Excellent progress is being made on the construction of the new STEM-1 (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) building. The project will eventually include the construction of two buildings, each of which will be 100,000 square feet in size. The buildings will be adjacent to each other, with a skybridge joining them. Construction on the first phase of the project began in January 2019, and is currently planned for completion in the Fall of 2021. The basement of the building is a three-story parking garage, above which there are three floors of research laboratories and office. Design of the second phase, STEM-II, has been underway for the last 8 months, and ground breaking will dovetail with the completion of STEM-I. The Department of Chemistry has been allocated 60% of the space in I-STEM, and will move all its experimental research groups into these buildings. Core instrument facilities, such as NMR, mass spectrometry, crystallography, and electron microscopy, will occupy the ground floor of STEM-I, while the bulk of the research laboratories will be located on the second and third floors, and all three floors of STEM-II. Classrooms, teaching laboratories, and administrative offices will remain in their current space in the old Chemistry Building, while vacated laboratories will be renovated and assigned to other science departments. The long-term plan for the university is to renovate all of the buildings on Science Hill, which were constructed in the 1950s and ‘60s. The move of our department into I-STEM will create the open space to begin the step-wise renovation project for the rest of the science departments at UGA.
