Malone Hall joins Decker Quad engineering facilities

A new hub for scientific activity, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative research, Malone Hall opened its doors to Hopkins faculty and students this past month.

“Malone Hall is a significant addition to the Homewood campus and is a model for 21st-century collaborative research,” Ed Schlesinger, the Benjamin T. Rome dean of the Whiting School of Engineering (WSE), wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “This is an outstanding building — from how well-integrated the design is with the Homewood campus, to the kinds of facilities it houses.”

The building includes offices, conference rooms and large areas for graduate students, as well as an undergraduate computer lab and specialized spaces designed for research.

“There are computer labs and collaboration facilities that will allow researchers and students working in big data, security and, indeed, in computer science in general, to interact and solve the most important problems and challenges we face in these fields,” Schlesinger wrote.

While the Department of Computer Science is the only academic department based in Malone, Schlesinger explained that the building would also play host to several affiliated research institutes.

Malone Hall houses the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI), which is devoted to the understanding of how materials behave under extreme conditions, as well as the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. Moreover, the building serves as the Homewood base for the Johns Hopkins Individualized Health Initiative, uniting research across the schools of Engineering, Medicine, Nursing and Public Health in order to target the most effective treatments for patients.

Schlesinger looks forward to the breadth of new opportunities for collaboration across divisions that Malone Hall will facilitate.

“It is filled with spaces designed to facilitate collaboration, interaction and interdisciplinary work,” he wrote. “The spaces encourage interaction in non-traditional ways and are meant to include people from disparate disciplines.”

Schlesinger foresees Malone Hall becoming a home for discoveries that will have significant impacts worldwide.

“[Malone will provide] spaces in which we are poised to make huge advancements in areas critical to our nation’s future and people’s safety and security — such as the privacy of electronic health records to preventing traumatic brain injury in combat or on the football field,” he wrote.

Among the more extraordinary facilities inside the building is a hypervelocity impact facility, in which a high-powered gas gun shoots projectiles toward targets at the rate of up to one kilometer per second to test the effectiveness of protective materials.

Similarly, the drop tower room features a device that drops weights onto objects to measure acceleration and impact.

Junior Blaine Muri, a computer science major, has already made use of the building’s top-notch facilities. He described Malone Hall as an efficient and interactive workspace.

“It’s a lot different than all the other buildings that are here on campus,” Muri said. “It’s very modern. All the walls can be drawn on. It’s meant to be a very group-oriented, productive place.”

Four-stories tall and covering 69,000 square feet, Malone Hall stands on the Alonzo G. and Virginia G. Decker Quadrangle between Mason and Hackerman halls. Its red brick walls and white marble trim allow it to blend seamlessly into the existing campus architecture.

“It’s traditional on the front, modern on the back,” Schlesinger wrote.

Construction of the Hall was funded by alumnus John C. Malone’s generous $30 million donation to the WSE. Malone received his master’s in Industrial Management from Hopkins in 1964, along with his doctorate in Operations Research three years later. He now serves as chairman of Liberty Media Corp. and Liberty Global, Inc.

“This building and the people it houses also reminds us of the tremendous impact an individual such as an alumnus like John Malone can have on an institution such as Johns Hopkins and the Whiting School,” Schlesinger wrote. “Malone is not just the name of a building; it is a name of one of our most successful graduates. His decision to support our school in this way has had impact and will continue to have impact for years to come. It is people like John Malone that ultimately make Johns Hopkins the great institution it is today.”