 "Photo: Laura Cole")
The University announced the official opening of the Biomedical Engineering Building Thursday with a commemorative ceremony including speeches by President William Powers Jr., donors and notable faculty and staff members.
The six-story, 141,000-square-foot building will house the Department of Biomedical Engineering as well as undergraduate laboratories and classrooms for the College of Natural Sciences on the first floor and the Department of Medicinal Chemistry within the College of Pharmacy on the sixth floor.
The building becomes the first on campus to receive certification for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design from the U.S. Green Building Council.
The $55 million project includes nine optics labs, 12 wet labs, eight tissue-culture rooms, dry labs and four computational labs for medical research. The building's lobby features pieces of science-related artwork on the marble walls, such as the human genome, a cell and mathematical equations.
"We hope that all of the students, faculty members and visitors will see that from the instant they walk through the lobby to when they experience learning in our educational facilities and working in our state-of-the-art research laboratories that our program is the best there is," said Kenneth Diller, chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
In September 2006, the department established a joint venture for medical research with the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the UT Health Science Center at Houston.
"Faculty from these three institutions have worked on detection and treatment of cancer, nerve regeneration, imaging technologies, novel drug delivery systems and a number of other health issues," said Ben Streetman, dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering.
Mia Markey, an engineering assistant professor, conducts research in the field of biomedical informatics and is involved with projects such as computer-aided detection of breast cancer, 3-D face recognition and computing to assist health-care facilities with medical diagnosis and decision-making.
"I came to the University in 2002, and I started in the department with our first group of undergraduates, so I basically grew up with them," Markey said. "We have a very nice computational lab, and the building has appropriate networking, air-conditioning and electrical equipment. What's more important is that it is designed with plenty of collaborative space. We need to bring together people with diverse talents and backgrounds."
Before the completion of the building, the advising offices of the Department of Biomedical Engineering were housed in a section of the basement of the Engineering-Science Building. The new advising offices feature a punching bag, a popcorn machine and a student lounge.
"In the Engineering-Science Building, students would walk up and then leave because there was not enough room to accommodate everyone," said James Shaw, a biomedical engineering senior and student adviser. "Students will feel much more welcome. Our new offices are well-lit and much less cramped."
Funding for the building's construction, which began in 2006, included $47 million from the state's Permanent University Fund, $3 million from the Whitaker Foundation and $5 million from the Cockrell School of Engineering.
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