Friday, June 21, 2024
By: Joey Mazzaferro
On a beautiful day at the construction site of the Bruno E. and Maritza F. Ramos Collaboratory on the University of Florida campus, Siemens presented the College of Design, Construction and Planning (DCP) a gift to enhance this new facility to even greater heights.
On hand to accept the gift from Siemens executives were University of Florida Board of Trustees member David L. Brandon, DCP Dean Chimay Anumba and Director of DCP’s Sustainability and the Built Environment (SBE) Program Bahar Armaghani.
Siemens has been a partner with UF since 1996. They have worked on projects that have strategically improved campus energy efficiency, reduced carbon emissions, addressed deferred maintenance and optimized existing infrastructure for a resilient campus of the future.
Siemens Empower+ Program gifted $150,000 to the college in $50,000 gifts for each of these areas:
- SBE’s curriculum development and launching of a Greece Study Abroad initiative.
- Equipment for DCP to study energy and indoor air quality data to measure, verify and optimize LEED and WELL building performance.
- Funding to develop an active learning curriculum that includes WELL V2 concepts to actual build environments, including understanding the Collaboratory’s systems, technology, and instrumentation that test, measure, verify, and report healthy building performance.
The Empower+ program is Siemens’ academic and workforce development outreach program, designed to expand customer partnerships, provide support, resources, and expertise to help institutions of higher education reach their academic and workforce development goals, and prepare students and residents for a brighter future.
“Meaningful partnership between industry and higher education is critical, especially when it comes to the institutional core mission of overall educational experience and workforce preparedness,” Siemens Empower+ Program Director Steve Hoiberg said. “As part of a multi-faceted and ever-evolving collaboration which continues to positively impact UF, Siemens Empower+ program takes tremendous pride in providing support to strategic programmatic initiatives that make a difference at DCP and the larger UF community as a whole.”
Another $75,000 is being gifted for development and deployment of Building X Lifecycle Twin (the product name of Siemens’ digital twin) of the forthcoming Collaboratory. Building X Lifecycle Twin technology is a fully lifecycle-oriented, globally implemented BIM system for integrating design and construction information in creation of a digital twin for the Collaboratory. The digital twin of this building will help optimize the building’s performance, as well as provide research opportunities for DCP students interested in Digital Twins.
These gifts are a portion of a larger gift agreement in support of the Ramos Collaboratory, where innovative Siemens’ building technologies will be made available in a dedicated lab environment to advance and support faculty and student research.
Siemens provided its first grant to UF in 2013 in the form of a sustainability education grant and has supported UF’s SBE program since its inception. The company actively recruits and hires students and graduates of UF due to their superior education and skill set they receive from DCP.
“DCP highly values our long-term partnership with Siemens, as this has added tremendously to the quality of our programs,” Anumba said. “The latest phase of collaboration centers around the Bruno E. and Maritza F. Ramos Collaboratory which, with advanced Siemens building and sensing technologies, will be an avant-garde living, learning laboratory for our teaching and research.”