Latest North Campus Building Provides Home to Manning School of Business
04/07/2017
UMass Lowell is taking care of business with the official opening of the Pulichino Tong Business Center, the new home of the Manning School of Business, on April 20.
“The building is going to bring our students and faculty together in new ways,” says Manning School Dean Sandra Richtermeyer. ”It will be a great community-builder.”
The Pulichino Tong Business Center's first-floor trading room is a centerpiece of the $47 million structure, the 13th building UMass Lowell has opened since 2009.
The building, at 54,801 square feet on the corner of University Avenue and Riverside Street, includes state-of-the-art classrooms on the first and second floors and faculty offices on the second, third and fourth floors. Up-to-the-minute updates from Wall Street are delivered from a stock ticker suspended in the lobby’s open, four-story Joyce & Jerry Colella Atrium. The building is wired with all latest audio-visual technology, including 30 computer lab stations, 20 laser projectors, 20 LCD flatscreens and 11 Lecture Capture and live streaming stations.
The business center will also be home to the new Donahue Center for Business Ethics, which was established by a $1 million gift from philanthropist Nancy Donahue, and the the Jack Wilson Center for Entrepreneurship. The Donahue Center will expand education in ethics to all majors, offer new research opportunities for faculty and students and develop ethics-focused programs and events for the university and the public.
The Manning School will be able to host outdoor events in the front of the building in the Grande Tomaney Plaza, made possible by a generous donation from alum Richard L. Grande '72, '80.
“The new building will help us be more innovative about how we interact with each other and how we engage with the campus at large,” says Richtermeyer, who adds that the project wouldn’t have been possible without the school’s many generous supporters, most notably John Pulichino ’67 and his wife, Joy Tong.
Many alumni and friends left their mark on the new building through a virtual beam signing webpage set up by Web Services last spring. Those signatures were applied via sticker to a first-floor beam in the building.
“I felt as if it was part of my legacy at UMass Lowell to have my name up in the new business building, where future students will get to learn and grow just like I did not too long ago,” says Dan Grealish ‘14, who now works as a compensation analyst for Cengage Learning in Boston. “I have a lot of pride for UMass Lowell, and to be able to even have the opportunity like that is very special to me.”
The business center and the Mark and Elisia Saab Emerging Technologies and Innovation Center form the backbone of the North Campus Innovation District, which brings together the university’s engineering, science and business programs for students, entrepreneurs and industry partners.