Palmer Campus
Standing at the center of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where the basic sciences of the central campus bridges the health sciences, the new three-building Palmer Campus embodies the University’s commitment to life sciences excellence.
The complex, built on Palmer Drive, brings together state-of-the-art life sciences research, undergraduate education, and collaboration on a campus-within-a-campus.
Images Of Palmer Campus
The Life Sciences Institute is a research unit of the University that brings together scientists from different disciplines and encourages them to look for important biological problems that can be addressed from many perspectives.
Each of the LSI faculty members has an academic appointment in another unit of the university, such as the Medical School, College of Pharmacy, or Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. The blending of diverse skills and approaches in a laboratory facility designed to foster communication and collaboration is expected to yield profound insights into the complexity of life that lies between the genome and the organism.
To emphasize LSI’s connection with all aspects of the U-M campus, it stands adjacent to new teaching facilities in a 140,000-square-foot Undergraduate Science Building, which will be the home of the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), and Women in Science and Engineering (WISE). The USB is atop a 1,100 space parking garage. It was completed in winter 2005, at a cost of $61 million.
LSI is across from the 99,000-square-foot Palmer Commons building designed primarily for meetings, social events and small conferences. Palmer Commons also houses the University’s Bioinformatics Program and the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (link to: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/)
Finding the Institute
The flagship of this effort is the Life Sciences Institute, a six-story, 230,000 square foot laboratory facility opened in Fall 2003. Built for approximately $100 million, the Institute was equipped to house 20–30 principal investigators and their research teams, and includes core scientific facilities and office space for research-sabbatical faculty and post-doctoral fellows. Collaborative meeting spaces and shared facilities are integral to the building’s design.
Accolades for the Campus
- LSI, Undergraduate Science Building, and Palmer Commons designer Denise Scott Brown is awarded the 2007 Vilcek Foundation Prize for outstanding achievement in the arts and humanities (PDF)
- The journal of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditional Engineers (ASHRAE) mentions LSI in its March issue for ASHRAE member Ronald Henning's implementation of a highly efficient system to provide air and reduce waste heat in LSI's animal laboratories (link to article forthcoming)
