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- More about DPI
- New HQ in the 78
- DPI's impact and vision
How we bring our three-part mission — tech talent, applied R&D and business building — to life. And how you can support us
DPI's Digital Explorers program teaches code to middle grades students.
This year, DPI's Community Education team launched both year-round and summer programming that reached more than 600 middle, high school, and community college students. Through these programs, students built coding skills and made connections with the Chicago tech community. These relationships will support additional pathways into these fields for more students of color and young women.
This year, the Workforce Education team successfully placed 18 full-stack software development apprentices at SAP, a multinational software company and the world's leading enterprise resource planning software vendor.
DPI teams with the Illinois Department of Public Health and others to test wastewater across the state.
We've built an early-warning system for deadly viruses in Illinois. Our wastewater team is monitoring for COVID-19, Flu A & B, and RSV A&B at wastewater treatment plants and manholes at nearly 88 locations statewide. We are helping the City of Chicago test wastewater for polio.
DPI partners with the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Chicago Department of Public Health to test wastewater across the state for potentially lethal viruses. Our wastewater team is monitoring for COVID-19, influenza, and RSV at wastewater treatment plants and sewers at nearly 88 sites statewide. We are also helping the City of Chicago check wastewater for polio.
The R&D team has been chosen by ComEd to estimate energy savings from carefully planting additional trees in metro Chicago based on different scenarios, with an overarching goal of reducing heat islands and improving health in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Our Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative (IWERC) has released two major reports. One looked into pandemic learning loss and another on which students leave Illinois for college and why. IWERC also created a dashboard breaking down access to education and workforce resources by Census tract.
A mobile lab built to run tests for Shield T3.
DPI's business building provides deep-tech focused services to local start-ups and mid-sized companies that are ready to grow and develop in Chicago's tech-ecosystem.
In 2020, Shield T3 launched our homegrown covidSHIELD test, a gold-standard, PCR saliva test invented at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Since its launch, Shield T3 has run more than 5 million COVID-19 tests nationwide and served more than 450 customers. As a result of the overall success of Shield T3, we are now commercializing our wastewater services.
More than glass and steel, DPI's new headquarters will be the center of the state's new tech ecosystem.
The central atrium will be where many kinds of people come together.
Walk into the 15th Street entrance of DPI's new headquarters and you might catch a career fair, exhibition, or lecture in progress. You might also bump into scientists, students, and entrepreneurs on their way to the labs, conference rooms, classrooms, and offices in the rest of the building where learning, collaborating, and innovating will happen.
On the building’s top, indoor-outdoor spaces will host a range of events.
Imagine a one-of-a-kind setting for a lunch for middle school kids learning how to code smartphone apps; a gathering of Midwest utility leaders working on new science to lower carbon emissions; or a showcase of startups from across the University of Illinois System. The Summit’s floor-to-ceiling windows will provide spectacular views of Lake Michigan, the Chicago River, and the Loop.
The auditorium will seat nearly 100 people.
Recent DPI events brought the governor of Illinois and mayor of Chicago together to announce tech training for people looking to start new careers; a scientific innovation business-building partnership with a world-class particle accelerator in Germany; a cohort of computer science students presenting their capstone research projects. In the future, these gatherings can take place in the tech hub's bespoke 95-seat auditorium.
Flexible labs are designed for different types and sizes of experimentation.
Drones programmed to scan bridges and dams to see if they are structurally sound. AI that can detect financial fraud in real time. Agbots that monitor, weed, spray and harvest crops. These modular labs will be built to give scientists the tools they need to discover, tinker, test, and iterate these and other breakthroughs.
Ceiling-sourced power and data mean these labs will be transformable.
A massive repository of brain health data used to untangle the most challenging conditions. AI to detect financial fraud in real time. A VR platform geared to help patients with chronic kidney disease live healthier lives. The six 1,500-square-foot computational labs will be ready-made with the tools to take on challenges like these.
Built to bring people together, DPI’s headquarters will have an array of spaces designed for a range of needs.
In the center of the atrium will be two circular, glass-walled conference rooms. These floating rooms will be just two of the many collaboration spaces for researchers, students, teachers, and entrepreneurs to push science forward and build a more equitable tech industry in Chicago — and beyond.
To teach tech, DPI will have a variety of large and small classrooms.
Teaching and learning is core to DPI's tech talent mission, a set of programs that spans from elementary school students learning to code and high schoolers meeting with Chicago tech leaders, to college students in immersion programs and adult learners upskilling to change careers into in-demand tech roles. The classroom spaces at the new headquarters will be purposely built for them all.