Though most students, faculty, and staff do not yet have access to Harvardâs new Science and Engineering Complex due to Covid-19 restrictions, The Crimson was granted access to tour the eight-story SEC Monday, guided by School of Engineering and Applied Sciences spokesperson Paul Karoff.
Situated across more than five acres with a maximum occupancy of around 2,000 people, the SEC plans for a full opening to students in fall 2021. Construction for the complex started more than five years ago and cost roughly $1 billion to complete. Faculty at SEAS started their move into the new building in Allston in November 2020, but most have yet to unpack their belongings.
In normal times, Environmental Engineering senior Elieen R. Egolf ’21 would have conducted most of her thesis research at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ Active Learning Labs.
But with labs mostly closed due to the pandemic, she took an unusual approach to her research in an unusual location: she built a robot composter in the basement of her home in Colorado.
Sourcing food waste from a local composting facility, Egolf amassed about 89 gallons of material to test her invention and woke up at 6:00 a.m. every other day for six weeks to conduct testing.
On Friday, she and other SEAS seniors celebrated the completion of their undergraduate theses and senior capstone projects, the culmination of a year of research conducted in spite of the logistical hurdles of an unconventional, largely-remote semester at SEAS.
After the coronavirus crisis delayed the opening of Harvardâs new Science and Engineering Complex in Allston, faculty and staff at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have begun transitioning their offices to the new building.
Harvard had intended to open the complex, which has been under construction for roughly five years, this past summer. The coronavirus pandemic, which caused the City of Boston to impose a moratorium on construction projects in the spring of 2020 and has disrupted the Universityâs operations more broadly, forced Harvard to delay the opening of its new campus, into which Harvard poured roughly $1 billion.