One of the major schools at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is getting its own hub on campus.
For the past few months, a former parking lot just north of campus center has been getting torn up, with fencing and heavy equipment lining the parcel next to Totman Gymnasium.
It’s the site of the future “School of Public Health and Health Sciences Hub,” one of several projects going up at UMass Amherst. Nearby, a new Computer Sciences Laboratories building is expected to be finished next summer, while a lab building for the College of Engineering will likely be done a year after that.
According to Dean Anna Maria Siega-Riz – the hub is the first structure designed solely for the school and its nearly 2,400 students.
“When I first started as dean five years ago, I thought ‘I'll never see a new building in my lifetime,’” she told reporters. “And we made some compromises, and this was the absolutely perfect compromise.”
The final product – a 27,000-square foot structure coming in at three stories tall, intended to anchor the school’s six departments. It will also offer up research and study space to some 1,700 undergraduate and 500 graduate students.
“When you have that many students, you need to have a place that you can bring them all together so that they can actually create synergy amongst themselves, and community amongst themselves,” she explained. “Without having - a centralized place, it's very difficult to do.”
The dean says negotiations started in 2020. After the pandemic, construction got underway this May, with a groundbreaking Tuesday.
Coming in at $43 million, according to university officials, the structure’s expected to be done by December 2025.
Siega-Riz says with classrooms and offices part of the package, classes for spring 2026 are being scheduled with the facility in mind.
Leading the project management group is Joe Naughton, executive director of Terva Corporation.
“We're ahead of schedule, we're under budget - from where we are - we're achieving all of our milestones,” he told WAMC
According to Chancellor Javier Reyes, the hub will end up serving a school where 88 percent of its students stays in Massachusetts after graduating.
It also supports research ranging from helping establish the country’s first “outbreak response disease modeling network” to studying the long-term effects of exposure to PFAS or “forever chemicals.”
In the wake of the pandemic, further investments in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences are a priority, he says.
“Public health, after what we’ve just been through and what it signifies, not only for physical health, but also mental health - this is a core area that, as a flagship university of the Commonwealth, we need to continue not only shining a light, but growing that light,” he told reporters. “And this signifies that investment.”
