This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Vassar College, an undergraduate liberal arts college with a long tradition of supporting faculty research and a commitment to educating students in the theory and practice of scientific research, will continue the transformation of research and research training by completely upgrading the electrical service and replacing the emergency electrical generator in Vassar's largest science building, the Olmsted Hall of the Biological Sciences. This will assure adequate electrical power for current equipment, future infrastructure upgrades, sophisticated new equipment, and increased computational power. The electrical service upgrade will support the research of fourteen current tenure line biology faculty members, including five hired in the past five years, all of whom have active and vibrant research programs. In addition, the upgrade will support the work of new hires that are anticipated in the next three to five years. Core research facilities that are shared with other science departments and that are housed in Olmsted Hall will be direct beneficiaries of the updated electrical service. Furthermore, the electrical service upgrade of Olmsted Hall will prepare the building to serve as the core of an integrated science center.
NSF award BIO ARI-R2 0963331 to Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, was used to upgrade the electrical system of Vassar’s Olmsted Hall of Biological Sciences. Olmsted Hall, a 72,000 gross square feet building built in 1972, currently houses Vassar’s Biology Department and supports research and teaching in Biology and related fields including Anthropology, Biochemistry, Biophysics, Cognitive Science, Environmental Science, and Neuroscience and Behavior. Approximately 55% of the building’s assignable square footage is dedicated to research and research training, including research space for individual faculty members and their students and shared research facilities. In addition to shared instrumentation, shared facilities include an Animal Care Facility, a Phytotron, a microscopy suite, a greenhouse, and a Robotics Laboratory. Biology is the fastest growing major at Vassar and Neuroscience and Behavior is the third fastest growing major; these two fields represent the heaviest users of the Olmsted Hall of Biological Sciences. Current and recent faculty research projects in Biology are supported by the NSF, NIH, Research Corporation, and DARPA and result in peer reviewed publications across biological sub-disciplines. The Olmsted Hall electrical system, at the time of this award, was original to the construction of the building, had exceeded its useful lifetime and was at capacity, while the building’s emergency generator was non-functional. The outdated electrical system impeded the productivity of the faculty and jeopardized their research programs. Power outages and ‘brown-outs’ destroyed equipment (e.g. a microarray scanner) and scientific results (e.g. cell cultures). We were unable to add new instruments or accommodate research that required additional computational power and these limitations constrained research and reduced the college’s ability to attract top scholar-teachers. In order to continue supporting the research of faculty and students into the future, it was determined that upgrading the electrical system and replacing the emergency generator was essential. Furthermore, because Olmsted Hall will be the core of a 200,000 gsf Science Complex (60% renovation of existing facilities and 40% new construction) that is currently under construction, it will increasingly be the locus for shared scientific research. The electrical upgrade of Olmsted Hall therefore not only restores infrastructure that is essential to research in the biological sciences, but will also support collaborative science at Vassar, since Olmsted, as the hub of the Science Complex, will increasingly be the location of new partnerships between biologists and researchers in chemistry, computer science, physics and psychology. The project has advanced Vassar College’s commitment to multidisciplinary and collaborative scientific research. The emergency generator aspect of this project consisted of replacing a nonfunctional gas fired emergency generator located on the roof of Olmsted Hall with a higher capacity 400 kW gas fired emergency generator, replacing a single automatic transfer switch with two new transfer switches thereby establishing an Emergency branch and an Optional Standby branch, and installing new panels for both branches on each floor of the building into which the existing branch circuits were segregated. The electric service upgrade consisted of removing and demolishing two existing unit substations, installing a new single ended substation and a new integrated switchboard with step down transformer and distribution section, upgrading main distribution panels, and selectively replacing utilization panelboards throughout the building. Selective branch wiring was replaced and upgraded where possible. Important scientific impacts of the project include the creation of a computing laboratory that supports on-going biological research including the study of adaptive molecular evolution in poxvirus genes, microbial diversity in complex soil systems under different environmental conditions, and the toxic effects of copper on coral DNA. Improved branch wiring has also permitted the installation of new equipment and instrumentation used in research on the impact of global climate change on nutrient cycling in forested watersheds that is conducted by a recently appointed faculty member. More than 90 undergraduates who pursue research in Olmsted Hall each year, either under the direction of a Biology Department faculty member or a non-biology faculty member who uses shared facilities located there, are more broadly impacted by this project. The electrical upgrade described above has allowed these students to pursue research with faculty mentors on innovative projects using up-to-date equipment and sophisticated instrumentation, and will continue to do so into the future. The upgrades will also support the research and research training pursed by two new tenure track appointments in the Biology Department who were hired since the grant was awarded. New projects initiated by these faculty members provide additional research training opportunities for students in the areas of neuroendocrinology and sensory ecology, physiology and behavior.
