The Stony Brook ECE Department is happy to announce the grand opening of a new teaching laboratory. The laboratory was made possible by a generous gift from William Forman and North Atlantic Industries, a Long Island company with a strong commitment to the education of the next generation of innovative engineers. The North Atlantic Industries Engineering Teaching Lab is a new combined teaching and laboratory space in the Light Engineering Building. The lab has twelve electrical test stations, each of which include a touchscreen oscilloscope, a 6 ½ digit multimeter, and a triple power supply. All of the equipment is professional grade so that students will become familiar with the equipment that they will see in industry. Part of the room is dedicated to circuit assembly and this area includes eight circuit assembly workstations each with a temperature controlled soldering iron and hand tools. The lab is also equipped with twenty computers running engineering design and simulation tools. A battery of eight 3d printers allows students go from sketch to completed part in just a few hours.

The lab has twelve electrical test stations, each of which include a touchscreen oscilloscope, a 6½ digit multimeter, and a triple power supply.

In addition to the laboratory equipment, the room is equipped as an immersive teaching space with five wall-mount video monitors echoing the instructor’s presentation. This technology  reduces the physical and psychological distance between the instructor and students and permits the instructor to move among the students while wirelessly controlling and annotating a presentation. This room optimized for “active learning” which has been demonstrated to improve student retention and comprehension.

A battery of eight 3d printers allows students go from sketch to completed part in just a few hours.

 The laboratory will be used by Stony Brook’s current Electrical and Computer Engineering students, and will also be used as part of the University’s outreach activity to expose middle and high school students to electrical and computer engineering topics. Visiting grade school students experiment with electricity and build circuits during day-long field trips to the University.

From left to right: Prof. David Westerfeld, Prof. Mónica Bugallo, North Atlantic Industries President and CEO William Forman, and ECE Department Chair Prof. Petar Djuric.