Physical Sciences Project

The physical sciences and engineering at Cornell have made unprecedented research advances and garnered international recognition for research excellence, including four different Nobel Prizes in the last 40 years. The Colleges of Engineering and Arts and Sciences are leading a new Physical Sciences Project that will extend existing facilities and provide a state-of-the-art environment to support Cornell's new thrusts in such interdisciplinary research areas as nanoscale science, x-ray and accelerator physics, chemical biology, and biological physics. The project will consist of a new building, situated in front of Clark Hall and an extensive underground laboratory space that will extend and complement the nationally famous research space in the basement of Clark Hall.

Three departments will be affected directly by this project: Applied and Engineering Physics, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Physics. New space is critically important to these departments both for recruiting and retaining faculty, at a time of heavy recruitment. It will also play a major role in drawing these departments together with each other, and with Cornell's biology community.

The Physical Sciences Project will provide one of three principle foci for the New Life Sciences Initiative, the others being the New Life Sciences Building and Duffield Hall.  Facilities at the Physical Sciences Building will emphasize the characterization and fabrication of complex molecules; Duffield will provide the tools for nanobiotechnology; and the New Life Sciences Building will accommodate work on biological organisms. In the past, such facilities have proven remarkably effective in catalyzing interdisciplinary research at Cornell. They are essential to Cornell's plan for far reaching life science discovery in the future.

Design of the new Physical Sciences Building emphasizes pedestrian access to surrounding Clark, Baker and S.T. Olin halls and an enhanced pedestrian route linking the Arts Quad with the College of Human Ecology and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). The new building will be built on an already paved area in an effort to preserve green space on the Cornell campus.

Once detailed designs are complete and associated permits are acquired, university officials hope to break ground on the project in September, 2007 and the project is expected to be completed in the Fall of 2010.

News Releases
Coming in 2010: New space for research, serendipity and intellectual collisions
September 24, 2007
The fences are up; orange-vested workers are gathering. Construction of the new physical sciences building -- an enhanced research and teaching space for Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Physics, and Applied and Engineering Physics -- on East Avenue between Rockefeller Hall and Baker Lab, has begun.