VMRCVM plans 3-phase building program

BLACKSBURG, VA. — The sights and sounds of heavy construction equipment will become part of campus life at the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine (VMRCVM) as early as this fall and continue four to five years as the school launches its biggest building program in more than 20 years.

Three projects to expand the physical plant complex are in various phases of planning, design and budgeting, with funding to come from a combination of federal, state and college funds and from private sources.

Listed in order of planned construction, they are:

1. A $10.2 million, 16,000-square-foot Infectious Disease Research Facility (IDRF) that would be built next to the teaching hospital

2. A $12.1 million, 32,300-square-foot Instructional Building

3. A $76 million, 130,000-square-foot Translational Research Center, expanding the teaching hospital.

"Our programs in teaching, research and service have grown substantially over the past 15 years, and without question space problems are holding us back," says VMRCVM Dean Gerhardt Schurig.

"Building these projects will enhance the work we are doing in infectious disease research, enable us to train more DVM students, expand our hospital activities and provide more appropriate housing and facilities for faculty."

Conceptual view: These drawings, subject to change, show where the three new buildings will be located on the VMRCVM campus and their relative distance apart.

Construction of the IDRF could begin this fall or early 2010 and will take about a year. It will contain five Biosafety Level-2 research laboratories, plus offices, a central conference area, information technology quarters and support space. It will provide lab space for the college's translational animal-model program focused on infectious disease and immunology.

The new Instructional Building, construction of which starts in 2010, will contain a lecture theater, a clinical techniques lab, seminar and conference rooms and 30 to 35 faculty offices.

After its completion, the college expects to increase DVM student enrollment from 95 to 130.

Improved faculty accommodations in the new building will address what college officials describe as a longtime need. "Our faculty office situation has become a serious faculty recruitment and retention issue. It simply must be addressed, and this building wil provide a solid move toward improvement," Schurig says.

The new Translational Research Center is considered the signature project of the program, providing a 30,000-square-foot expansion of the Veterinary Teaching Hospital on the ground floor and another 100,000 square feet of state-of-the-art laboratory space on other levels, designed to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving within the medical, biological, agricultural and environmental sciences. Construction of the center should start about 2013.