The Texas A&M University System became even larger Monday morning with the breaking of ground for a building at the new RELLIS campus.
RELLIS, which is an acronym for the six core values of A&M — respect, excellence, leadership, loyalty, integrity and selfless service — is the new research and development campus consisting of seven buildings and testbeds that will be available for research performed by students and those in the private sector. The expected completion date is 2018.
Known as the Center for Infrastructure Renewal, the building construction began on will be the first RELLIS building and provide a place for students to collaborate with industry professionals and researchers on projects that require larger facilities than anything the main campus of Texas A&M can provide.
The ceremony celebrating the ground breaking included key remarks by Regent Phil Adams, Chancellor of the Texas A&M University System John Sharp and Dean of Engineering Katherine Banks, who each played important roles in the development and commissioning of the project.
“This wonderful RELLIS campus marks the beginning of something truly historic,” said Adams, Chairman of the Committee on Buildings and Physical Plant. “The A&M System, Blinn College and private companies are coming together to build a most unique campus.”
Sharp said, in many ways, the core values the campus is named after are what it means to be an Aggie, and the new campus will allow a greater number of people to become part of the ever expanding Aggie network than ever before.
“Texas A&M University gets about 40,000 high school students that apply,” Sharp said. “Texas A&M accepts 20,000 of those … That means there are 20,000 kids who want to be Aggies who are not able to get into Texas A&M University.”
The new campus will allow an opportunity for those applicants to begin as Blinn students before going to different schools within the Texas A&M University System. A few of them, according to Sharp, will even get a degree from Texas A&M University.
Banks said the Center for Infrastructure Renewal will allow students to work on large-scale infrastructure research with help from industry contractors. This is contrary to the general tendency for research centers to focus on a particular aspect of infrastructure, such as material or power.
“I don’t know of another building this size with this diverse a research focus in the country,” Banks said. “We’re looking at infrastructure as a whole, not just one aspect of it.”
The campus intends to be a place where ideas will be generated, developed, tested and improved before being introduced to the marketplace. The possibilities are difficult to enumerate, but it may not be unreasonable to expect RELLIS to soon revolutionize the technologies experienced daily.