Science and Engineering Hall Breaks Ground
Science and Engineering Hall Breaks Ground
November 2011
With the ceremonial turn of more than a dozen golden shovels in the earth, ground was officially broken on the new 400,000-square-foot Science and Engineering Hall (SEH), a state-of-the-art facility that will provide transformative and integrated learning and lab spaces for the biological and physical sciences and the engineering and applied sciences. The building will nearly double the amount of space currently available for those disciplines and will reflect the latest pedagogical thinking about how students learn science most effectively.
“We’ve already seen the impact of modern, spacious facilities . . . such as the consequential research of the Vertes Research Group when it moved to renovated space in Corcoran Hall six years ago,” said Michael M. King, professor and chair of GW’s Department of Chemistry. “SEH has the potential to multiply that effect throughout the faculty, creating new opportunities and making a difference in ongoing work.”
The promise of the new facility has already advanced efforts to grow Columbian College’s research enterprise and attract new faculty. Among those recently recruited are Damien O’Halloran, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, who will join the Department of Biological Sciences; and, to the Department of Chemistry, Adelina Mitova Voutchkova, a Yale post- doctoral fellow whose research interests include green chemistry, sustainability, toxicity, and hazard reduction of commercial chemicals. Both O’Halloran and Voutchkova will begin their tenure at GW in January. It is anticipated that approximately 20 more scientists from the nation’s top laboratories and academic institutions will be hired by 2015.
For students, the impact of the building on learning will be all-encompassing. At both the undergraduate and graduate levels, students will have the opportunity to study how to plan and conduct an experiment and how to interpret results in a building where science is practiced all around them.
“With our strong commitment to the integration of undergraduate research in our curriculum, we look forward to inviting more of our stellar students into spaces that will accommodate them,” said King.
The location of Science and Engineering Hall in a metropolitan area that has become a center for world science will not only bolster the recruitment of top students and faculty, it will also build upon existing partnerships with government agencies, think tanks, museums, and other national and international organizations. “This new building,” said Dean Peg Barratt, “will enable us to be “a node and a convener for scientific research on a global scale.”
The facility’s innovative features include:
- A high bay with a 30-foot ceiling for research involving large-scale objects, such as building particle detectors for high-energy physics experiments
- A 3,600-square-foot, state-of-the-art greenhouse to study the impact of climate change on plants and animal/plant interactions
- An imaging facility to enable investigators to “see” into materials and cells with greater detail and clarity
- A “clean room,” where air quality, temperature, and humidity are regulated, for students and faculty to create computer chips
- A multi-use auditorium and a media center for hosting national science symposia, conferences, and keynote addresses by distinguished visitors
- Flexible space to accommodate developing technologies
Track the SEH progress and view additional information at http://www.sehshowcase.com/. To read more about the groundbreaking ceremony and listen to the speeches, visit http://gwtoday.gwu.edu/aroundcampus/universitybreaksgroundforscienceandengineeringhall.
