News

Friday, December 18, 2009

Virgil Elings donates $1 million to the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy

Local resident Virgil Elings has made a $1 million gift to the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy for the construction of a new facility at Dos Pueblos High School. In recognition of this gift, the new building will be named the Elings Center for Engineering Education.

The Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy is a four-year integrated course of study in physics, computer science and engineering that enrolls 128 students. The Engineering Academy is seeking to grow by building a new 12,000 square-foot facility that will have laboratory and classroom space for 400 students. The capital campaign to match a $3 million California state grant to fund the construction of the new facility is led by the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy Foundation, a local nonprofit foundation.

The Elings gift is the largest contribution to date for the capital campaign. With this recent gift, a total of $1.76 million has been contributed to the campaign by the community.

Virgil Elings is a former UCSB professor of physics who started and supervised a Masters Degree Program at UCSB in which the students did project-based learning, as opposed to book learning. Dr. Elings also founded and built a Santa Barbara company, Digital Instruments, along with former students in the Masters program, that through rapid innovation was the world leader in its field. Dr. Elings would like to encourage and support the focus on project-based learning and innovation in the Engineering Academy.