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General Information

The REDC received $30 million in funding from the Commonwealth.

The building houses both the Sam and Irene Black School of Business and the School of Engineering. This is one of the first efforts to collocate a fully accredited business school and an engineering schools with accredited programs under one roof.

In the words of architect Herm Weber of Weber Murphy Fox, Inc., the REDC is expected to “create collision” between engineering and business to foster collaboration.

About half the facility’s 160,000 square-feet is laboratory and support space:

• One behavioral lab
• Ten electrical engineering labs
• Eleven mechanical engineering labs
• Six plastics labs
• At 10,500 square-feet, the plastics processing lab is the largest academic plastics lab in the country.

A quarter of the REDC is classrooms and computer labs:

• Seventeen classrooms
• Three computer labs
• Eight computer classrooms

The remaining space is offices and conference rooms.

The REDC doubles the classroom space for the business and engineering schools.

It is the largest building on the Penn State Behrend campus.

The REDC is the largest academic building in Erie County.

It is the largest Penn State building outside of University Park.

It costs more than $40,000 a month to heat the REDC during winter.

The REDC is home to many of the college’s applied research and outreach centers:

• Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Research Center of Excellence
• Partnership Erie (creates and hosts free Web sites for nonprofits)
• Center for Credit and Consumer Research
• Economic Research Institute of Erie (ERIE)
• Applied Energy Research Center
• Plastics Computer-Aided Engineering Center
• SEET Applied Research and Design Center

The REDC created nine new full-time jobs, eight in Maintenance & Operations, one in Housing & Food Services.

At peak construction, the REDC site averaged 135 workers a day.

Main contractors:

Construction of a 200-seat lecture hall addition began in August 2006. Completion is expected in April 2007.

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