New facilities should help growing public health school

The public health school finished major renovations to its building this semester that will accommodate the rapidly growing department and recycle underused space.

The changes, which started last March and finished in January, included converting racquetball courts into labs and 140 graduate assistant offices. A new dean’s suite was added, replacing the old basketball gym. The improvement also makes room in the building for the family sciences program, which used to hold classes in Marie Mount Hall.

All the renovations to the building were completed last spring, over the summer and throughout last semester, a process Capital Projects Director Carlo Collela said was no easy task, especially with students on the campus for much of its duration.

“There was a fairly aggressive schedule set for us by [Provost Nariman Farvardin], and I’m proud to say we met it,” Collela said, noting the project did not exceed its $15 million price tag.

The partial renovation was an “adaptive reuse of a building that was being underutilized,” Collela said, adding that students had difficulty navigating the building before the changes.
Many students and faculty members had complained that before it was difficult just to get from one side of the building to the other without either going outside or taking an elevator. New stairways have eliminated that problem.

Robert Gold, dean of the public health school, said the changes will improve inter-college collaboration and make research easier by housing the growing program under one roof.

And with an increasing number of students in the program, changes were much-needed, Gold said. Between 2002 and today, the public health school has seen substantial growth — from 900 to 1,700 students.

“You can’t accommodate that kind of growth without doing something like this,” Gold said.

The move also allowed family sciences to upgrade the facilities for its Center for Healthy Families program, which provides therapy to about 500 families and couples each year.

“The recipients of this service have easy access to the building,” Assistant Dean Mary Kivlighan said. “But it also protects their privacy.”

The new facilities for the center now look more like an office and provide state-of-the-art research opportunities for family sciences students working there, Kivlighan said.
But not all family sciences majors are excited about the changes.

Senior family sciences major Dani Callet said the move from Marie Mount Hall was more of an inconvenience because the new location is on North Campus and far from most other academic buildings.

“If I have to come from the mall to get there — that’s at least a 20-minute walk,” Callet said.
Callet, who is a member of the Family and Consumer Science Honors Society, also complained that the public health school building doesn’t have a place for her organization to meet. Marie Mount Hall, on the other hand, had a student lounge the group used for meetings.

Despite the North Campus location, most other public health students and faculty members are happy about the building’s improvements and take the longer walk in stride.

“I think it’s a great upgrade,” physical and cultural studies graduate student Jennifer Collins said. “It’s going to be much more attractive to incoming freshmen.”

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