Texas Tech University :: Vice President for Research

EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCES BUILDING OPEN ON TEXAS TECH CAMPUS

By John Davis
Photos courtesy of Kippra D. Hopper

The Texas Tech University skyline changed yet again this year.
		To celebrate, Texas Tech officials officially opened the $37 million Experimental Sciences Building on March 3 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The multidisciplinary research facility is designed to serve teams of faculty researchers and their students. “The new Experimental Sciences Building will advance research on the Texas Tech University campus,” said Dean O. Smith, vice president for research. “Researchers and graduate students go hand-in-hand, so our top students will benefit as well. We have moved some of our best researchers into the laboratories and plan to use the unfinished shell space to attract more premiere researchers to the university.”
The 127,810-square-foot building features 50,851 square feet of lab space with a basement and three floors, faculty research laboratories and offices. To enhance the research process, completed lab areas were designed to bring together researchers from different disciplines and encourage them to collaborate. Working together in the new facility will be researchers in biology, chemical engineering, plant and soil sciences, animal and food sciences, computer sciences, economics and geography, biotechnology and imaging.
		The facility was constructed using $24 million from tuition revenue bonds and $13 million from Higher Education Assistance Funds. Researchers and their students will have access to a plant growth chamber facility, a biotechnology and genomics center, a center for biological and geospatial information systems and an imaging center with electron and optical microscopy. Michael Allen, associate vice president for research, said the building is designed similarly to other new university research buildings across the country in that it encourages interdisciplinary research.
“This new building is vital to growing our research enterprise,” he said. “It will attract new researchers and will provide excellent research space for productive faculty who are already on campus. All major research universities are moving more toward interdisciplinary research. Most new research buildings are designed so that faculty from different disciplines can work in close proximity to encourage teamwork and cooperation with the hope that the interactions will lead to more sponsored research.” CONTACT: Dean O. Smith, vice president for research, 742-3905, dean.smith@ttu.edu.