Social Spaces Improve the Quality of Campus Life
The University of British Columbia's capital improvement program is aimed at enhancing more than just the quality of the buildings on campus. Planning officials are also taking into consideration the need to provide alternative learning and social spaces for the 50,000 students, faculty, and administrative staff who occupy the campus on any given day.

Success Lies in Program Aspects
Focusing on two hot academic and commercial fields, bio-business and digital media, the University of Georgia in Athens (UGA) has created an incubator program that launches successful businesses based on the University's research and facilities. These academic commercialization centers offer promising start-up businesses access to research labs, venture capital, and office space to propel them through the critical early phases of business development and into the high-tech marketplace.

Hailed as the Taj Mahal of Medical Research
Within four months of opening in November 2000, the $200-million Stowers Research Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, surpassed its three-year goal for scientist recruitment. More than 15 principal investigators now work in the 600,000-sf facility, built with the intention of becoming one of the world's most innovative biomedical research institutions.

Innovative Institute Solicits Input from All Disciplines
The McKnight Brain Institute of the University of Florida brings together 315 faculty from 51 departments in 10 colleges in a unique collaboration that topples century-old academic silos and creates partnerships with government and private industry. Dr. William G. Luttge, co-founder, professor, and executive director of the Institute, says this groundbreaking approach is the only way to effectively research, treat, and potentially cure neurological diseases. Brain disorders and injuries--including those causing addiction, developmental disorders, depression, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, paralysis, epilepsy, chronic pain, and more--afflict one in five people in the United States and cost more than $500 billion a year in treatment, rehabilitation, and lost wages.

San Diego State University
The new five-story Chemistry Science Laboratory building is a key node and a prominent feature at the entrance to the San Diego State University (SDSU) campus. Its Spanish design with mission clay tile roof, colorful stucco, open courtyards, and arcades with open views of the surrounding hillsides, provides the students and faculty with a pleasant setting for learning and relaxing. The design of the building relies on bridges to the campus and the old laboratory building to support future connections to faculty office and classroom space. Scheduled for completion in January 2003, the old laboratory building will become the Business and Math building with Chemistry Sciences faculty offices on the new sixth floor.

University of Texas, Austin