Leone-Perkins Materials Technology Lab
Alumni donors Douglas M. Leone ‘79 and his wife Patti Perkins-Leone, provided the funds for this lab space to allow students to apply their classroom knowledge and gain hands-on experience in a real design.
This space is used by students to gain hands on experience working with specimens that are talked about in class and research projects that are designed and built by the students to be load tested using the Forney XX machine. The Leone-Perkins Room is used for testing in geotechnical and structural courses such as: Concrete Materials and Construction and Design of Concrete Structures. Testing for the Annual Garmezy Competition, in which students compete for cash-prizes awarded for producing the highest strength concrete with a 99% level of confidence takes place in this room.
Concrete Canoe Team: Cornell’s Concrete Canoe Team annually constructs & races a 20 foot concrete canoe, which is built in the Leone-Perkins room.
Assistant Professor Greg McLaskey's CEE 3710 Structural Modeling and Behavior class designed and tested footbridges in this space. This is part of an ongoing education and outreach effort to create a wooden bridge building competition and teach underlying science and engineering concepts. It includes a yearly competition in CEE 3710, summer undergraduate research projects, and planned outreach activities in upstate NY.