In Associate Professor Jing Zhou’s lab, chemistry graduate student Erik Peterson works with an X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS) machine, the type of imagining equipment that will one day be housed in the new CASI center.
“I think we were a sounding board,” says Bob Grieve, a member of the task force who received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in microbiology from UW and went on to earn his doctorate from the University of Florida. Grieve’s impressive science background includes 15 years at top academic institutions, where he researched immune responses to parasitic diseases and taught as a tenured professor. A co-founder of Heska Corp., Grieve also generated more than 90 scientific publications and was an inventor or co-inventor on more than 50 issued patents.
“We helped the leadership team frame the scope of what was realistic, and then we helped communicate the intent and the goals of the Science Initiative,” he says of the task force.
“The role of the task force was very valuable in that they really provided some reality checks for us,” says Greg Brown, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a botany professor who served on the task force and chaired the leadership team. “The leadership team took that advice and guidance very seriously. By doing that back and forth, I think we ended up with a very strong plan.”
The plan includes three central elements: state-of-the-art research centers to house new facilities for imaging, astronomical exploration, and advanced biological, chemical and physics research; activelearning classrooms and programs to fundamentally transform science education in the state (see page 30); and programs to stimulate research innovation and student training in emerging areas of science relevant to Wyoming’s economy (see page 40).
During the 2015 legislative session, the Legislature approved funding to begin Phase I of the Science Initiative, including $750,000 for programs, $3 million for facility design, as well as setting aside $30 million toward construction of a new building. Full funding of Phase I, as recommended by the task force, would be $100 million for capital construction and $5.4 million a year for programs.
With the Physical Sciences and Biological Sciences buildings constructed in the late 1960s and the Aven Nelson Building completed in 1924, there was a clear need for modern laboratory, collaboration and teaching space.
“Back in the early 1980s when I attended UW, the facilities I worked in then were antiquated and out of date. I can remember being flooded out of my grad school office in the Aven Nelson Building. Those are the same facilities that people are still using today,” says task force co-chair Carol Brewer, who received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UW, as well as her doctorate in botany. She went on to become associate dean of the University of Montana’s (UM) College of Arts and Sciences and is a professor emerita of biology at UM, as well as the founder of Prairie Research Group LLC.
In addition to outdated labs and classrooms, UW researchers in the core sciences currently operate $10 million worth of sensitive imaging and microscopy instrumentation, which is scattered across campus in aging buildings.
Enter the proposed 170,000 square feet of new facilities, which will house the Center for Advanced Scientific Imaging (CASI), the Center for Integrative Biology Research (CIBR), active-learning classrooms, offices and collaborative “collision” spaces. In particular, these facilities will catalyze collaborations between faculty members in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Department of Botany—whose laboratories are currently located on opposite ends of UW’s campus—and among faculty members in the Department of Chemistry, Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Department of Zoology and Physiology whose research utilizes scientific imaging technologies. Planning for the facilities will begin this year.
“A lot of new, creative ideas come about when people from different backgrounds merge,” Brown says. “We call these collision spaces.”
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