Latest Reports

With Florida International University’s Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing and Health Sciences facility, student and faculty recruitment has exploded, and major donations are on the rise. Collocating five health science disciplines with nursing has been a boon to interprofessional collaboration, as has the inception of the Simulation Teaching and Research (STAR) center. But five years in the facility has taught Dr. Helen Cornely an important lesson: You can’t have too many electrical outlets or too much storage.

The University of Cincinnati has completed the fourth and fifth phases of a six-phase transformation of Rieveschl Hall. The renovation of the eight-story, 234,000-sf building has taken place over the course of four capital funding cycles. Phase 4 involved the 42,000-sf renovation of the Department of Biology’s sixth- and seventh-floor teaching and research labs, offices, and conference space.

Penn State University’s Millennium Science Complex is a state-of-the-art 297,000-sf facility that combines the Materials Research Institute with the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences to create an interdisciplinary research center for advancing science through diverse relationships. The facility serves as a valuable equipment and resource hub for thousands of researchers from Penn State and other organizations—including academic, government labs, and industry—who are at the leading edge of materials science, nanofabrication, and other disciplines.

The University of Toronto’s new 110,000-sf, five-story Environmental Science and Chemistry Building (ESCB), on the suburban Scarborough, Ontario, campus, provides undergraduate students and faculty with labs that feature transparency, flexibility, and adaptability, with a modular design of open, double-sided benches. Benches and associated service columns can be removed and relocated as needed, so dry lab space can be easily converted to wet lab functions without renovations.

In order to increase capacity, improve student/faculty ratios, and boost space utilization by 150 percent, Purdue University’s College of Engineering developed a five-year strategic plan for increasing efficiency and space on the College’s main campus. The plan—which was driven by the need to meet the goal of a 30 percent growth in engineering faculty and staff, along with growth of graduate and undergraduate students—combines a mix of strategies including renovation, portfolio rebalancing, and new construction.