3 2 | L E H I G H B U L L E T I N plans to launch graduate degrees in Fall 2022 along with a Ph.D. program in population health, and a dual degree with the College of Business next year. HST is the college’s new home base, which has created a sense of renewed excitement among students and faculty, Dolan said. “We have existed, obviously, but there’s a link between place and identity, and so I think that being in this place helps us really get on themap, literally and figuratively,” she said. The college plans to have 12 faculty members by Fall 2022 and is in the process of hiring an additional eight faculty members, Dolan said. At full capacity, it plans to have 55 faculty members. There are also five staff members and eight research scientists with the Institute for Indigenous Studies, which is affiliated with the college. In January, 14 faculty and staff members associated with the college moved into HST. The college’s administrative suite is on the first floor of the building. “HST has been really helpful in terms of recruiting students and faculty,” Dolan said. “The students are so excited, what they keep saying is, ‘We have a home now. The College of Health has a home.’” Fathima Wakeel, associate professor and director of graduate programs at the College of Health, joined the faculty in 2020. She came from Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, where she focused on public health. “Personally, I’ve always been interested in community-based research. My Ph.D. is in public health, specifically community health sciences,” she said. “I’m really excited about the HST building because it’s facing outward into the community. An emerging prioritywhile I’ve been at Lehigh is for the university to be immersed in the community and contribute to the lives of its residents.” Wakeel will use the space for her community-based research, which includes a study on the physical and mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and an interdisciplinary study launching this spring to address the needs of adolescents with autism, who often lose support when they transition into adulthood. Moving 15 Labs in a Week HST was under construction for two-and-a-half years, facing supply chain issues and other delays resulting from the pandemic. “It’s a longtime coming,” Klocek said in January as he oversaw the faculty and lab moves. It took dozens of workers per lab to facilitate, since each lab had its own advanced equipment and sensitive chemicals. “Every lab is different. We are moving chemists, biological scientists, chemistry; there’s materials science and microscopy in the basement,” he said. “Every lab has some different equipment, and all those items have movers related to them and specialty groups that have to decommission the equipment and move it.” Equipment manufacturers from as far away as Germany and California came to assist with the move, Klocek said. “It’s definitely verynice. It’s a verymodernbuilding,” saidManoj Silva, a fourth-year P.h.D student in chemical engineering, as he helped move a chemical engineering lab. “I think the open space concept is pretty cool becausewe used tobe inour own lab [at Iacocca] but nowwe’ll be able to seemore peoplewalking around and talk to themand learnmore about what other labs are doing.” The development of HST was one of the factors that led Reichmanis, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a groundbreaking researcher in the world of microlithography, to join Lehigh’s faculty in 2020 as a professor and the Carl Robert Anderson Chair in Chemical Engineering. Her new office, on the second floor of HST, is also across from her new lab space. “Just the idea of having an open lab environment with multiple research groups coming from a range of different departments creates opportunities for interacting with people,” Reichmanis said. “That sort of chance meeting, at least in the past for me, has led to some interesting research. It’s exciting to me.” Reichmanis was also attracted to Lehigh for its cutting-edge microscopy tools, whichwill be housed in one location in the basement of HST. Reichmanis and Wachs have been discussing future collaborations that bridge the electrochemical research in the Reichmanis Group with the operando molecular spectroscopy expertise in the Wachs Group, an effort that will be made easier now INNOVATION Students in the Nano | Human Interfaces Visualization and Data Analysis Lab run by Martin Harmer, the Alcoa Foundation Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.
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