Latest Reports

The Phase II addition to the John Edward Porter Neuroscience Research Center (PNRC) houses 419 occupants, including 45 principal investigators (PIs) from 10 separate NIH Institutes, along with 374 post-doctoral researchers. The PNRC is a state-of-the-art research facility that promotes world-class biomedical neuroscience research by enhancing interdisciplinary communication and collaboration as a means of facilitating innovation and creativity.

As health science education becomes increasingly interprofessional, the design of academic medical facilities is changing to reflect this new type of learning. Collaboration is the cornerstone of interprofessional medicine, as health care providers strive to offer the best patient care. Nurturing such collaboration begins in the educational facilities where students from multiple disciplines learn the importance of working together.

The five-story, 70,000-sf Duke Environment Hall, home of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, serves as a living laboratory of sustainable design. The building, which is tracking LEED Platinum, houses the rapidly expanding undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students in the Environmental Sciences and Policy program.

Renovating or repurposing older buildings on college and university campuses is a cost-effective, sustainable, and efficient way to modernize or add program space, with the advantages of less time to completion and occupancy, fewer site planning challenges, and preservation of historic campus buildings. This approach also maximizes financial accountability and return on investment in a time of tight budgets and reduced federal funding, which requires academic institutions to depend more heavily on state support and creative funding streams, such as public/private partnerships.

Though it sounds counter-intuitive, trying to customize flexibility in research spaces may actually inhibit the intended outcome in the long term, according to Niraj Dangoria, associate dean of facilities planning and management at Stanford School of Medicine, and David Bendet, associate principal at Perkins+Will Architects. Designers should focus instead on the people and modularity, even when future research needs are uncertain and can change rapidly.