At the end of October … one year after breaking ground on the 90,000 square-foot, $30 million Health Sciences Center at Belmont University … the construction project was officially topped out. With an anticipated completion date of June 2010, the building will serve as home to the School of Pharmacy and School of Physical Therapy, plus have expansion space for other health sciences fields including nursing, occupational therapy, social work and psychology.

 

Attaching at one point to the Gordon E. Inman Center, currently the main health sciences building, completion of the new construction will consolidate the university's health sciences studies on the northeast corner of the campus. Clustering the different health majors together facilitates Belmont University's goal of providing interdisciplinary educational opportunities.

 

School of Pharmacy Dean Philip E. Johnston, PharmD, said the new facility will be home to his program's administrative, classroom and clinical components. "We'll also have in the new building a retail pharmacy," he continued, noting that in addition to being a convenience for staff, students and faculty, the pharmacy will also serve as a clinical training site for student pharmacists.

 

Designed by Earl Swensson Associates with construction by R.C. Mathews, the new building has sophisticated laboratories and was designed to emphasize integrated, hands-on experiential learning. In addition to faculty research laboratory space, Johnston said, "It will also have simulation labs, which we use to train students how to do appropriate counseling and patient management." He added the skills training module will utilize both high-tech mannequins and live actors. The idea behind the simulation suite is to create an environment where students from various programs will have the opportunity to react to scenarios involving multiple healthcare disciplines.

 

While classrooms are outfitted in a manner that could hold up to 100 students with the potential to link to even more sites via technology, Johnston said at the heart of the design is an emphasis on small group learning. He explained the College of Pharmacy utilizes the teaching concept of problem-based learning where six-10 students are given a specific dilemma and asked to research the problem thoroughly and come up with a solution. "They are learning group dynamics and how to come up with consensus," Johnston said.

 

Sitting at the head of a quadrangle, the building is flanked by new dorm space — one of which opened this fall as the School of Pharmacy welcomed its second class, with the second dorm slated to open about the same time as the health sciences building is completed.

 

In addition to providing innovative educational space, the building project complements Belmont's efforts toward environmental sustainability. The four-level underground parking garage reduces the structural footprint and saves four acres of land that would have been needed for a surface lot. The construction also includes a 20,000-gallon water storage tank that has the ability to capture excess ground and storm water, which will then be recycled and used to irrigate the campus.

 

Upon completion, the new structure will have two classrooms that hold 100; 12 classrooms designed for about 10 occupants; a little more than 18,000 square feet of lab space including student labs, faculty labs, the sterile products and manufacturing labs, plus the campus pharmacy; staff and faculty offices, and ample public areas.

 

"When we have our full cohort, we'll have 300 students and about 30 faculty so we'll need all that space," said Johnston, who added the school would hit that mark at the beginning of the 2011/12 academic year.