Latest Reports

The University of Kansas has completed the second phase of a major expansion of its engineering facilities to accommodate a 50 percent increase in the number of engineering graduates. The Learned Hall Engineering Expansion Phase 2 (LEEP 2) completes the new engineering complex by connecting two existing buildings: Learned Hall, built in 1963, and the Measurement, Materials and Sustainable Environment Center (M2SEC), completed in 2012.

The “Super Lab,” opened in 2015 at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), in Sydney, Australia, can host more than 200 students in up to five different lab classes simultaneously. With several sessions held each day, the Super Lab sees 2,500 to 3,000 student entries per week, a figure that, for a single lab space, is “rather horrifying to academics at first face value,” says Bill Booth, laboratory operations manager at UTS.

Research trends that could reduce the need for future vivarium space have led some research institutions to “future-proof” those expensive spaces by designing them to be convertible to state-of-the-art labs. Institutions including Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, University of California, and the University of Pittsburgh have built convertible space, and others are following suit, says Josh Meyer, AIA, managing principal at Jacobs Consultancy Inc.

Holyoke Community College’s Center for Health Education is a state-of-the-art facility providing teaching spaces for nursing and radiologic technology students pursuing a practical nursing certificate, an associate degree in nursing, or an associate degree in science, with a focus on radiologic technology for use in the medical imaging professions. The Center also supports the Foundations of Health program by providing modern low-fidelity (lo-fi) labs within the nursing program spaces.

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.