Call it five stories of synergy.

Construction is rolling at UC Riverside on a structure envisioned as encompassing the essence of interactive scientific inquiry: Multidisciplinary Research Building 1.

“We have literally just broken ground,” said Associate Vice Chancellor Jeff Kaplan of the university’s Capital Asset Strategies division. He was among university officials involved in the project who celebrated a groundbreaking ceremony at the site last week.

“We have earth-moving equipment and large scale tractors on site literally digging the ground,” he said. “There’s a lot of visible earth moving going on.”

Targeted for completion in fall 2018, the $150 million project is being built on two acres directly north of the Materials Science & Engineering building. It will be to the west of Aberdeen Drive and east of the UCR soccer field.

The building will house 179,000 square feet of space, of which 125,500 square feet will be devoted to as many as 56 faculty investigators and their teams from an array of sciences.

“This will be the point of a multidisciplinary intersection between engineering, chemical science and biological medicine,” Kaplan said. “We’re getting together now to strategize on specific areas of research. Multidisciplinarian research is kind of the wave of the future.”

Kaplan said the closest existing structure with a scope comparable to UC Riverside’s concept is UC San Diego’s Health Sciences Biomedical Research Facility II, a 196,000-square-foot building that opened on the Torrey Pines campus in 2014.

“That is exactly the same type of facility that is meant to bring together different sciences working together collaboratively to solve common problems,” Kaplan said.

The San Diego building received platinum certification for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design from the U.S. Green Building Council and UC Riverside is striving for the same level with its venue.

“This is what we call a LEED platinum building, which is the highest level of a sustainable, energy efficient building,” Kaplan said. “It is designed to be environmentally conscious and sustainable.”

David Lo, the senior associate dean for research at UCR’s School of Medicine, is among faculty members forming a committee contributing to the planning process. He said what attracts him to the plan is it will be a microcosm of what already exists at the school.

“It’s intentionally designed to bring together research labs from multiple colleges and schools across the campus,” he said. “The design is really incredible because in front of the building there will be a larger interactive space where people can meet and chat, and really reinforce that whole notion of being multidisciplinary.”

Being located next to Materials Science & Engineering will provide an immediate connection with the research building, while the medical school has the advantage of being on campus.

“When you have a big university, often the medical school has its own campus somewhere distant from the main campus,” Lo said. “Our school is right in the middle of the campus and we’re often actively engaged with some of these other colleges and schools (on campus). And that’s kind of what’s supposed to take place in this (research) building.”

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