LaGrange College Opens $21 Million Sciences Project
2/23/2017
Pouncer watches as Dr. Arthur Sikora, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, prepares a special ‘ribbon cutting’ for the opening of the Ida Callaway Hudson Lab Sciences Building at LaGrange College. A chemical reaction produced flames that burned through the ceremonial ribbon.
LaGrange College hosted a ribbon cutting and open house at the new $21 million Ida Callaway Hudson Lab Sciences Building and completely renovated Callaway Science Building on Friday.
A state-of-the-art, 40,000-square-foot facility, Hudson Lab Sciences Building houses laboratories for instruction in anatomy/physiology, biology, chemistry, ecology, cell and molecular biology, microbiology and organic chemistry and designated space for undergraduate research.
The building includes microscopes that allow students to transfer images to their smartphones or tablets, seminar rooms with oversized televisions and huge dry-erase panels, prep rooms between each lab to allow professors to assemble materials before each class, glass panels in common areas for use as dry-erase boards, a nuclear magnetic resonance machine and an atomic absorption spectrophotometer.
The facility incorporates “soft” learning spaces and community areas for students to gather, compare notes, study or socialize. The spaces also allow students to interact with their professors outside the classroom.
The new laboratories will provide graduates pursuing careers in research, medicine, allied health fields or sustainability, firsthand experience with best-practice instructional methods and current technological innovations.
In addition to the new facility, Callaway Science Building has undergone a total overhaul. Opened in 1972, the facility creates a modern classroom learning environment for the college’s students. The facility will continue to serve as classroom space for all of the sciences and as home for computational mathematics and physics.
The “like new” building features space designed especially for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) instruction, including a high-performance computer to support a range of scientific research, a new and enlarged physics lab, spacious math classrooms surrounded by white boards, seminar and group-study areas and full accessibility to those with disabilities.
The new space also provides a significant boost to the college’s relatively new computational mathematics major.
Working with their chemistry, biology and physics colleagues—and the new high-performance computer—faculty and students will be able to pursue multiple undergraduate research projects in experimenting with and mathematically modeling a wide array of interdisciplinary inquiry, mirroring the latest in scientific research trends.