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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.

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.

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.

Emory University’s 200,000-sf Health Sciences Research Building (HSRB) provides both wet and dry labs and BSL-2 and BSL-3 containment to pursue research in drug discovery, immunology and vaccines, neurosciences, cancer, gastroenterology, transplant immunology, nephrology, biomedical engineering, and human genetics.