On August 23, 2018, the Board of Regents approved the UW System’s capital budget recommendations for 2019- 21, which largely focus on renovation, repair, and replacement of aging or obsolete facilities. Included in the recommendation was a new building to house UWM’s Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, with state-of-the-art instructional and research laboratories.

The design of the New Chemistry Building, for which funding was approved in July 2020 ($129M), is underway. The university contracted a team of architectural firms (Cannon Design & Kahler-Slater), which has been working with our user group (Kristen Murphy, Nicolas Silvaggi, Douglas Stafford, Kevin Blackburn, and Joe Aldstadt) over the past five months. The schedule calls for the design to be finalized in October and then put out for bid by the end of the calendar year, with construction underway by this time next year.

The images were prepared by the architects at Cannon Design (Chicago) and Kahler Slater (Milwaukee). They depict the first floor lobby, an aerial view along Kenwood Boulevard, and a schematic diagram of the ground floor.

The building will be located along Kenwood Boulevard, between the former Physics Building and the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center. Our current building is slated for demolition to create “green space” between the new structure and Engelmann Field. The 130,000-square-foot building would include:

• Modern instructional laboratories to support and expand offerings for core curricula across all STEM and health science related majors. New labs are intended to position UW-Milwaukee as the “go to” place for the best and brightest regional high school students.
• Modern research laboratories to support and expand research across chemistry specialties. The new facilities would support an expanded graduate program with more graduate students and post-docs participating in faculty-led research.
• A modern outreach facility to broaden relationships between UWM and the local primary and secondary education community. Developing these relationships further positions UWM to recruit the best students possible.
• Specially designed facilities for tutoring, mentoring, and informal learning.

To understand the scale of chemistry operations at UWM, consider the breadth of whom we serve and what we offer. Enrollment in undergraduate classes is about 5,000 per academic year. In the last ten years, 450 undergraduate degrees, over 40 Master’s, and over 90 PhD degrees in chemistry disciplines were awarded. Currently, there are 81 Chemistry & Biochemistry Department declared majors. We offer nearly 50 lecture and seminar courses including about 85 lab sections per semester. Beyond the classroom, every semester, approximately 60 hours per week of extensive walk-in tutoring is offered and about 2,000 students attend the Chemistry Supplemental Instruction (CSI) program.