Workers have broken ground on the project that will turn the former Dalgleish Cadillac car dealership into Wayne State University's new Multidisciplinary Biomedical Research Building.
The $93 million project is turning the longtime car dealership at Cass Avenue and Amsterdam Street into 200,000 square feet of research space geared toward life sciences. When the project is done it will become the home of 500 researchers and 68 principal investigators for the university.
While the project is Wayne State University's most expensive to date, it will be less expensive than building a brand new building from a vacant lot.
"That's the primary reason we're refurbishing Dalgleish," says Jim Sears, associate vice president for facilities management at Wayne State University. "It's nice not to start from scratch every time."
Wayne State University is going for
LEED silver rating for the Multidisciplinary Biomedical Research Building. One of the green features will include replacing the car ramps with a 3-story atrium.
The Multidisciplinary Biomedical Research Building will have space for both wet and dry laboratories, faculty offices and common areas, as well as clinical space. Faculty members from across the university's
School of Medicine,
College of Engineering,
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,
School of Social Work, and
Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences will conduct research at the facility. Ninety-three percent of the structure will be occupied by Wayne State University, with the remaining 7 percent housing partners from the Henry Ford Health System, including its bone and joint research program and biomechanics motion laboratory.
Researchers will work on a number of thematic areas, such as cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders such as diabetes, hypertension & obesity, systems biology, biomedical engineering, bioinformatics and computational biology, and translational behavioral science.
Source: Jim Sears, associate vice president for facilities at Wayne State University
Writer: Jon Zemke
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