design
The Carter-Harrison Research Building B Y LINDA J . KOBERT
rom his desk in the anteroom to the Center for Cell Clearance's
Petri infectious disease laboratory in the new Carter-Harrison Research Building, Nathaniel Christy can see across the brightly lit central hallway to Dr. Eric Houpt's lab where other microbi- ology graduate students and post-doctoral fellows are processing samples and crunching data. Sunlight streams through the lab's large
windows where Christy works on a project trying to understand the molecu- lar mechanisms of pathogenesis of Entamoeba histolytica. And when he comes up with an interesting finding or runs into a problem, he can walk a few feet to Dr. William A. Petri's glass-walled office in the lab to discuss it. This environment is a far cry from the space in which the PhD candidate
worked when he first came to UVA four years ago. At that time, the infectious disease labs were scattered in cramped spaces among several locations. In the building where Christy worked, individual labs were clustered in the core of the building with offices around the perimeter and a corridor circling the structure between offices and labs. Each lab was a world unto itself with doors opening only onto the corridor; if Christy wanted to confer with a colleague, he had to leave his lab and walk around the building to another. There were no windows in the lab space and a very limited flow of people…or ideas.
JACKSON SMITH
PHOTOS B Y
Vitals Fall 2011
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