Engineering Research Building
Engineering Research Building The tallest building on the engineering campus at 13 stories, ERB houses a veritable cornucopia of engineering research. In the basement you’ll find laboratories for the Engine Research Center, a federally funded facility devoted to making engines more efficient and powerful. Go up a few floors and you’ll find research on gallium arsenide going on in the molecular beam epitaxy labs. Oh, and there are laboratories for solar energy research, plasma source ion implantation, nuclear engineering, and, of course, materials research to just name a few. It’s also the home base for the Department of Engineering Physics.
(Fun fact about ERB: At the top floor is the best view on the engineering campus from the conference room known as 1307 ERB, where lovely Lake Mendota beckons outside.)
Material Science and Engineering Building
Material Science and Engineering Building Just to the left of the pool at the end of engineering mall on the UW Engineering campus is the oldest engineering campus building, finished in 1910. Prior to World War II, it was the original U.S. Forest Products Laboratory; today it’s the Materials Science and Engineering Building, home to the college’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. In 1998, a two-year $4.6 million renovation gave the building a clean, new look. Now it houses state-of-the-art microscopy laboratories, with attached classrooms so students can view materials at the atomic level and beyond. And a working foundry — a testament to the college’s long tradition of foundry research — occupies one large corner of the building.