'That's our core, that's not all we are': Whitworth University, known to be a private liberal arts college, unveils new $20 million engineering building

Whitworth University welcomed donors and students to their campus on Thursday to celebrate the dedication of its new engineering building.

The private Christian college most recognized for its high-quality liberal arts curriculum is committed to producing graduates who can serve humanity in numerous ways, including through their engineering department, said Kamesh Sankaran, the chair of the engineering department.

"It is a bit of a misconception that Whitworth is only a liberal arts," Sankaran said. "That is very much our core, and we are not ashamed of our Christian liberal arts identity. But while that's our core, that's not all we are."

Sankaran said Whitworth has been gradually rolling out their engineering program over the last 20 years. Within the last five years, it's become not just apparent, but critical, that they needed more space and improved tools to better instruct the next generation of engineers.

The $20 million dollar project has more than a 100 donors, but the namesake of the building belongs to its largest benefactor, Fortune 500 company PACCAR. With a total asset base of over $44 billion, PACCAR is most recognized for designing and manufacturing heavy-duty trucks including Kenworth and Peterbuilt.

Sankaran said that although the university is most known for its humanities, the college has a rich history in STEM.

George F. Whitworth, who founded the university in 1883, is credited for starting the college of engineering at the University of Washington. He was a two-term president at the University of Washington between 1866 to 1867 and again from 1874 to 1876 before starting Whitworth.

Sankaran said even the first president of Whitworth, Amos T. Fox, was a civil engineer for decades.

"It's the confidence we had in the success of our alumni that really gave us faculty members the impetus to push forward to offer more and more engineering courses" Sankaran said.

Only two students graduated from Whitworth with a Bachelor of Engineering in 2021, Sankaran said. This year, that number will be closer to 20.

The new facility offers six teaching labs, a metal machining shop, and a rapid prototyping space for advanced manufacturing equipped with 3D printers and a laser cutter. A cleanroom that does a complete exchange of air in the room about 60 times an hour, a Microdevices Lab that lets researchers fabricate devices no thicker than that of a human hair, and many more collaborative spaces are all housed in Whitworth's newest edition.

Prior to the opening of the 20,000-square-foot PACCAR Engineering Building, Sankaran said they used rooms in the Eric Johnston Science Center that doubled as multiple labs. They no longer have to do that with all the new space.

Upstairs, in the Senior Design Lab, Cameron Johnston, Kenyon Coleman and Brodin Faser have been working on a project for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory over the last several months.

The three of them are a part of a team of six making a robot for testing nuclear materials.

Before moving to the PACCAR building in January, the trio were working in a space about half the size of what they have now. Johnston said they were working in the same room that his parents did their chemistry lab in decades before.

While the three of them are only about three weeks away from graduating, they said getting the opportunity to continue their project in the new building has made a "night and day" difference.

"It's a dedicated space where you can explore, flourish and really just learn engineering without very many distractions," Faser said. "It's a very focused area."

Johnston, Coleman and Faser are picking up where last year's senior class left off. The students before them made an enclosure for an "ionizing radiation detector," which is essentially a camera that can detect radiation.

Using a stepper motor that moves in small, discrete angular steps, the three of them are programming a robot to make tiny movements at hundredths of a millimeter to extract radioactive particles from a filter within a two-by-three foot operating area. Once a particle is extracted, it's then placed on a well plate, or a microplate, so it can be analyzed individually in a separate lab at PNNL.

"Different areas (of a given sample) may have different radioactive particulates in them," Johnston said. "That's why extraction is needed because we may want to analyze different particles that are embedded in the filter separately from each other. So this allows for increased precision and full autonomy without scientists kind of having to get in there and pick around radioactive stuff on their own."

Coleman said his brother goes to a large public school and takes a chemistry lab with 600 other students. His brother can never talk to a professor, only teaching assistants. That's not the case with Whitworth, he said. While there are far fewer students in the engineering department than other schools, Johnston, Coleman and Faser all used the word "rigorous" to describe the program.

As graduation rapidly approaches, Johnston said he's found that the program has adequately prepared him for a vast array of engineering positions, not just mechanical and electrical engineering roles.

"Whitworth is ABET (originally an acronym for Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accredited engineering, but you still have to take a bunch of core classes," Faser said. "We found that it (core classes) helps with communication. It develops a person, rather than just an engineer. There's also the religious element, which is not forced upon you, but it is open if you're interested... So it's less about churning numbers out through the university, and more about the students themselves and the personal growth that they can accomplish."

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