Industry News

Santa Clara County is building a $74-million forensic crime laboratory in San Jose, Calif. The four-story, 90,000-sf facility will be the first government-owned laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area with a DNA analysis system when it opens in 2008. The project, which will enable the study of physical evidence from crime scenes including toxicology, latent print processing, and substance analysis, began construction in May of 2006.

Qualcomm has completed the 909,170-sf Building W Campus in San Diego. The three-building project was designed by Delawie Wilkes Rodrigues Barker and built by general contractor Roel Construction with Burkett & Wong as structural engineer and Walsh Engineers as mechanical engineer.

UC Davis opened its new Education Building and the F. William Blaisdell Medical Library on the school's Sacramento campus on December 11, 2006. The $46-million, four-story structure replaces classrooms and offices in Davis and unites the medical school's educational facilities on a single campus.

A consortium led by Rutgers University has received $50 million in New Jersey state funding to construct a stem cell research facility in Camden. Partnering with the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Camden, the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, and the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, the laboratory will be the center of a statewide network of interconnected biomedical research and collection centers.

St. Elizabeths Hospital broke ground in December 2006 on a two-story, $140-million psychiatric care facility on its Washington, D.C., campus. Accommodating 292 patients in private rooms, the 438,000-sf facility will feature a 20,000-sf "green roof" for energy savings and drainage reduction. The general contractor for the project is Tompkins Builders, a subsidiary of Turner Construction. Completion is slated for March of 2009.