NEW FLIPBOOK
PHOTO GALLERY

By Paula Scott

On a sunny October afternoon, Bluffton University officials provided a tour of the new Knowlton Science Center for donor and alumnus Greg Wannemacher and members of his staff. 

The facility, which opened for use this fall, provides six labs, faculty offices and room for student collaboration in a nearly 20,000-square foot building. The center is named for Austin E. Knowlton and is among fifteen grant projects featured on the Knowlton Foundation website. https://aekfoundation.org/transformative-grants/

The facility is also filled with the names of donors, many of whom are  Bluffton University alumni. The dietetics teaching lab is named for Greg and Donna Wannemacher, who graduated from Bluffton University in the late 1970s. The couple served as co-chairs on the building project with Dave and Tonya Baumgartner.

Wannemacher links his personal and professional interests in the development of the dietetics teaching lab at Bluffton University.

His company, Wannemacher Enterprises, has grown over the past 30 years from a trucking company to include packaging, warehousing, distribution and two kinds of food processing services. Wannemacher has a liquid fill co-packing facility that specializes in honey processing and a spray drying facility that processes broths with an atomizing nozzle and high temperatures, instantly turning the liquid into a powder. Both are Safe Quality Food certified facilities.

Thus, Wannemacher sees students in the university food lab as both future fellow alumni and potential future employees.

But it is relationships that have kept the businessman connected with the university. He speaks of being inspired by business professor Dr. Howard Raid, who toured Wannemacher's business in the 1990s and told people that the former student was “one my boys.” It was in the 2000s, as his business grew, that Wannemacher began developing a new kind of relationship with the university.

University president Jane Wood calls the science center “A joy of a building: so many people came together to make this happen.” She points out that “Every lab has a name, every office has a name,” indicating the people who supported the project and who “know how important sciences are to our future.”

During the tour, vice president of student affairs Phill Talavinia introduced faculty members who in turn provided information on the new resources and technology that will impact their teaching in STEM fields. On the first floor an Anatomage table provides students with the ability to study virtual cadavers down to the cellular level. In the second floor food lab, there is all new equipment including large monitors which give close up views of cooking demonstrations.

The Knowlton Science Center, which is located in the center of campus next to the tennis courts, will be open for tours on homecoming weekend.