Brings Together Bioengineering, Biomedical, and Genome Sciences
In 2001, construction began on a new bioengineering facility at the University of Washington in Seattle. The facility was intended to provide a central home for bioengineering teaching and research programs, which has previously been scattered among nine separate facilities since the department's inception in 1948.

Science Building Design Can Foster Collaboration
The National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine continue to promote interdisciplinary research as the best way to solve science's most perplexing problems in fields that were unimaginable a generation ago. During the last decade, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of academic departments at universities as research disciplines merge to create, for example, biophysics, biochemistry, and bioengineering. Most recently, the trend has been to merge bio- and nano- fields.

University of Washington
This important building for the University of Washington houses the disciplines that lead the evolution of biomedical research and creates the setting for a highly collaborative, interdisciplinary academic research environment.

New Developments, Performance, Costs, and Trends Must Be Considered
Choosing the most appropriate products to use for the interior surface finishes in a vivarium is an important decision that should not be taken lightly. Too often, finishes for the floors, walls, and ceilings are not selected until the end of the design process and little consideration is given to the protocol and purpose of the vivarium. This failure to properly select durable finishes that can withstand exposure to heavy impact, moisture, cleaning agents, biological materials, and general wear-and-tear can result in cracked floors, imperfect junctions, and unsealed penetrations.

Radio Frequency Identification Increases Data Accuracy and Cost Savings
University of Florida (UF) recently implemented a radio frequency identification (RFID) system to track rodent census at its newly opened Cancer and Genetics Research complex in Gainesville, Fla. Used extensively for inventory tracking in shipping and commercial sectors, RFID has the potential to radically improve the accuracy of monitoring vivaria populations and create considerable cost savings by eliminating labor intensive paper-based systems.

Cost Modeling Strategies Combat Escalating Inflation Rates
The extreme volatility of the marketplace between 2004 and 2007 has led the architectural design community to search for new ways of dealing with higher inflation rates, particularly in the academic science arena where universities often approve and set budgets two to three years before the actual start of a project.

Tools and Technologies for Leading Edge Facility Design
In a time of increasingly limited funding and rapidly rising construction costs, facility planners are using new methodologies to achieve efficient design solutions with high benefit-to-cost ratios. Architects at Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Architecture & Engineering (EYP) used a collection of analytical planning tools in the renovation of the University of New Hampshire's (UNH) James Hall to create a flexible modern research facility programmed for maximum efficiency.

Atkinson Hall Houses Calit2 and "Invents the Future" of the University
It looks like something out of Star Trek: a large open room with a glass cube suspended in the center. Step inside the cube, and a researcher can experience what a molecule looks like from the inside, manipulating his viewpoint by moving his hand. Or an architect can "tour" a building that so far exists only in her imagination.

Collaborative Learning Spaces are Found Throughout Science Buildings
The past decade has seen a blurring of the distinction between courses taught in a "laboratory" and those taught in a "lecture hall." Based on the notion that students learn science by actively doing science, lectures and data computation are taking place in labs, and students are interacting more with each other and their professors in lecture halls. This shift in the thinking about how students learn science has resulted in a shift in the way both kinds of learning spaces are designed.

Arizona State University
Arizona State University's new 180,000-sf Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building (ISTB I) promotes the school's growing reputation and record of accomplishments for its innovative approach to research at the intersections of science, technology, fine arts, policy and humanities. The ISTB I represents a facility where "teaching and learning can be enhanced by the type of labs constructed"; that the physical "breaking down of artificial constructs" and the intermingling of a spectrum of life sciences and engineering lays new ground--psychologically, philosophically, and scientifically--for "new perspectives on nature."

Rice University
When Rice University adopted the vision for its Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management to be among the top 10 business schools in the country, in the next 10 years, it placed a large stake of that vision in the construction of a new state-of-the-art facility. The logic, as Dean Gilbert Whitaker explained, followed that the coupling of great students and faculty, with a great building, "will make it possible to meet Rice's high aspirations for the Jones School."

Frostburg State University
After nine years in the making, Frostburg State University's new $33-million Compton Science Center is home to the biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering departments. As the latest addition to FSU, the Compton Science Center is considered "a jewel of the university system."