Today, the University of Maryland (UMD) made a major move for collegiate entrepreneurship by opening the latest facility, the E.A. Fernandez IDEA Factory Building, on its flagship campus in College Park.
The building, which broke ground in 2018 (although construction began in 2020), boasts seven stories and 61,000 square feet of labs, workspaces and more resources for student entrepreneurs. According to UMD, it will be “drastically different” from any other building on campus and is specifically designed for students looking to make changes in fields such as multimedia, robotics, rotorcraft and quantum engineering.
The building is named after alumnus Emilio Fernandez, cofounder and CEO of railroad engineering company Pulse Electronics. Fernandez currently holds 25 patents, largely in transportation, but one in computer technology was crucial for e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and eventually became the most-cited patent in the US. The “IDEA” portion stands for “Innovate, Design and Engineer for America.”
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