WATERLOO — Construction is officially underway on the University of Waterloo campus for a big new applied health sciences building.

The four-storey facility will house one of the largest lecture theatres on the Waterloo campus — with 350 seats — and have state-of-the-art laboratories when it's scheduled to open to students in fall 2016.

A groundbreaking on the 56,000-square-foot building was planned for Friday morning.

The $18.6-million expansion project, being paid for with university and government funds and also fundraising, is essential for the growing faculty, said interim dean of the faculty Prof. James Rush.

"It's definitely needed to even accommodate what we have," Rush said on Thursday.

But the new building will also give students the freedom to dream, he added, "to go to the next level."

Over the last decade, enrolment has grown by 60 per cent, he said. Now there are more than 2,100 undergraduate students and 620 graduate students in the faculty.

The new facility will be tacked onto the original building and later additions as the faculty grew steadily from its humble start in 1966 with just five faculty members and one-year physical education programs.

"It's been an evolving complex of buildings," Rush said.

Now the faculty offers 20 degree programs and specializations in three departments, kinesiology, recreation and leisure studies, and public health and health systems.

The faculty's approach to health promotion and disease prevention spans from microscopic cells to society at large.

"As a faculty, we include that whole spectrum," Rush said.

The new building will bring together all the teaching labs for kinesiology, with updated technology. It will also house the university's school of anatomy, one of just a few anatomy labs in the province outside of medical schools.

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The lecture theatre will be able to comfortably hold first-year classes, which can have hundreds of students. But Rush is also excited about the space being opened to events for the entire community.

"It's going to be an ideal setting for public lectures."