S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 | 2 9 HST opened in the Spring 2022 semester, with 32 faculty members and 15 labs beingmoved inmid- to late January fromexisting areas on campus, including the P.C. RossinCollege of Engineering, the College of Health and College of Arts and Sciences. A ribbon cutting is planned for this spring. From faculty research to layout, HST is all about interdisciplinary research. It incorporates a pedestrian bridge that connects the new building to Lehigh’s other core research facilities: Seeley-Mudd, Sinclair and Whitaker labs. HST will advance Lehigh’s mission to cultivate more interdisciplinary interactions, Urban said. “The goal is to have this building be a place where that kind of work is routine. You can see that in terms of the makeup of the people who are going to be in the building,” Urban said. “They’re coming from multiple colleges, from multiple departments. The design of the building and the decisions about who is going to be in the building were intended to foster this kind of intermixing.” Among the researchers working in HST are polymer chemist Elsa Reichmanis, who wants to collaborate with Israel E. Wachs, the G. Whitney Snyder Professor in the chemical and biomolecular engineering department, to study how polymer and hybrid materials behave in real-world conditions; and Hyunok Choi, an associate professor in the College of Health and environmental epidemiologist, who plans to work with colleagues in education, biology, psychology, business and engineering to explore how pollution causes asthma in children and how to develop better treatments and new health policies. In the basement is the Nano | Human Interfaces Visualization and Data Analysis Lab run by Martin Harmer, the Alcoa Foundation Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Chris Marvel, a research scientist in the department ofmaterials science and engineering. The visualization lab, aLehigh presidential initiative, features three 98-inch touch screens that allow multiple researchers to interact with one another as they visualize and analyze data in the same space. Aseparate humanobservation lab, set up in the same room, enables cognitive psychologists to observe the individuals conducting research and gain a better understanding of how people communicate in an interactive research environment. In another project that will take place at HST, Kelly Schultz, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and colleagues Steven McIntosh, department chair, and Angela Brown and Mark Snyder, also associate professors, will combine their specialties of antibiotic resistance, biomaterials, scaffold microstructures and electrochemistry to grow fake meat in a lab, a project they say could reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated by the meat processing industry. “The most natural thing you can do in the space is work with the people around you,” said McIntosh, who served as a faculty liaison to the advisory committee that oversawHST’s design. “You have to create the environment for interaction and then you have to let people go. They will do new and interesting things. Theywill work together, but you can’t dictate it.” McIntosh and Snyder chose to merge their labs once they settled inHST. “We both synthesize materials, co-advise students and have multiple collaborative research grants, so it makes sense. Having my students next to his students, they can say, ‘How do you do it that way?’ or ‘Maybe I can try that technique,’” McIntosh said. “There’s no reason to have walls and barriers, and that’s the way this building was designed. It eliminates them.” Details, even down to the building’s doors, were carefully planned. The staircases offer sweeping A BEACON Lehigh’s new Health, Science and Technology building on the northeast corner of Asa Packer campus. Right: “Lehigh” is illuminated at the top of HST, visible from vantage points across Bethlehem. Below: HST’s open stairwells and glass walls provide views between floors.
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