EAST LANSING, Mich. (Lansing State Journal)- In a time of campus-wide budget cuts, Michigan State University is moving ahead with construction of the first major new building on its campus in nearly a decade.
The Plant Science Expansion will be a four-story glass and brick structure at the southwest corner of Bogue Street and Wilson Road. The price tag is estimated at $43.2 million.
Construction is scheduled to begin in May 2010 and finish by late 2011.
"Why invest here when you're cutting everything else?" said David DeWitt, associate dean for budgets and research in the College of Natural Science. "I think the idea that the university has come to grips with is, when you have budget cuts, you can't just cut everything and go on business as usual."
The university isn't just cutting, he said, but realigning and making strategic investments in its strongest programs.
"One of the things we're good at and one of the things we're going to be good at in the future is plant science research. So we're investing in that," he said. "You have to invest in your future."
Plant science is a research area that extends across departments and disciplines, and, over the past few years, a lucrative one for the university.
Crowded area
There's MSU's $50 million share of the Department of Energy-funded Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), the $2.8 million stimulus grant for research on medicinal plants, $1 million from the Department of Agriculture for work on developing perennial wheat and other, mostly smaller awards.
"We've been very successful, and, when you're very successful, you need more space," DeWitt said. "The GLBRC required us to hire 100 new people. That's a big investment, so we're kind of crowded."
At 90,000 square feet, much of it devoted to open-layout lab space and plant growth chambers, the Plant Science Expansion will alleviate that crowding.
It also will provide spaces better fitted to contemporary research.
Plant biology professor Robin Buell's current lab was "designed for people to do physiology or biochemistry, where people stand and work at a bench."
Which isn't what Buell and her team do. Their work is computational, mapping plant genomes.
"Almost everyone who works for me just sits at a computer all day," she said. "There's just not very good work space for that."
Multi-disciplinary
The new building will physically join the Plant Biology and Plant and Soil Sciences buildings.
By doing so, university officials hope it will also foster greater interaction among researchers and greater levels of cross-disciplinary collaboration.
"The life sciences are becoming more and more multi-disciplinary," said Christoph Benning, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology whose work focuses, in part, on the use of algae for biofuels.
"We are looking not just at single genes and single processes, but the whole plant, the whole organism at the systems level. That requires teams of people. So we want to foster an environment that facilitates that."
Additional Facts
At a glance
Construction on the Plant Science Expansion is set to begin in May 2010 and finish in December 2011. The 90,000-square-foot building will be the first major new building on campus since the Biomedical and Physical Sciences building was completed in 2002. It will be located at the southwest corner of Bogue Street and Wilson Road.
In your voice
