DBIA awarded the UC Irvine Engineering Unit 3 in Irvine, California the Design-Build Excellence award in the Educational Facilities category. A $52 million, 122,000 SF, cast-in-place structure including five stories for the lab wing and four stories for the non-lab wing, the Engineering Unit 3 project at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) was constructed to provide primarily wet and dry labs and expansion space for the five engineering departments: Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Civil and Environmental Engineering. The project also added much needed surge space and an approximately 350-seat lecture hall. The facility is used to foster a growing trend toward collaborative inquiry between faculty in the Schools of Information, Computer Sciences and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. A common thread between the research activities of these three groups is the quest to achieve better understanding of the principles in engineering and computer sciences.