 300 tenure-track faculty.
“We have grown as a college and will continue to strategically do so, particularly in the areas of graduate enrollment and through faculty recruitment,” Schwartz said. “This tremendous growth in people, and the corresponding growth of our research enterprise that now totals almost $150 million annually, has highlighted a need for increased and modernized facilities that are better consolidated on campus.”
In 2018, Penn State engaged Payette to develop a master plan and framework to increase the quantity, improve the quality, and optimize the distribution and organization of the college’s physical space across two budgetary funding cycles: 2018-23 and 2023-28.