Coming to Life: All Invited to USU Life Sciences Building Celebration

Utah State University celebrates the completion of the Life Sciences Building on its Logan campus Friday, April 5, at 1 p.m. in the new building’s lecture hall, Room 133. All are invited to attend.

“Our celebration is the culmination of precision planning and hard work on the part of many people,” says USU College of Science Dean Maura Hagan. “We invite all Aggies and our community to join in celebrating this new facility that will benefit scholars for years to come.”

Utah System of Higher Education Board of Regents member Ronald Jibson, Weber County Commissioner Gage Froerer, USU President Noelle Cockett and Chris Luecke, dean of USU’s S.J. & Jessie E. Quinney College of Natural Resources, along with Hagan, are featured speakers for the program.

Following the ceremony, guests are invited to a reception and tours of the 103,000-square-foot building, which houses a lecture hall, teaching and research laboratories, study student spaces, an outdoor teaching laboratory garden and a café.

At 4:30 pm, the College of Science, along with USU’s Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art and the Department of Art + Design in the Caine College of the Arts, host “Conversations with the Artists,” in Life Sciences Building lecture hall, Room 133. The gathering includes a panel discussion of artists Amy Landesberg, Mark Pomilio, Jerry Fuhriman and Woody Shepherd, all of whom created works gracing the new building, along with Jim Glenn, visual arts manager for Public Art and Design Arts of the Utah Division of Arts & Museums. NEHMA executive director Katie Lee-Koven serves as panel moderator. All are welcome.

During the week leading up to the celebration, April 1-5, all Aggies are invited to participate in the “Science Snaps Photo Competition.” Participants are encouraged to complete a series of “challenges” with suggested photos and videos and are invited to post them with corresponding hashtags in social media. Instructions for the competition are described on the competition’s webpage [http://www.usu.edu/science/snaps]. Prizes will be awarded for “Most Creative,” “Most Scientific,” “Most Humorous,” and “Most Aggie Spirit.”

Construction of the Life Sciences Building was prompted by the growing demand at Utah State for foundational biology courses, which are required for more than 30 of the university’s undergraduate majors, ranging from life sciences and engineering, to agricultural, nutrition and food sciences and natural resources.

USU formally broke ground for the new structure April 25, 2017, and the building opened for classes January 7, 2019. USU received $38 million in state funding from the Utah Legislature to construct the building, along with $7 million from private donors.

For more information, visit the USU College of Science’s “Coming to Life” website.