NJIT President Shares the Latest Campus Innovations

Taped on the campus of NJIT, Steve Adubato talks with Dr. Joel Bloom, President of NJIT, about the latest and greatest innovation happening on campus including “Makerspace.”

9/18/17 #2072

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"Hi, Steve Adubato here. We are thrilled once again to be joined by Dr. Joel Bloom on... it's your campus, it's your students’ campus, and it's our second home. NJIT. The New Jersey Institute of Technology. Good to see you Doctor. Welcome Steve and to this outstanding show. And by the way, we're coming on campus this morning, and do yourself a favor. A lot of security, but get onto the campus here because I am stunned by all of the construction, all of the activity. What is going on here? So, it's $375 million worth of construction and renovation and what was critical is the state bond act that was approved in 2012 by the voters of New Jersey for higher ed facilities. NJIT materialized about $120 Million dollars from that bond act. We're investing the rest to get us to the $375, $375 million. So, we're building a new life sciences and engineering building. We totally renovated to 200,000 square foot central high school state of the art labs. Very focused on biology and new kind of learning classrooms and we're building a 200,000 square foot W.E.C, (Wellness and Events Center). That's what the W.E.C is. That's the W.E.C. It's a wellness and events center. We will be able to host professional conferences here for 4,500 people come next Spring. Spring of 2018. So, it's an athletic center, but about 60% of the building is multipurpose for our students, staff, our faculty, our community. But most important, really important is the ability to bring professional conferences into the city of Newark. Clearly, colleges and universities... they play a more and more important role from an economic development perspective. We'll talk about healthcare, talk about a whole range of issues in cities and places across this nation. But recently, there was a $10 million State Appropriation in the budget that is going directly to NJIT for something called Makerspace, which I know is a national movement. But what is Makerspace, what's going to go on here - a multi part question - and why does it matter to the people watching right now? So, first of all, manufacturing. So, the whole purpose of Makerspace is manufacturing and we shouldn't lose sight. The largest global manufacturer, 25% of global manufacturing is done by China but right behind China at 19% is the United States, so we're still a manufacturing country and in the state of New Jersey, you may have read about the new initiative between Corning, Merck, and Pfizer manufacturing in Vineland, New Jersey. It's having to do with glass packaging? Right. So, manufacturing is 10% of the employees in the state of New Jersey. So, if you want to work, you want to work in part in manufacturing producing products. Makerspace focuses on advanced manufacturing. That kind of glass manufacturing that's going to..."