April 24, 2003 — Research at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center will be center stage April 29 when ground will be broken for one research facility and the doors open on another.
Groundbreaking for the new Emma Eccles Jones Research Building will be held at 10:30 a.m. in the southeast quadrant of the Health Sciences Center, immediately east of the South Parking Terrace. Following the groundbreaking, a 1 p.m. ribbon-cutting ceremony will help open the new Emma Eccles Jones Nursing Research Center on the fifth floor of the College of Nursing building.
University researchers, physicians, administrators, employees, and donors will turn the first shovels of dirt for the $25 million research building, for which the Emma Eccles Jones Foundation contributed $12 million.
“The medical school has been critically short of space for more than a decade now,” said A. Lorris Betz, M.D., Ph.D., senior vice president for health sciences and dean of the medical school.
“The Emma Eccles Jones Foundation gift gives us much-needed elbow room for promising projects in the basic sciences and enables us to expand opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration,” Betz said.
School of Medicine research programs from the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Pathology will be located in the 126,000-square-foot building. The six-level facility will have five floors of laboratory space, a portion of which will be shelled for future expansion.
The Emma Eccles Jones Research Building has been designed by Architectural Nexus, formerly Jensen Haslem Architects, with Jacobsen Construction as contractor. It is scheduled to be completed in April 2005.
The new Emma Eccles Jones Nursing Research Center on the fifth floor of the College of Nursing building was funded from a $1 million gift from the Emma Eccles Jones Foundation. The project improves and expands clinical research space for faculty and doctoral and masters nursing students. The area will accommodate research programs for cancer care, women’s health, end-of-life care, and newborn care.