WIT opens new dorm and labs

Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT) opened a 305-bed dorm and new science facilities last month.

“We’re very excited to celebrate the opening of these new spaces,” Wentworth President Zorica Pantić said in a release. “With these new facilities, Wentworth is providing our undergraduate students with graduate-level laboratories, which aligns with our plan to add more graduate programs, including several in engineering disciplines.”

WIT cut the ribbon on the Apartments @ 525 Huntington Ave., a 110,870-square-foot, $43 million residence hall.

The seven-story building includes 72 apartment-style units and 1,897 square feet of open space located at the building entrance on Huntington Avenue.

The Apartments @ 525, which opened at the start of the current semester, is the school’s seventh residential building on campus and now allows Wentworth to provide housing for nearly 90 percent of students who are seeking on-campus living.

The new dorm houses juniors and seniors, a population of students who often seek off-campus living arrangements in the Mission Hill and Fenway neighborhoods, and has apartment-style units with single and double bedrooms, full kitchens, and washers and dryers in each apartment.

Currently, there are no plans to build more dorms at WIT.

The Gelfand Strength of Materials Laboratory features equipment that tests tensile strength, torsion, structural behavior.

The complex also includes the Sweeney Nanotechnology Lab, the Amelia and Eugene Lutrykowski Collaboration Space, and a new materials science lab.

“Bringing in the modern equipment and the modern technology is incredible for our students,” Michael Jackson, chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Technology, said in that release. “It motivates them to know that we are trying to make them better at what they’re going to be doing out in the real world.”