An Inventor’s Paradise

Built to LEED-Gold standards, it boasts the campus’s first-ever solar array, which will provide at least 24 percent of the building’s energy. Other LEED-Gold highlights include renewable and efficient energy use and low carbon-emitting materials. The radiant hydronic heat and cooling system is supplemented with “free heating” from the combustion lab equipment. (In other words, student and faculty research helps heat the building!)

Industry partners—such as Daimler, Tektronix, and Hyster-Yale Group—will take space in state-of-the-art labs and “Partner Suites.” University of Portland students will contribute to industry- specific projects through research and internships.

Hyster-Yale is a material handling company, known for its forklifts and other lift truck technologies. UP students will be working on the Hyster Reaction/Yale Reliant products that improve safety for operators. An added bonus: four University of Portland engineering alums—Jeremy Quilizapa ’20, Jessica Cherry ’20, Jennifer Loui ’20, and Dillon McDermott ’23, who work in the Hyster-Yale Innovation Group—will return to The Bluff to mentor undergraduate students.

 Jeremy Quilizapa says the program really helps engineers learn to ask questions and listen before trying to come up with answers. “You can’t think you have all the answers without listening to everyone in the room,” he says. Plus, “Solving problems is fun.”

Donald’s Garage is the student-run maker space on the third floor. It is named after the space where engineer and inventor Donald Shiley, Class of 1951, kept his mill and lathe, where he would go to tinker, invent things, work with his hands, and bring an idea to life. In the new maker space there are, among other resources, laser printers, Glowforge laser cutters, engravers, 3D-design software, and a sewing machine.

“If you have an idea and you want to bring it into reality, this is the place to do it,” says mechanical engineering major Zach Gerards, who also works a shift in Donald’s Garage. “It’s the best place to come and be creative.” Gerards recently created a version of the game Settlers of Catan with small magnets on each of the pieces, so they wouldn’t fall off the table during play. Another student took what he learned from his circuitry class and made a motorized skateboard. The Robotics Club is creating the treads for a newly designed lunar surface vehicle.

“This is a space where our students can proudly walk in the footsteps of Donald Shiley,” says Dean Brian Fabien.

Among Donald Shiley’s many patents—several examples drawn here—were two for a rocket fuel pump and a rocket motor, inventions that could help vehicles work in space. Later, he wondered whether there were more applications for his rocket fuel pump, where the valve allows fuel to move in one direction. What if he could use his innovations to help that most important pump, the human heart? He made a prototype valve, refined it, and made new ones, working in biomedical engineering before there was a name for it. In the end, his patent, the product of his vision and hard work, ended up saving thousands of lives.

Now, it’s the next generation’s turn to make something new. As Donald Shiley said, “Find out what God gave you and then sharpen and hone and train your gift, and then go and use it. Go.”

They had full careers before they met. Donald P. Shiley ’51, was the engineer who created the Björk-Shiley tilting disk heart valve, among other inventions. Darlene Marcos Shiley had a career in the arts—both as an actress and in fundraising. Donald saw her first onstage acting the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter. It’s safe to say he was struck by her performance. By her. He sent roses, though it took six months for him to muster up the courage to ask her out. Every ounce of her verve onstage was a counterpoint to his unassuming confidence. She was the performer. He was the quiet tinkerer who built things in his garage. That a building meant to encourage interdisciplinary, right-brain-left-brain projects bears their names makes a whole lot of sense.

The Shileys are the loving and generous couple who made the Shiley-Marcos Center for Design & Innovation possible.

Donald and Darlene both came from humble means. Donald’s family picked fruit in Yakima, Washington. Darlene grew up in northern California, raised by a single mom. When they met, Donald was still working as founder and CEO of Shiley Company. He never paid himself more than $60,000 a year. When he sold the company, they began the philanthropic chapter of their lives together. Together they have supported education, public television, medicine, and the arts.

It is said that Donald’s heart valve saved more than 400,000 lives. Darlene recalls someone stopping them in a restaurant in Phoenix. The man said to Donald, “I have one of your valves in my heart. It clicks.” Donald responded that this was a good sign. That’s how they’d know it was working.

In 2019, nine years after her beloved Donald had passed, Darlene came to UP’s campus for a celebration at the Shiley School of Engineering. A current student waited in a long line to meet her. He wore a ring made of the material in his own heart valve. It wasn’t the Björk-Shiley valve, but it was one that built upon that technology. The student waited to meet Darlene because he felt a debt to the Shileys. He felt he was still alive because of them. He had enrolled at UP because of Donald Shiley’s connection to the school. And he also graduated from UP’s graduate program and is now a biomedical engineer.

“I can’t think of anything more positive than taking our young people, giving them all the tools they need, and letting them run with it,” Darlene says. “That’s what Donald did. He ran with it.”

The University of Portland and its students are immensely grateful for the visionary support of Darlene and Donald Shiley.