When the doors of Stanley Hall, UC Berkeley’s new state-of-the-art bioscience research facility, officially opened this fall, the campus grandly ushered in a new era in bioscience. More than a decade in the making, the new building brings together Berkeley’s preeminent bioengineers, biologists, chemists, and physicists under a single roof.
“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,” says Chancellor Robert J. 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.”
In the late 1990s, it became clear that Berkeley’s science and engineering departments were in dire need of new facilities if they were to remain at the forefront of discovery. In response, faculty members including the late Daniel E. Koshland Jr., Graham R. Fleming, and Paul R. Gray developed a creative plan to bring together scientists from different disciplines to advance solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges in health, energy, and the environment.
A signature facility
The signature 285,000 gross-square-foot facility that emerged from the planning, Stanley Hall, now rises eight stories above the ground, with three additional research floors beneath. In all, the building accommodates 650 faculty, students, and staff members. Along with modern classrooms and instructional labs, the building has 33 wet laboratories and eight computational laboratories. An area of the building was also specifically designed to house a regional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) facility — the most powerful imaging technology available to support structural biology studies for drug development, nanoscale biomaterial, and fundamental research.
Designed by Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects LLP, the building is named for the late Wendell M. Stanley, a renowned UC Berkeley biochemist and virologist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946.
The science inside
“Stanley Hall is really more than just a building,” says Graham Fleming, the UC Berkeley director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), which is housed in the new facility along with the Department of Bioengineering. “By bringing researchers from different disciplines together in one location, Stanley Hall will actually help shape the way science evolves. The building’s collaborative environment will make discoveries possible that simply wouldn’t happen otherwise. And that impact doesn’t stop at the campus borders, because the scientists from other universities or industry who come to Stanley to use a core facility or conduct joint research will become part of our extended community.”
Located in the building are scientists and students studying such diverse subjects as breast cancer antigen targets, stem cell performance during muscle repair, potential bio-friendly nano-sized light sources, and synthetically designed microorganisms that can detect environmental contaminants or digest toxins.
“The new space is wonderful, offering many opportunities for close interactions between labs,” says Jennifer Doudna, a molecular biologist who is investigating RNA structural elements that control gene expression. “Our lab is next door to two of our close collaborators, which fosters conversations between different lab members and is already stimulating new directions in some of our projects.”
Partnering for the future
“This building is the physical representation of the critically important public-private partnership needed to make revolutionary advances in biomedical science,” says Robert Tjian, the faculty director of the Health Sciences Initiative, a program launched in the 1990s to bring together experts in the biological and physical sciences, engineering, math, computer science, and public health.
In total, state support provided $80.9 million in funding for the building, and an additional $88.6 million was raised from individual philanthropists.
