"The medical school has been critically short of space for more than a decade now," said A. Lorris Betz, M.D., Ph.D., senior vice president for health sciences and dean of the medical school.

"The Emma Eccles Jones Foundation gift gives us much-needed elbow room for promising projects in the basic sciences and enables us to expand opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration," Betz said.

School of Medicine research programs from the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Pathology will be located in the 126,000-square-foot building. The six-level facility will have five floors of laboratory space, a portion of which will be shelled for future expansion.

The Emma Eccles Jones Research Building has been designed by Architectural Nexus, formerly Jensen Haslem Architects, with Jacobsen Construction as contractor. It is scheduled to be completed in April 2005.

The new Emma Eccles Jones Nursing Research Center on the fifth floor of the College of Nursing building was funded from a $1 million gift from the Emma Eccles Jones Foundation. The project improves and expands clinical research space for faculty and doctoral and masters nursing students. The area will accommodate research programs for cancer care, women's health, end-of-life care, and newborn care.