Campus Facilities

New building, new ‘neighborhoods’ for bioscience learning

By Sarah Yang

Stanley Hall, Berkeley‘s new biophysical science hub, is named for the late Wendell M. Stanley, Berkeley biochemist and virologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946. Peg Skorpinski photo

Fall 2007 | Berkeley’s impressive new Stanley Hall, one of the nation’s only facilities devoted to biophysical science, brings much-needed teaching and research space to the campus, but, more important, it is a catalyst for the interdisciplinary work that one day may lead to new cures for disease, environmentally friendly sources of energy, and better ways to clean up pollutants.

This fall the campus celebrated the opening of the $162.3 million building, constructed with a combination of state and private funds.

“Today, life-science research is progressing toward problems of increasing scale and complexity, with solutions rooted in the quantitative sciences: mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering,” said Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. “The research that will be stimulated here, at the crossroads of multiple disciplines, holds the promise of transforming human health, energy, and the environment,” he said.

In the interdisciplinary building, “We actually dispensed with the notion of departments altogether and instead focused on the different types of science that would take place in the facility,” said Susan Marqusee, professor of molecular and cell biology and the faculty leader on the building project.

Instead of being clustered by discipline, faculty and students are dispersed throughout the building in “neighborhoods” where they work alongside colleagues in other fields. Their space is flexible, to evolve with the science. Each neighborhood has three to four research labs, equipment rooms, office and conference space, and a shared “community center” where students and faculty interact.

Under the Stanley Hall roof, a wide swath of the campus community works together, from undergraduates to award-winning scientists, including one Nobel laureate. Along with modern classrooms and instructional spaces, the building has 33 wet labs and eight computational suites that will be used by bioengineers, biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. Altogether, there is space for 650 faculty, students, and staff members.

That six of the departments represented in Stanley Hall are ranked in the top 10 nationally illustrates the breadth of excellence represented in the building, and at Berkeley.

Faculty conceived of the building a decade ago as a place that would not only enable collaborations among scientists from different disciplines but would make such alliances inevitable. “This commitment to interdependent research is necessary to make transformational leaps in the biosciences,” noted chemistry professor Graham Fleming.

Stanley Hall houses the Department of Bioengineering and is the Berkeley home of QB3, the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research. QB3 is one of four California Institutes of Science and Innovation launched by the state in 2000 as a multi-campus, public-private partnership for critical research.

Jeanne Stachowiak, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering who works on a bioengineering research team in Stanley Hall, said sharing equipment and expertise has already become commonplace in the building.

“If we weren’t on the same floor, or even in the same building, it would be less likely that we’d even know about each other’s resources,” she said. “The way the space is configured lets students build their own collaboration. We talk while having lunch, and we might find out that a particular lab has a tool that could be useful in our research. It helps students create their own community.”

For Professor Marqusee, Stanley Hall is the culmination of an exciting vision. “This building has been my passion for the last 10 years. It embodies the best of how science can affect the design of a building, and how the design of a building can transform the science that takes place within its walls,” she said.

For more on Stanley Hall and video interviews of those who work there, visit newscenter.berkeley.edu/goto/stanley.