Newswise — The University of Illinois at Chicago today unveiled its College of Medicine Research Building, which provides state-of-the-art laboratories for biomedical researchers. It is the largest new building constructed on the Chicago campus in a quarter century.
The eight-story, 325,000-square-foot building, located at 909 S. Wolcott Ave., will increase UIC's total research space by 15 percent.
"UIC has tremendous assets in its faculty and its clinical education and research programs," said Dr. Joseph Flaherty, dean of the UIC College of Medicine. "And we now have the technically innovative facilities to keep and attract the best and brightest faculty and students to develop cutting-edge cures and treatments for patients."
The research facility houses basic and clinical researchers in medicine, physiology and biophysics, obstetrics and gynecology, pharmacology, urology, microbiology and immunology, anatomy, neurology, pathology and surgery.
The building is designed to foster cross-disciplinary teamwork by incorporating elements to enhance communication and interaction among researchers in various disciplines.
Five broad areas of scientific investigation will come together in the new facility: cardiovascular disease, immunology/transplantation, neurosciences, women's health and cancer.
The new space will allow researchers to continue their work in understanding the basic causes of infertility and reproductive disorders, developing preventive strategies for stroke injury, designing new pharmaceuticals for the treatment of heart failure, and studying the effects of immune tolerance on organ transplantation. It will also provide the capacity for expansion into new areas of research.
"The future of research is interdisciplinary, and will quickly take us into areas that today we cannot even foresee," said UIC Provost R. Michael Tanner. "This building gives us the space and the flexibility to go where the imagination of our faculty takes us."
The $145 million facility includes 116 modern research laboratories for 80 faculty principal investigators and 700 researchers and students.
When fully occupied, the building will support an estimated $35 million in new research annually, in addition to the nearly $110 million College of Medicine researchers annually attract from the National Institutes of Health and other public and private granting agencies.
UIC ranks among the nation's top 50 universities in federal research funding and is Chicago's largest university with 25,000 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state's major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.
For more information about UIC, visit www.uic.edu
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