New Building is a Result of Both Public and Private Support
Davis Marksbury grew up in central Kentucky and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in civil engineering from UK in 1980. With a business partner, he began three successful companies addressing technological challenges in the document publishing industry.
The third company he started in the basement of his Lexington home, and when Hewlett–Packard acquired it in 2008, it had annual revenue of $90 million and offices in several countries.
After selling the company, Davis and his wife Beverly gave the University a $6 million gift toward an $18.6 million building to house high–technology research. Dedicated as the Davis Marksbury Building, the new facility is the second building of the College of Engineering’s digital village complex.
An additional $2 million gift was provided by James F. Hardymon, ’56,’58, and a gift of $328,000 was made by James F. McDonald, ’62, ’64. All totaled, more than $8.3 million in private funding was given toward the construction of the facility. This amount was matched by the state’s Research Challenge Trust Fund.
“Not only will this new facility provide UK with world–class research and teaching space, it is an innovative partnership of public and private support,” notes Mike Richey, ’73, ’79, Vice President for Development. “We are deeply grateful for these visionary gifts from alumni, and for the matching state support.”
“In today’s economy,” Richey continues, “We need gifts like these to help us fund big ideas that are transformative to the University and to the Commonwealth.”
Davis Marksbury shares, “The University of Kentucky has been good to me, and I thought I should give something back. If you want to make a difference . . . and you have the opportunity to make a difference . . . what better place could there be than the University of Kentucky? We have the brightest and best right here.”
The three–story, 45,014–gross–square–foot building will provide engineering and computer science students with state–of–the–art classrooms, laboratories and research facilities. The new building is also UK’s first facility to receive certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system developed by the U. S. Green Building Council.