My hope is to take my UB education and really push the frontiers of space
exploration. I've traveled all over the world and I've always felt totally
capable and that really came from UB. To be able to find very unique solutions
to unique problems. The learning I did formed the basis for realizing my American
dream. This building will be a major, major asset for the university but as
well for the community for the state and I would be so bold as to say for the
world. The college university system of the United States is the generator of
the intellectual capital and our future. Ever since I was little I was very
interested in space and I remember in third grade I once was asked, someone asked
do you want to be an astronaut and I said no I just want to send people to space. A
group of students and I designed a excavator to work on the moon so we
looked at the lunar environment and some virtual prototyping tools that they use
at UB to kind of design a almost like a lunar backhoe and so that kind of spun
off into my work which I'm doing now which was at NASA this last summer doing
research on sending two satellites to the moon.
What we saw into computer science what we saw here what they are doing with the
post office and artificial intelligence and looking at the earthquakes and
how the buildings can survive it's very exciting work they are doing at
University at Buffalo. I am a part of the American Society of Civil Engineers. When
you are designing a scaled model of a steel bridge or if you're designing a
concrete canoe all these equations everything that you've learned it just
kind of culminates into this one project.
The education I got from engineering made my life a success not just make a lot of
money but it made my life much better than it would have been if I hadn't gone
to UB engineering school. I started the company when I was actually a student
here in my dorm room. For five years I worked by myself and then I slowly added
people until at the end it was quite a lot of people and we had offices all over the world.
I think the essence of a quality university really is its people its faculty its
staff and certainly its students but one can't do it on those people alone
those people have to have an attractive force to bring them together and part of
that force is the facilities the equipment the buildings the campus as a whole.
Of course when I got here I found 10, 20 year-old temporary trailers. A lot of
students were cramped into those trailers graduate students, post doc
students. We have faculty that are spread out across the campus and borrowed and
rented space and that's very inefficient when you're trying to get collaboration
to occur between disciplines. It's a challenge of course to build a new
building. I think tearing down the trailers was a strategy of mine to make
sure that we had no way to go but forward. This building that we're going
to start today exemplifies the UB 2020 commitment to the creation of great
spaces in support of academic excellence an investment in the science technology
teaching and research that are needed to grow our new knowledge economy here in
Western New York and far beyond. And instead of talking theory what UB 2020
and then the School of Engineering building show no it's bricks and mortars
it's reality we can build on this momentum and everybody within the
community should get really excited about that aspect of it. It's sort of
invaluable and very rare to be able to come back to a school that you went to
and be able to create a building that will be there for you know the next
hundred years. The delegation came together seven or eight years ago to
recognize that there was a specific need here to expand the School of Engineering and
improve the School of Engineering. It took seven or eight years to get that
done but I think you're gonna see that 49 million dollar investment
turning into part of that economic engine that's so very important here in
Western New York and specifically at the University at Buffalo. We need better
labs and state of art equipment so this new building will give us all these
things for us to prepare a better generation of engineers.
The direct impact obviously is that you're going to generate people
for jobs that are not being filled right now but I think the more powerful
things that a research university can do for local economy are the kinds of
things you see around Boston in the 128 loop or the Silicon Valley effect in
California. The growth of small companies is usually generated by very talented
faculty ideas. My relationship with UB particularly is important because I
need the talent, I need the talent which UB can generate and provide to us. I
also have project certain times which we need research work done I can use the
professors here as consultants. And we really believe in teaching and that's
the reason I feel that any contribution to teaching it multiplies multifold than
any other gift that you can give.
We had to do a lot of fundraising for the building. We're about halfway to closing
the gap. We still have more to do but some of the people that have stepped forward
have been extremely generous. So my son graduated in May of 08 I graduated in
1979. He's done a masterful job out in industry now in a
short period of time and I felt like I owed something back to the university
based on my own success and what I've seen with my own son. I've spent 20 years
at UB and that's most of my professional career. These 20 years have been you know
the best part of my you know of my life and so giving back to an institution that has
made it possible is so easy. The largest gift in the engineering school's history
came this year when Mr. Jack Davis a local entrepreneur and business owner
decided to contribute funds to the building. I didn't do it for other people.
I did it because I wanted to do it and I would hope that other people would
possibly listen to my story and say "oh yeah, Jack had it right, I'd like to do
the same thing" and I hope they do. We're visiting with as many people as we
possibly can and we're asking them to do whatever they feel is appropriate but
please help us now if they can. The payback will be enormous. At the end of
the day I'm not asking to be you know the next Christian Menn like a great
bridge designer but I would like to be the best at what I do and to leave a
lasting impact. One of my mentors likes to say dream big ask for help and never give up.