Chapman University in Orange, California, has announced a $21 million gift from the W.M. Keck Foundation to enhance and elevate the university's science and engineering education.

The gift will help fund construction of a three-story, 140,000-square-foot complex for the Schmid College of Science and Technology. To be named the Keck Center for Science and Engineering, the 2.25-acre complex will consist of two connected halls — the Hall of Science and the Hall of Engineering. Scheduled to open in the fall of 2018, the center will feature a total of forty teaching and research labs, a computational and data sciences classroom with a supercomputing room, designated areas for collaboration, research/study suites, seminar/conference rooms, an outdoor amphitheater, and state-of-the-art molecular biology, microbiology, organic and physical chemistry, biogeochemistry, environmental sciences, computer science, and materials science equipement.

Since 1996, the foundation has given $2.45 million to the university, including $1 million to name the W.M. Keck Foundation Chemistry Suite in the new Center for Science and Engineering.

"For more than sixty years, the W.M. Keck Foundation has been investing in high-impact scientific endeavors," said Keck Foundation chair and CEO Robert Day. "Given Chapman's incredible growth in STEM-related fields, we are proud to partner with Chapman to build a center to serve exceptional students and scholars for generations of scientific advancements. We look forward to what the university will accomplish with these new facilities."