Nov. 3, 2003
The News & Observer
By staff report
© Copyright 2003 The News & Observer Publishing Company.

Ceremonies fete new projects

There has been a lot of groundbreaking on Triangle campuses in the past two weeks- evidence of the $3.1 billion in higher education bonds approved by voters in 2000 and Duke University’s ambitious building plan.

In Durham, N.C. Central University broke ground on its new West Campus on Friday, which also was the university’s Founder’s Day. The West Campus will include teh New Baynes Residence Hall and the $36 million Science Complex, which will include a wing for the university’s new center for biomanufacturing research. NCCU also held a ceremony to mark the beginning of the construction of a new residence hall.

Also on Friday, Duke University held a ceremony to celebrate the start of a new two-story building at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. The $12 million building will be across the lawn from the institute’s current building, which opened in 1994. It should be completed before the 2005-2006 academic year. The building is partly funded with a $5 million gift from David M. Rubenstein, a 1970 Duke graduate and founding partner and managing director of The Carlyly Group, a global private equity firm.

On Oct. 24, N.C. State University broke ground on a $35 million building on Centennial Campus . It is the second phase of the relocation of the engineering college to Centennial Campus. It will be home to the computer science and electrical and computer engineering departments. The building should be finished by 2005.

Vet school professor honored

N.C. State University doesn’t have a medical school, but it now has its first member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. Jim E. Riviere is the Burroughs Wellcome Fund distinguished professor of pharmacology and director of the Center for Chemical Toxicology Research and Pharmacokinetics at NCSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

Riviere , who studies the absorption and transport of drugs and chemicals across the skin, was one of 65 people elected to the institute. In the world of animals, his method is used in food safety issues to predict how drugs and chemicals seep through skin and into the edible tissues of animals that produce food.

The Institute of Medicine was established in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences and has become recognized as a national resource for analysis and recommendations on issues related to human health.