The University of California, Irvine earlier this month started building a $19.6 million, 68,000-square-foot Earth sciences research center, which also is one of a handful of research centers in the U.S. focusing on the study of ways various physical aspects of the Earth interact with each other.
When completed in fall 2003, John V. Croul Hall will house laboratories, a conference center for events of international scope, and office space for the Earth Systems Sciences department of the UCI School of Physical Sciences.
The Earth Systems Sciences department at UCI includes civil engineers, physicists, oceanographers, biologists and atmospheric chemists. It was founded by a group that includes current UCI Chancellor Ralph Cicerone, who remains a professor in the department.
“It has become the top-ranked program of its kind in the country,” said Ron Stern, dean of Physical Sciences at UCI.
The Philadelphia, Penn.-based Institute for Scientific Information gave the UCI department a No. 1 nationwide ranking based on average number of citations per paper published by the department.
The department committee includes F. Sherwood Rowland, the 1995 Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, who also is a member of UCI’s chemistry department.
The building will include a spectrometer facility to perform carbon dating of materials. Other research performed in the building will develop models looking at ways of establishing climate predictability.
“It’s a pure research group,they’re experimentalists,” Stern said. “They’re people that set up stations in Brazil, the ocean and the Antarctic, and then research the results later.”
Stern said the project will somewhat tie into industries like the power sector, including coal producers.
“Some of the members of the Earth Systems Sciences department themselves receive independent funding from companies in those sectors,” Stern said.
John Croul, former chief executive of Santa Ana paint manufacturer Behr Process Corp., donated $6 million to the building.
The standing of UCI’s Earth Systems Sciences group also received a boost with the appointment of Cicerone,himself a nationally-acclaimed atmospheric chemist and also former dean of the UCI School of Physical Sciences,as chair of a National Academy of Sciences panel reviewing climatic change on behalf of the White House.
Cicerone and his wife, Carol, also were among of the major donors, as were Joan Irvine Smith and Greg and Donna Jenkins.
Croul Hall will add a corner to UCI’s Nobel Courtyard. UCI buildings that currently surround the Nobel Courtyard include Reines Hall, named in honor of Fred Reines,UCI’s founding dean of the School of Physical Sciences and a 1995 Nobel Laureate in Physics.
Another building that surrounds the Nobel Courtyard is Rowland Hall, named in honor of F. Sherwood Rowland.
The building designers were the Irvine office of San Diego-based Carrier Johnson as executive architects and San Francisco-based Esherick Homsey Dodge and Davis as architects. n
