Now it can be told! Come June, work will begin to renovate the third floor of Brown’s CIT building to let the Computer Science Department expand into it (we’re currently housed in the fourth and fifth floors). We’ve been growing steadily over the past few years in faculty and graduate students both. Indeed, in recent years we’ve had to ration our faculty visitors stringently in order to offer them any kind of office space at all. The prospect of more room to move about, more freedom to invite sabbatical-wandering colleagues as visitors, and the ability to admit more graduate students is exhilarating to us all.
It’s not yet clear just when we will start moving into the third floor, nor just how extensive the move will be at the start (the plan is that eventually the Department will occupy the whole third floor). Tom Doeppner, who’s been honchoing space negotiations and arrangements for the Department, says, “The university has hired the architectural firm of Signer Harris of Boston to handle the job. We hope to be able to move into most of the third floor by September; CIS will retain a few offices for a year or two. We are investigating how to extend the fourth- and fifth-floor atrium down to the third floor, but this work will take place as a second phase, probably not for a year or so.”
We greatly appreciate the vote of confidence by Brown’s administration that this expansion constitutes.
