Virtual Tour

Pew Engineering Quad

The Pew Engineering Quad serves as home to the majority of the College of Engineering’s facilities. When the weather is nice in Ithaca you can often find students lounging in the sun or tossing a frisbee with friends in the afternoon. While somewhat difficult to see in the panosphere, we Engineers are very proud of the sundial, designed by Dale Corson (president emeritus and a former dean of the college) and built in Cornell’s machine shop in 1980, which is accurate within 30 seconds. In fact, Engineering Student Services comes out with a weekly newsletter called The Sundial that informs students of different opportunities and events on campus.

Duffield Hall Atrium

Duffield Hall, which opened in 2004 is named for its primary benefactor, David Duffield, a 1962 graduate of the College of Engineering and founder of Workday. The focus of Duffield is interdisciplinary research in nanoscience; the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility, located in Knight Lab on the second floor, is one of four National Science Foundation research facilities on campus. The Duffield atrium is open 24/7, with comfortable alcoves for collaborative work. It also houses Mattin’s Café, which makes Duffield a common spot for students to spend their down-time during the day with friends or to do work. At the far end of the atrium you can find the Cornell Reuleaux collection – these kinematic models were cutting-edge teaching tools for engineers in the 19th century and Cornell has the largest collection in the world.

Gates Hall

The Bill and Melinda Gates Hall, opened in 2014, is one of the newest buildings on the Engineering Quad and is the home of Computing and Information Science. In the panosphere you can see a banner for BOOM (Bits On Our Mind) which is an annual showcase for Cornell student projects in cutting-edge digital technology. In addition Cornell CIS hosts many student-run organizations, project teams, and hackathons to ensure that students can have a broad range of opportunities to develop technical and leadership skills, find and provide mentorship, and foster relationships with potential employers.

Olin Hall Classroom

The classroom here is Olin 155 which is the largest lecture hall on the Engineering Quad with space for 289 students. Many large courses end up being taught in this classroom throughout the semester including the math classes engineering students are required to take, entry level courses like Intro to Python, and even more advanced classes like the one pictured here, CS 4410: Operating Systems class.

Robotic Personal Assistants Lab

Robotics at Cornell spans various subareas, including perception, control, learning, planning, and human-robot interaction. Students and faculty work with a variety of robots such as aerial robots, home and office assistant robots, autonomous cars, humanoids, evolutionary robots, legged robots, snake robots and more. The pictured lab is the Robotic Personal Assistants Lab run by CS faculty member Ross Knepper. In one corner of the room, you can see a robot with red arms named Yogi. The lab currently has a few projects in the works including one called Solar Airship where they are working to develop an autonomous blimp capable of independent flight for extended periods of time. You can learn more about the work the lab is doing here.

Bovay Lab

The Bovay Civil Infrastructure Laboratory Complex has several components that allow CEE students to receive hands-on experience, observing what large forces and displacements can do to soil, concrete, steel, and other fabricated materials and structures. In lecture courses, students have learned the fundamentals and built models to predict effects, but it is in the laboratory that such models are tested and validated, often prompting new theories and new models of infrastructure-behavior. Undergraduates have been involved in several phases of experimental design and subsequent use of the computational simulations, and many students find that they learn more in the time they spend actively testing their work than by just doing classroom work.

Snee Hall Atrium

Snee Hall, the home of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, houses a number of fascinating displays including the Timothy N. Heasley Mineralogical Museum which contains precious and semi-precious stones from all over the world, dinosaur footprints, a life-size plesiosaur cast, and a number of fossils from the Paleontological Research Institution. Not in the above panosphere is also a large working model of sediment transport by water flow, and a continuously operating, earthquake recording, seismograph station that you can check to see if there’s significant seismic activity anywhere on the planet. In addition, Snee contains many state-of-the-art facilities for isotope geochemistry, high-pressure mineral physics, and Cornell’s Center for Materials Research.