Science students will have more space to work with in the upcoming years. The renovations in Douglas Strain Science Center have been completed with the new offices. The administration is now making plans to complete the two new research labs.
The construction in Strain Hall began just this previous summer, with the focus that the students working in the building were overflowing the labs.
“I think that the science programs are so heavily enrolled that they need to make the spaces more flexible for use,” Director of Facilities Management & Campus Public Safety Cindy Schuppert said. “I know that for the labs, rather than have them specific for one of the sciences they want to, be spaces that several sciences could use.”
Strain Hall has now renovated the space for two research labs, one on the second floor and one on the third floor.
“Now are offices are altogether in this little quad of offices, and on the other side of those offices is a big open area that’s being renovated,” Biology Professor and Department Chair David Scholnick said. “We gave up space, so we have smaller offices now than we used to, but to have this really nice research space for us and our students to work.”
Along with that, a larger amount of windows have been installed in both the office areas and the research labs, for hope that it will make the science building appear more open. The research labs are expectedtobecompletedby spring of 2016. Until then, the professors in Strain are excited to see how many research opportunities this brings to the science courses.
“I just think it’s going to be be great for our students. I mean, that’s who it’s built for,” Scholnick said. “They’ll give our students a chance to collaborate on different projects with a variety of faculty, and it’ll be a little more cost effective, so now we don’t have to equip all these little labs. We have one lab so we can share equipment, and space and chemicals and all those expensive things, and I think It’ll be a great way to kind of ramp up our research.”
Scholnick said she also hopes that this will be an ideal model for further construction in the science buildings.
“We’re hoping that it’s going to be kind of a model for new labs in the future,” Scholnick said. “We ran out of space a long time ago,soifweweretodesign a new building, this is going to be what we want it to look like.”
Leave a Reply