Latest Reports

The award-winning Eva J. Pell Laboratory provides Biosafety Level Three (BSL-3) and Animal Biosafety Level Three (ABSL-3) high-containment laboratory space for pathogen and toxin research to support a growing infectious disease research program at Pennsylvania State University. The facility has been designed to support advanced research using CDC/USDA Select Agents. As many as 15 researchers—working in BSL-2, BSL-3, and ABSL-3 containment—study human and animal health issues they were previously unable to safely address on campus.

Community colleges are fulfilling an increasingly important roll in higher education, particularly in allied health fields, and as a result are focusing on modern facilities and equipment to provide hands-on training. Elgin Community College (ECC) in Illinois recently opened a new, state-of-the-art Health & Life Sciences building, which is helping the college achieve its goals of remaining competitive and expanding program offerings.

Utilizing the “big room”—collocating all project team members onsite in a single environment—to achieve true integrated project delivery (IPD) can be the best way to drive efficiency, reduce waste, and improve project outcomes through a shared pain/shared gain contract structure for all stakeholders. But it also can create a lot of noise in the form of information overload. Only by managing information as a Lean commodity can the IPD team realize the full potential of the process.

The six-story, 296,500-sf University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston’s School of Dentistry includes dental clinics, simulation and pre-clinical labs, clinical support labs, a clinical research lab, classrooms, learning resource center, student center, and administrative space. The building is divided into three zones: patient and public areas on the lower floors, topped by student areas, then faculty and staff areas on the upper floors.

Bringing biosafety laboratories into compliance with the BMBL 5^th Edition’s “zero airflow reversal” clause requires assessing risk appropriately, analyzing the impact of a pressure envelope on the facility, installing appropriate ventilation and control systems, and implementing new control strategies for practical testing.