New PNW building to house nursing and biological sciences departments
Chancellor Thomas L. Keon said the new Nils K. Nelson Bioscience Innovation Building at Purdue Northwest will help people look at PNW as a “top-level institution.”
The new building on the Hammond campus is the first new building on the Hammond campus in more than 20 years, Keon said.
The $40 million facility features simulation rooms that resemble doctor’s offices and hospital suites, along with laboratories for both nursing and biological sciences departments.
“We have taken on a strategy that actually started a while ago to really emphasize increasing the quality of the students, the quality of our programs and the quality of our faculty,” Keon said. “And then also trying to do some things that set us apart.”
The 68,000-square-foot building is dynamically flexible and features open seating arrangements outside of classrooms, said Kenneth “Chris” Holford, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs and professor of biological sciences at PNW, at a socially distanced tour for area legislators Friday.
“Everything can be reconfigured really easily,” Holford said. “As teaching methods change over the next 10 or 20 years, we won’t have to build a new building, this building is designed to be able to knock walls out and reconfigure, so it’s a shell with ultimate flexibility put in mind.”
There are many classrooms and labs throughout the building, including microbiology labs, general biology labs and advanced cell molecular labs.
A big change that came with the building is the lack of personal office space for faculty and staff, Holford said. The second floor of the building is home to a shared office space with an open floor plan, allowing for students and staff to come and go as they please, most without their own set desk space.
Lisa Hopp, Dean and professor of PNW’s College of Nursing, said the co-location of the nursing and biological sciences departments new building allows for more connection.
“Before we were across buildings and felt a little disconnected from what was going on with our undergraduates in labs,” Hopp said. “It’s really worked out … it’s been an easy transition for me.”
The building is named after Nils K. Nelson, a former Purdue Northwest professor who left the university an $8 million gift in his will. Nelson, an organic chemist, retired from PNW in 1991.
The $8 million gift has gone toward student scholarships, the endowment of professors and the naming of the building, Holford said.
“We are a student-centric institution, half of that, $4 million, went into scholarships for our students,” Holford said. “That was important for Nils as well.”
Holford said lab science and health science are often “invisible professions,” and he hopes the giant windows framing labs in the building will potentially influence students with undecided majors.
“Growing up as a kid, we all know what a policeman or fireman does, we frequently know what a physician does on a day-to-day operation, but very few people know what a lab scientist does on a day-to-day basis,” Holford said. “The idea here is to demystify that, and to let people see how interesting some of these professions might be.”