Northwestern to Build Engineering Life Sciences Facility
Monday, March 17, 2008
EVANSTON, Ill. --- A five-story addition to the Technological Institute will
be built to house engineering life sciences programs at the McCormick School
of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern University has announced.
The facility will be a multidisciplinary center of research excellence
designed to retain and attract the best faculty in the field of engineering
life sciences. Another key feature of the building will be a
state-of-the-art analytical laboratory for chemists and others who study and
develop new molecules and substances.
The addition, totaling 54,000 gross square feet, will occupy space on the
north side of the Technological Institute between the B and C wings,
currently a small parking lot. Construction of the new space is expected to
begin in June 2009 and be completed two years later. The building will be
designed by Flad Architects.
The ground floor of the new building along with some adjoining space in the
Technological Institute will be used for the Integrated Molecular Structure
Education and Research Center, an improved and expanded version of the
existing Analytical Services Laboratory, a facility that provides essential
shared instrumentation for the analysis of molecules and materials.
The building's upper floors will provide core laboratory and office space
for McCormick researchers whose work emphasizes the life sciences and their
relation to engineering. The addition will not include any classroom space.
"During the last decade, at McCormick and across the country, biology has
joined physics, mathematics and chemistry as an integral part of
engineering," said Julio M. Ottino, dean of McCormick. "As disciplinary
boundaries fall, traditional engineering departments have expanded into
biological sciences."
Traditional biology-related engineering disciplines are biomedical
engineering, environmental engineering and biology components in chemical
engineering, but all eight of McCormick's departments have faculty who are
involved to various degrees in life sciences engineering. Interdisciplinary
areas of research at McCormick include biologically inspired devices,
computational biology, bioinformatics, neural engineering, patient safety,
rehabilitation engineering, tissue engineering, biologically based
materials, biomimetics and sustainability.
These areas are receiving substantial research funding, said Dean Ottino,
and are attracting a significant number of students, leading to the need for
expanded research facilities at the Technological Institute.
