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.

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.

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.