S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 | 3 1 though there are a lot of conference rooms andplaces to gather, there are no formal classrooms. “You’re forcing people to interact, to see what’s going on, supporting the idea that different researchers can be next to each other,” Stringfellow said. For now, the third and fourth floors of the building remain unfinished with the option to convert them into more lab space, depending on the university’s future needs. Wilson said he and his colleagues considered facilities across the country to get ideas for the building, including StanfordUniversity’s Bio-Xprogram, housed in the James H. Clark Center. That facility brings together biomedical and life science researchers, clinicians, engineers, physicists and computational scientists in open labs with glass walls, exposed staircases and bridges that link wings. Another space was Paul M. Gross Hall at Duke University, a building that dates back to 1968 but was extensively updated in 2014 to add a curtain wall of glass and aluminum, flooding the building with natural light. Offices were moved to the perimeter of Gross Hall and open work stations were intermingled in the center, encouraging colleagues to collaborate. “We weren’t trying to find a building we wanted to copy,” Stringfellow said. “We chose the features that were best for Lehigh.” While HST has features occasionally seen in other buildings, it stands apart because of its configuration, Wilson said. The open-space concept with labs that are easily reconfigurable, plus Lehigh’s Core Data Visualization Lab, make the facility unique. “I think HST will be a pioneer in creating research culture,” he said. Wilson compared the building itself to a staircase, the first step at the base of the hillside leading into Lehigh’s steep campus. “It’s a very prominent site because you’re going to arrive on campus and this will be one of the first buildings you see. You are invited into it and up through the campus,” he said. A Home for the College of Health Just as the building creates a stepping-stone to the rest of Lehigh’s campus, it also forges a link to the community with doors that open onto Morton Street at bothWebster and Adams streets. Bethlehem residents will be able to visit the community room for public events and lectures. There’s also a separate entrance for individuals to arrive anonymously for focus groups and interviews. The space is especially significant for the College of Health, where many faculty members do community-based research, said Beth Dolan, the interim Dean of the college. Projects include studying the effects of air pollution on the health of those living on the South Side and the effects of the pandemic on maternal and child health in the community. In addition to the community room, HST will also feature a Health Data Warehouse to house publicly available, subscription and privately held data sets on demographics and population health. The information will be utilized by both the College of Health and College of Business to study ways to improve health outcomes in populations, increase quality of care and reduce the cost of healthcare. The building’s design “demystifies science” and allows for collaboration, Dolan said. “You can see folks doing collaborative research with community members in the community space. The building has unlimited potential, actually, because we don’t know what’s going to happen, we can’t completely predict what will happen here, which is great.” The College of Health launched in Fall 2020 offering a bachelor of science degree in population health, and last spring unveiled a new bachelor of arts degree in community and global health. There are COLLABORATION Left: Students in one of the many gathering spaces throughout HST. Above: In the College of Health administrative suite, Beth Dolan, interim Dean of the College of Health (left), talks to Fathima Wakeel, an associate professor and director of graduate programs for the college.
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