Spanning 500,000 square feet, GW’s Science & Engineering Hall (SEH) is home to the labs and classrooms where ECE students and faculty teach and learn, discover and invent.
On the basement level, the GW Nanofabrication and Imaging Center (NIC), equipped with state-ofthe-art lithography equipment, deposition, etching, and analysis systems, provides faculty like ECE Professor Gina Adam with the tools to advance brain-inspired chip technologies. In the “Micro and Nanofabrication Techniques” class, she trains students in using these specialized technologies as they practice optimizing chips through heterogeneous integration, designing and building new devices on top of existing microchips.
Through a DoD capacity-building grant, Adam enhanced GWNIC’s offerings by acquiring a dual-chamber sputtering system that allows her interdisciplinary research team to better explore new materials for neuromorphic computing. This advanced equipment significantly strengthens Washington, D.C.’s position as a leader in energy-efficient neuromorphic computing while providing students from GW and collaborating universities with invaluable experience in emerging topics.
Moving up to the fifth and sixth floors, the department hosts countless research and teaching labs. The fully operational Smart Grid Control and Power Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) Testbed provides researchers and students with a unique opportunity for end-to-end testing of smart grid operations. A set of control and power HIL platforms is its latest addition, enabling real-time analysis and coordination of control and power exchange among critical components under normal and stressed conditions.
The department is also building a Physical Artificial Intelligence (PAI) Studio, slated to open in Spring 2026. Designed to support PAI modules in all undergraduate and graduate courses, the studio will feature impact-resistant quadrotor drones for multi-agent, swarm, and vision-based applications and autonomous vehicles, both equipped with Nvidia® Jetson™ technology. Comprehensive resources for teaching and research in physical and virtual environments will also be provided, including access to OS, FPGA, and GPU boards for AI-centric design, deployment, and configuration.
As ECE faculty establish labs and acquire new equipment, they not only keep GW Engineering at the forefront of scientific discovery but also enrich student learning. The SEH continues to be a vital enabler of our ambitions, allowing the department to responsibly translate innovations to society.