A new gift from The Bourns Foundation will support the development of UCR’s Advanced & Integrated Manufacturing (AIM) Hub, a newly approved center within the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering (BCOE) that is now in its launch phase.
The gift will help build the first phase of AIM’s cyber-physical digital engineering platform, a shared environment where students, researchers, and industry partners will be able to connect computer models with physical systems and real-world data. The goal is to explore, test, and refine engineering ideas before committing to costly prototypes, equipment, or production changes.
That capability is central to what AIM is being built to do.
Rather than relying only on a fixed, traditional curriculum, AIM is being designed to connect engineering education with the needs industry is identifying now and the capabilities it expects to need next. Industry-informed challenges will give students opportunities to work across disciplines and gain experience with emerging engineering technologies before entering the workforce.
For a student, that could mean studying a physical system and its digital counterpart at the same time. Data collected through sensors or laboratory equipment could update a digital model, allowing students and researchers to examine performance, identify potential problems, and refine a design before it is built or deployed.
The platform is expected to bring together digital engineering software, digital twins, sensing, advanced computing, artificial intelligence, and data from laboratory and manufacturing systems.
“This support from The Bourns Foundation comes at an important stage in AIM’s development,” said Kavan Hazeli, professor of mechanical engineering and founding director of the AIM Hub. “This gift helps AIM build more than a laboratory. It creates a shared engineering environment where industry challenges directly shape student learning, applied research, and technology development.”
The Foundation’s support also continues a relationship with UCR engineering that spans decades.
Marlan and Rosemary Bourns co-founded Bourns, Inc. in 1947 in their Altadena garage, making sensors for the rapidly growing aerospace industry, before moving the company to Riverside in 1950. The college took their names in 1994 following a gift from The Bourns Foundation, which has continued to support engineering education at UCR. Their son, Gordon Bourns, has maintained a close relationship with the college and has served for more than two decades as chair of its Council of Advisors.
“My parents wanted Riverside to develop engineering talent of its own, and that was the idea behind the Foundation’s 1994 gift to the college. Supporting AIM from the beginning is consistent with that vision,” said Gordon Bourns, vice president of The Bourns Foundation. “AIM students will learn to model and test their ideas using real data before anything is built, shortening development time and leading to better designs. We hope many of these students will build their careers right here in the Inland Empire.”
The Foundation’s gift comes as AIM works to secure the partnerships, funding, and infrastructure needed to move the center from launch into operation. The digital engineering platform will serve as one foundation for that work, with additional equipment, technologies, and industry collaborations added over time.
Those early investments will help determine what students can do through AIM: work on problems brought forward by industry, test ideas using modern engineering tools, and gain experience before entering the workforce. They will also give manufacturers a new way to work with UCR on the engineering and workforce challenges shaping their industries.