Latest Reports

To produce more food for more people with fewer resources, due to climate change and population growth, agricultural bioscience research will need to adopt new research models, including interdisciplinary projects and corporate partnerships, to help fast-track product discovery and development. Timing will be important. “When I first started in agriculture, if you came up with a new corn hybrid, it could be 10 or 12 years before you would grow that hybrid commercially,” says Stephen Briggs, launch director for the North Carolina Plant Sciences Initiative. “You can’t afford to do that in a 12-year timeframe now. You have to shorten that to two or three years.

Founded at the intersection of health science and education, the Henderson County Health Sciences Center is building bridges between patients, students, and healthcare professionals. The three-story facility provides an enhanced experience for patients through a complex network of professionals working together. The facility is the result of a strategic partnership between Pardee Hospital, Blue Ridge Community College, Wingate University, and Henderson County. Henderson County coordinated and funded the project through a public-private partnership that expands space, funds, and resources for the three entities and the surrounding community.

The new 39-bed Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Beacon Children’s Hospital in South Bend, Ind., features enhanced single-family rooms (SFR) and couplet care rooms (CCR), two new room designs that expand clinical functionality and family accommodation in the NICU. The hospital’s NICU staff holds the conviction that babies belong with their parents whenever possible, and desired to make this practice available not only in the SFRs but also for postpartum mothers who are still patients. Previously, some mildly ill or premature babies were taken to the mother’s postpartum room to accomplish this, but most babies were not eligible due to the severity of their illness. Both types of rooms in the new NICU are designed to accommodate mothers who are still patients immediately after birth. This facilitates early bonding between mother and child, which historically has been limited during the first few days of a NICU baby’s life.

The distinctive design characteristics of the tech workplace are spilling over into the scientific research environment. Elements like glass-walled open-plan offices and labs, activity-based spaces, and the embrace of WELL standards are all making an appearance in Merck & Co., Inc.’s new nine-story, multi-disciplinary discovery research facility, set to open in South San Francisco in 2019. Along with other yet-to-be determined innovations, these features likely will be incorporated in the $8 billion in U.S. capital projects the pharmaceutical giant announced it will invest in over the next five years.

Universities typically build or acquire new academic space sparingly, after long deliberation. When changing economic conditions dropped a whole campus into Lehigh University’s lap, the challenge has been to use that space in ways that support today’s education. Industrial giant Bethlehem Steel didn’t go formally bankrupt until 2001, but the writing was on the wall as early as 1987, when the company sold the majority of its “Mountaintop” research facility to Lehigh, which has since acquired two more buildings there, including Mountaintop C. That massive building’s three high bays attached to a curved bank of offices, is now home to student-driven projects in an environment that seeks to keep elements of the industrial feel and keep large bays as relatively rough, unfinished space.