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On Campus
Board of Trustees

Where Red Means Go

In the tech community, cycling has trumped golfing as a social pastime conducive to swapping ideas, making deals, and pitching the next Big Thing. Several years ago an “on wheels” conversation on a northern Illinois road between avid cyclists and technophiles Ed Kaplan (ME ’65) and Joel D. Krauss (MATH ’71) became the vision for the first new academic building on the Illinois Tech Mies Campus in 40 years: the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship. Nearly 775 people, many wearing scarlet ties, caps, shirts, dresses, or shoes, attended the Kaplan Institute groundbreaking on August 25 in the Hermann Hall Expo Center. Kaplan, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Illinois Tech President Alan W. Cramb, Provost Frances Bronet, architect John Ronan, Student Government Association President Hamze Sukkar (CE 4th year), and other dignitaries spoke about the significance of the Kaplan Institute. After the speeches guests went outside to Morton Park, the future site of the new building, to turn over golden shovels of earth moistened by earlier rains. Construction is expected to begin in March 2017 with an anticipated completion by late 2018.
Features
UFarm

Greener Acres

“These are the best tomatoes I’ve had since home,” says Merjem Mededovic (BME 3rd year), reaching for a cluster of tiny crimson spheres dangling from a blossom-studded tomato plant in UFarmIIT. Growing up in urban Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, she looked forward to weekends when she could work in her grandfather’s garden on the outskirts of the city. “As a biomedical engineering student, I appreciate the importance of being active and eating right, and also helping Earth. Farming touches so many points that are part of a sustainable life.”
Features
David Baker

UTP Celebrates 10 Years as “Living Laboratory”

Like a teacher who gives his or her student the freedom to develop and grow with just the right amount of guidance and opportunity, University Technology Park at IIT—now Chicago’s premier tech park—has fostered and graduated innovative startups that have become successful companies, many drawing international acclaim. Illinois Tech President Lewis Collens (1990–2007) first proposed the idea of a tech park and selected David Baker, longtime vice president for external affairs, as UTP’s strategic architect.
Rewind
Argonne

Ring of Brilliance

Its roots lie in what is known today as Red Gate Woods but in the early 1940s was Argonne Forest, part of the Cook County Forest Preserve District near Palos Hills, Illinois. Argonne Laboratory was created to provide a more remote location to continue Enrico Fermi’s work on the Manhattan Project after the physicist and his team achieved the first manmade controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago. In the late 1940s Argonne Laboratory relocated to a larger site in Lemont, Illinois, and was chartered by the United States Department of Energy as the nation’s first national laboratory in 1946 to conduct “cooperative research in nucleonics,” exploring the use of nuclear energy in peacetime efforts.
IIT Magazine Fall 2016
Managing Editor

Marcia Faye

Director of Editorial Services

Chelsea Kalberloh Jackson

Contributors

Jim Daley

Amanda Cleary Eastep

Art Director/Design

Scott Benbrook

Illinois Tech Magazine is published two times a year by the Office of Marketing and Communications
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