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Posted Jun 30, 2014, 2:44 PM
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Portland
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SUBSCRIBER CONTENT: Jun 27, 2014, 3:00am PDT
Cover Story: Introducing the medical school of tomorrow
Elizabeth Hayes
Staff Reporter-
Portland Business Journal
http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/prin...y-introducing-the-medical-school-of.html
Quote:
The Collaborative Life Sciences Building in the South Waterfront is open for business.
Not only is the complex, on Southwest Moody Avenue, the most imposing structure on that stretch of the Willamette River, it also represents a huge leap forward for Oregon Health & Science University’s educational and research missions.
“It will totally transform the educational mission and add significantly to our research capacity,” said OHSU Provost Jeannette Mladenovic. “In many ways, this is a unique opportunity for OHSU but also for Portland and all of Oregon.”
The design is geared to enhance cooperation across disciplines and among the three university partners — OHSU, Portland State University and Oregon State University.
“We built the building around the concept of collaboration and the spaces and architecture are set up so students, faculty and staff have to interact and bump into each other,” said OHSU Executive Vice Provost David Robinson.
Another noticeable feature is the openness — research and lecture spaces have glass walls, not the standard in OHSU’s aging buildings on Marquam Hill.
“On the hill, if you don’t have badge access, you won’t see the benches,” said Brian Newman, OHSU’s director of Campus Planning, Development & Real Estate. “Just like with education on display, we want to put research on display.”
Then there’s the cutting-edge technology, incorporated everywhere from the lecture halls with their sophisticated AV systems to the simulation theaters to the stadium-grade wireless.
OHSU expects the building to attract the best and brightest students and faculty. It will also allow it to expand programs. The medical school class, for example, will have room to grow from 120 to 160 students.
“This really changes everything in OHSU’s educational milieu,” Mladenovic said.
Atrium
Natural light pours in from the glass curtain walls to the east and glass roof. More light emanates from a public art installation of lights on the undersides of the elevated walkways. Communal spaces with tables and chairs and comfortable seating are scattered throughout, even on a suspended walkway.
PSU Lecture Hall
The front row of each tier of seats can swivel around, so students can interact in small-group breakout sessions within the 400-seat lecture hall, which will be used for biology and chemistry classes.
Lab space
Windows on either side not only allow for natural light, but a view of scientists at work.
Skourtes Tower: OHSU School of Dentistry
Dental simulation rooms feature mannequin heads with mouths agape so students can practice performing root canals and restorative work, such as fillings and crowns. Each work station has electric equipment and computers. There’s even a vacuum system to 🞵🞵🞵🞵 up the water from the instruments. The dental clinic treats 500-to-1,000 patients a day. Students are organized into “practices” and each manages a patient population. All told, there are 215 dental chairs and all-electric hand pieces, which are state-of-the-art in dentistry.
School of Dentistry lecture hall
Jutting over the promenade, the hall seats 200.
Low vibration microscopy suite
Located underground beneath the rear promenade, this is the most expensive corner of the entire complex — at $12 million in construction costs.
It’s here that Dr. Joe Gray will conduct pioneering work in early cancer detection, as well as research into treating advanced cancers.
“The ultimate goal is to use the instruments to understand what’s different between normal tissue and diseased tissue,” said Gray, director of translational research at OHSU’s Knight Cancer Institute and director of the OHSU Center for Spatial Systems Biomedicine.
Gray’s task requires not only high-powered microscopes, which the university already owns, but also an absence of vibration, which could mess up the lab’s high-resolution imaging.
Gray said the suite of six microscopy labs will contain $8 million worth of equipment, including electron microscopes made by Hillsboro-based FEI Co. that are among the most powerful available in the Northwest. The highest-resolution microscope stands 12 feet high and “looks nothing like a conventional microscope,” Gray said.
The microscopes will enable measurement of protein structures of genomic abnormalities, a view of the structure of individual proteins, and how they assemble into complexes, then into cells and into organs.
“It’s the Google Earth view of cells and tissues, which will help us understand how they function,” said Gray, a biomechanical engineer who is renowned for his work in cancer imaging and genomics. “This is a nontrivial undertaking. It requires an extremely high-precision microscope. The microscope can’t vibrate.”
Canceling out vibrations was no easy task. The building sits on squishy alluvial gravel. Buses and street cars run by regularly and barges on the Willamette River are equipped with low-rpm propellers.
To overcome those challenges, the suite was situated on a mote that’s separated from the rest of the building by 30-foot sheets of steel.
Concrete piles were driven more than 100 feet into the ground and there’s a four-foot-thick pad of concrete around the outside. A raised access floor sits on top of the concrete pad. The floors meet the specifications of electron microscope manufacturer FEI for optimal resolution for its electron microscopes.
“In terms of the ultimate resolution we can achieve with these instruments, we couldn’t achieve this on the hill,” Gray said.
Clinical simulation
There are eight simulation theaters, including general surgery, outpatient and maternity, complete with birthing mannequins and babies. Adjacent control rooms with mirrored glass allow professors to view and critique the students’ work, which they can later view in the debriefing areas. The rooms even allow for power outages to test students’ problem-solving skills. In addition, there are 21 patient rooms where actors pretending to be patients can sit on exam tables and flat screen computers line the corridor walls, allowing students to check virtual charts.
Learning studio, OHSU School of Medicine
The 360-seat room contains 12 screens and 12 projectors, with a partition in the center to break it into two separate classrooms. Windows around the back and sides allow anyone to peek in and see what’s going on.
Elizabeth Hayes covers health care for the Portland Business Journal.
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