Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

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Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

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Feinberg takes over old Dental building

While Northwestern’s Dental School faculty and students have moved on after the school closed last May, the 90,000-square-foot building has nowhere to go.

So NU administrators are in the midst of a $35 million renovation project that will give the former dental facilities to the Feinberg School of Medicine for additional research and administrative space.

The space will provide classroom, laboratory and office space for the Medical School’s medicine and anesthesiology departments as well as an expanded imaging center, administrators said.

“Our objective is to grow our research enterprise, and this helps us to grow our research space,” said Janet Stevens, assistant dean for administration.

The renovations should be complete by late 2003 or early 2004, nearly a year before the Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center, the $200 million, 200,000-square-foot building for cancer research, is to open, said Jeff Miller, senior executive associate dean for management.

Feinberg officials began preparing to renovate the dental facility, also known as the Health Sciences Building, soon after administrators announced the school’s closing in February 1998. A decision by The provost office’s decision turned the space over to Feinberg, Stevens said.

“Whatever the Dental School had is now ours,” she said.

Workers have been on the site for about eight months, Miller said. The basement is being gutted, offices on the first floor are almost complete and designs for the second and third floors should be finished soon, said Jonathan Leis, executive associate dean for research.

The building is shared by NU and Northwestern Memorial Hospital. A walkway connects the building to the Feinberg and Galter Outpatient pavilions across the street, making it an ideal location for the anesthesiology department, Miller said.

“They can get to their offices and back to the operation rooms without worrying about Chicago weather in the middle of January,” Miller said.

The space provided by the building will allow Feinberg to start work on much-needed renovations in other buildings, Leis said.

“The space that (Feinberg) will be vacating is some of the worst space that we need to renovate,” he said.

Once the renovations connected with the Health Sciences Building are complete, Feinberg will have 70,000 square feet of modernized research space, Leis said. That space will help the school accommodate its faculty until the Lurie Center opens in its first phase.

In the meantime, space from the Dental School also will allow Feinberg to consolidate six departments into one connected space and help alleviate problems in the school’s human resources department, Leis said.

“It’s allowing us to cure (historic) ills,” he said.

The space also will allow the school to hire new faculty – as many as 30 principal investigators, with five to seven additional faculty each.

Administrators are trying to move departments as little as possible during construction, but changes in the field often require changes in campus design, Miller said.

“The boundaries of science keep crumbling,” he said. “You have people collaborating that, five or 10 years ago, you would not have imagined collaborating. It’s changing all the time.”

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Feinberg takes over old Dental building