Facts about the Richard Weeks Hall of Engineering
The Building
The Richard Weeks Hall of Engineering will be the flagship building for the Rutgers School of Engineering and gateway building to the Busch Campus, housing the school’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as well as laboratories and classrooms.
Location: Busch Campus, between the Biomedical Engineering Building and the Paul Robeson Cultural Center, near the Busch Student Center on Bartholomew Road, Piscataway, N.J.
Size: 100,000 square feet
Labs: Advanced manufacturing research, pilot manufacturing facility, robotics laboratory, civil engineering laboratories, water resources laboratory
Instructional facilities: flexible space for instruction, research and collaboration
Expected completion: 2017
Funding
Richard N. Weeks, chairman of Weeks Marine and a Rutgers alumnus, donated $6 million.
Another alumnus who has chosen not to be named provided $4 million as part of a challenge grant.
The total private support raised to date for the project is $23.8 million.
The Weeks Family
Richard N. Weeks is chairman of Weeks Marine, one of the leading marine construction, dredging and tunneling firms in North America.
He is a 1950 graduate of the Rutgers School of Engineering.
Weeks joined the family business, founded in 1919 as a stevedoring firm, working for his father, Richard B. Weeks, and grandfather, Francis Weeks.
The company remains a family-owned business, now operated by Weeks’s son, Richard S. Weeks.
Headquartered in Cranford, N.J., the company has regional offices in Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Hawaii, Ontario and Quebec.
Weeks Marine is in the Engineering News-Record Top 400 Contractors list, is among the largest construction companies in the U.S., and the second largest dredging company in the U.S.
Recent high-profile jobs have included recovering the stricken US Airways plane that Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger safely ditched in the Hudson River, transporting the Space Shuttle Enterprise by barge from Kennedy Airport to its home at New York’s Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and dismantling the Seaside Heights roller coaster swept out to sea by Hurricane Sandy.
Rutgers University School of Engineering
The School of Engineering enrolls approximately 4,500 undergraduate and graduate students, and ranks in the nation’s top 25 for undergraduate degrees awarded to women.
It generates more than $60 million in research expenditures annually.
The school has departments that cover aerospace, biochemical, biomedical, chemical, civil, computer, electrical, environmental, industrial, materials, mechanical and systems engineering.
It hosts such leading institutes as the Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation (CAIT) and the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB).
The present School of Engineering became a separate entity in 1914. The university previously offered engineering instruction as early as 1864 as part of the Rutgers Scientific School, designated by the state of New Jersey as the “State College for the Benefit of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts.”