New LSU facility touted
Gov. Bobby Jindal on Thursday said LSU’s newly opened $34 million Chemistry and Materials Science Building was a first-rate teaching and research facility that should attract students and faculty from around the world.
The five-story, 85,000-square-foot building, formerly called the Choppin Annex, is made up of mostly new laboratories and support facilities, increasing LSU’s chemistry research space by about 50 percent.
With roughly 30,000 people in Louisiana working in the chemical industry, Jindal said, the new building will be needed to train future generations of chemical engineers.
The governor also said he expected the building to make “LSU a magnet” in attracting some of the most-promising scientific minds in the academic world.
The building, nearly 10 years in the making, was originally planned as a three-floor chemistry research building.
A second effort was made four years ago to secure funds for the additional two floors to accommodate LSU’s growing material science and nanotechnology research.
LSU administrators said they expect lots of new patents and discoveries to come out of that research.
LSU System President and Baton Rouge Chancellor William Jenkins added that LSU’s chemistry researchers brought in more than $100 million in research grants last year.