Myles Brand Hall
Indiana University President Michael McRobbie announced during his State of the University address Sept. 24 that the buildings at the corner of 10th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, the Informatics buildings of the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, have been renamed Myles Brand Hall.
The decision commemorates the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the then-School of Informatics as well as honoring the passing of Brand, the former president of IU, 10 years ago this month.
“The driving force and visionary behind (the School’s) establishment was President Myles Brand, and I had the honor to work with him on it,” McRobbie said. “He saw clearly that IU Bloomington had suffered from not having a strong presence in technology, which it had been denied. It meant that there were fewer avenues for finding ways to apply and make practical use of innovations coming from basic research. To him, informatics was a way to establish that presence.
“(Renaming the building) is a fitting way to remember the path-breaking contributions that President Brand made to the academic core of this university and his many other enormous contributions.”
The Informatics East and West buildings have a long history on campus. SICE, which previously had been spread in buildings across the IU campus, found its first home in 2003 in the Info West building, which was built in the 1950s and previously served as a sorority house. In 2008, the School expanded into the Info East building, which was built in the 1920s and was a former fraternity house before undergoing more than $2 million in renovations that included a connecting corridor between the two buildings.
“Myles Brand was instrumental in starting the Informatics program at IU,” said Raj Acharya, dean of SICE. “It is a tremendous honor for one of our buildings to be named in celebration of such an important part of our history, and this is wonderful for our School.”
McRobbie also credited SICE with opening the door to expansion at the university during the past decade. He spoke of the establishment of the School of Public Health in Bloomington, the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Affairs, The Media School, and the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, plus the reorganization of the School of Education in Bloomington and multiple entities at IUPUI.
“In many ways, the school whose establishment led the way for all this change was the School of Informatics, which was founded in 1999, for it showed that change of this kind was possible,” McRobbie said. “The School rapidly grew, with the Department of Computer Science at IU Bloomington joining it in 2005, and the merger with the School of Library and Information Science in 2013. Finally, in 2015, the Intelligent Systems Engineering program was established in the school, and it became the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, now one of the campus’ largest and most popular schools. It is the final realization of President Brand's dream.”
The name change has already been approved by the IU Board of Trustees and is effective immediately.