The WSU Board of Trustees met Friday, Sept. 21, and were given a report on the campus from John Tomblin, vice president of research and technology transfer.

Campus expansion

Tomblin said:

• WSU has a responsibility to help grow the community, and one of the ways we're doing that is by creating new vibrant places on campus, especially on the 120 acres on the east side of campus that were formerly Braeburn Golf Course.
• The first large restaurant for Braeburn Square is in final contract discussions and may be announced in the next few weeks. Tomblin said several other restaurants have expressed strong interest in the retail development near the southwest corner of 21st and Oliver. The goal is to get restaurants that will stay open late to serve the community and campus. The Shocker Store and Meritrust Credit Union are nearing completion there, joining Starbucks, which opened in 2017.
• Hotel discussions are back on track, and Tomblin hopes there will be an announcement and construction start by the end of 2018. The hotel would be located near 19th and Oliver.
• The new YMCA, Student Wellness Center and Wesley Urgent Care Clinic are on track to begin construction for an early 2020 opening. Students living in nearby residence halls will be able to walk back and forth through the new building from their residence halls to classes and other university activities.
• The second residence hall on the east side of campus is now under construction. It will be called The Suites.
• The WSU Foundation has done an excellent job of raising the private funding portion for the construction of a new Barton School of Business building, just south of The Flats and The Suites. The university will identify how the remainder will be funded. The new building will be named Woolsey Hall, in honor of its largest donors.
• The state is scheduled to open bids in mid-October for construction of the new Crash Lab for the National Institute for Aviation Research. Construction should begin about 30 days after the contract is awarded for the building, which will be about 20,600 square feet. The centerpiece of the building will be a new crash sled for testing collision impact. The crash sled, primarily financed by a federal grant, requires more than a million pounds of concrete floor underneath to absorb the impact of the force generated.
• The new partnership building north of the Experiential Engineering Building opened this semester and is known as PB2. The first floor is already occupied by the College of Engineering Student Success Center and administrative offices, and the Army's FirePoint Innovation lab. Other open space on the first floor will be occupied by a Machine Learning Lab, funded by a Department of Defense grant. There students, faculty and other researchers will focus on sustainment (maintenance, support and life cycle) of aging parts of military aircraft.
• As previously announced, Spirit AeroSystems will take a large space on the second floor to bring together its research and development personnel with WSU students and researchers. Pierre Harter, Spirit vice president and a member of the WSU Board of Trustees, said Spirit and WSU will together pursue grants for aviation research. Tomblin said, “I think we're stronger together. We make good partners.”
• Other portions of the second floor will be occupied by NIAR for student applied learning, smaller companies from outside of Kansas that want to be part of Wichita State applied learning and research and a federal grant-funded lab focused on sustaining legacy Department of Defense aircraft. An announcement on that grant is expected.

Tomblin said he talks regularly with company leaders who are interested in locating research facilities on campus, but are worried about finding enough students to hire as part-time employees and eventually as full-time employees.

“Companies always come back to the question, ‘Can Kansas produce enough educated workers?'” Tomblin said, adding that they react positively to the information that WSU is now actively recruiting students in Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri to come to Wichita for their education and sink roots here.

For example, the number of Oklahomans enrolled at WSU has gone from about 20 in 2015 to more than 100 this semester.

He echoed the sentiments of President John Bardo that the shortage of qualified, high-skill workers is the biggest factor holding back the local and state economy. Wichita State is working to be part of the solution.

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