The University of Hawaii has completed construction for its new, $65 million Life Sciences Building on its Manoa campus, officials with the state university announced Tuesday.
The three-story, 70,000-square-foot facility is located on the Diamond Head end of McCarthy Mall and includes 21 state-of-the-art teaching and research laboratories, with the capacity to serve more than 500 students daily. The multi-million dollar building will house the College of Natural Sciences biology, microbiology and botany departments along with the Pacific Biosciences Research Center, which operates the state’s only transmission electron microscope.
The building — which will be open for instruction beginning in the Fall 2020 semester — also features a 600-square foot student collaboration area, 52 graduate student workstations, five conference rooms and 28 faculty offices.
“We are extremely excited that the Life Sciences building is ready,” said UH Manoa College of Natural Sciences Dean Aloysius Helminck, in a statement. “It’s a fantastic opportunity, a collaboration between several different units on campus to provide absolutely top-notch, world-class facilities for both research and instruction.”
The Life Sciences Building is the university’s first major design-build project, a single contract for the design and construction with a fixed cost.
“This building was designed and constructed purposely to bring together many of our most-accomplished researchers with undergraduate and graduate students,” said UH Manoa Provost Michael Bruno, in a statement. “The interdisciplinary collaboration that will happen in the new facility offers an exciting opportunity for our students, our future researchers and leaders.”
In 2016, leaders at the university mapped out a new campus modernizing strategy-designing university space to encourage “interdisciplinary collaboration and communication,” that will, in turn, support modern teaching, learning, and innovation. The university partnered with Layton Construction Company, LLC, and its design consultant G70 for the Life Sciences project.
The next major project on the Manoa campus is a $41 million, design-build to renovate the Sinclair Library into a student success center, which state legislators funded in 2019.
“We cannot thank state lawmakers and the governor enough for supporting this project,” said UH President David Lassner, in a statement. “Beyond the amazing educational and research opportunities that the facility offers our students and scientists, it also provided the university an opportunity to prove that it could efficiently build a facility that will advance 21st century teaching, learning and research.”