UT Medical School Digs In To Launch
Research Expansion in New Facility
Replacement Research Facility
(click on photo for larger image)
HOUSTON—(April 12, 2005)—The University of Texas Medical School at Houston has celebrated a crucial step toward expanding its research capacity and providing a new home for the school’s laboratory animals. Students, staff, faculty, leadership and friends gathered for a "groundbreaking celebration" April 12 in the Fifth Floor Gallery of the UT Medical School. Special guests symbolically turned shovelfuls of earth and speakers noted a milestone in building the Replacement Research Facility.
"Seeing our baby—the new research building—through its gestational date is my most important short-term goal," said UT Medical School Dean Stanley G. Schultz, M.D. "It will permit a much-needed significant expansion of our research capacity."
Schultz noted that the six-floor, 208,500 square foot facility to be constructed due south of the Medical School Building at 6431 Fannin will be the first new building for the school in nearly 30 years. It will go up on the site of the recently deconstructed John Freeman Building, the school's original home, which provided 55,000 square feet of space in two stories.
When the $78-million building opens in early 2007, the school's research animal facilities ("vivarium") will be consolidated on the top two floors. The National Center for Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health provided two grants totaling $6 million toward construction of the new center.
"I can't wait for the new building. It will be a state-of-the-art facility—certainly the best such facility in Texas and one of the best in the world—when it is completed," said Bradford S. Goodwin, Jr., DVM, executive director of the Center for Laboratory Animal Medicine and Care.
The building's four other floors, offering a total increase in research and office space of nearly 100,000 square feet over the previous structure, will house four strategic interdisciplinary research programs:
- Neurobiology of Human Development
- Molecular Biology of Human Pathogens
- Physiological Genomics/Systems Biology
- Structural Biology.
During the groundbreaking ceremony, Schultz praised the "tireless" efforts of UT Health Science Center at Houston President James T. Willerson, M.D., to solicit funding for the Replacement Research Facility.
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