News Release

On Friday, October 23rd, at 12:30 p.m., Johns Hopkins University president William R. Brody will join students, faculty, community business leaders and public officials to celebrate the groundbreaking for the second building on Hopkins Montgomery County campus.

The campus has been a success since it opened in 1988. Enrollments have steadily increased. Course offerings and academic programs have expanded. The nearby business community has taken an active role in developing courses and programs and then participating in them.

Now the time has come for the campus to grow to match its success. We just need more space. It s that simple, says Elaine Amir, director of centers in Montgomery County and Washington, D.C. Enrollments are expected to leap from 8,000 to 11,000 in the next five years. It s become difficult to find adequate classroom space and to introduce new programs to serve the demand.

The new three-story, 49,000 square-foot structure will meet those growing academic and community needs.

Hopkins opened its campus in the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center 10 years ago to provide students living in Metropolitan Washington access to the university s part-time graduate programs. There are now more than 40 academic programs offered by the schools of Arts and Sciences, Continuing Studies, Engineering and Public Health. Many courses have been developed in academic disciplines that are of particular interest to the growing biotechnology and information technology industries emerging in the Baltimore-Washington corridor.

Course registration during the past decade has increased an average of 25 percent each year, and it is projected that it will increase by 30 percent in the next five years.

So a breezeway and several student lounge areas in the existing building have been acting as classrooms and a coat closet has been converted into a small conference room. And still Hopkins has had to lease space at a neighboring office building to accommodate expansion.

The new teaching-research building, which is the second of five planned buildings that will eventually complete the Montgomery County campus, will include four computer labs with wide-area connectivity and Local Area Network access, biotechnology wet labs and a bioinformatics lab. It also will house 22 smart classrooms, which will be configured for video conferencing, compressed ISDN video capabilities, multimedia presentations, transmissions of large data bases across T-1 lines and international communications via the World Wide Web. Current plans include the completion of the first two floors, Amir says. The third floor will be constructed as a shell to be converted into classroom and wet lab space in the future.

Besides providing sorely needed space and facilities, the new building will allow the School of Nursing to offer The Business of Nursing program when the new building opens.

Student amenities will include a coffee house, a bookstore and a variety of meeting spaces. Our intent is to have these facilities serve as a place where the business and academic worlds can meet to exchange ideas and promote collaborations that will be beneficial to both students and Montgomery County business, Amir says.

The 38-acre campus master plan calls for a total of five buildings eventually to be arranged in a quadrangle, with the original facility acting as the centerpiece. This first new building, planned by Lavigne Associates Architects, will be built by contractor J. R. Austin Co. of Bethesda, Md., in association with the architectural firm of Kling, Lindquist. It will be divided into an academic wing and a services and support wing, with a walkway connecting the two. To complement the existing building, its exterior will be pre-cast concrete and will have aluminum-framed windows fitted with gray glass.

Planning for the third building is underway.

Building costs are estimated at $7.9 million. The State of Maryland has approved a capital grant of $3 million for the project. The remaining funds will be raised by the university divisions which will use the facility.

Economic Impact

A November 1997 study by the Jacob France Center on the economic impact of Johns Hopkins on the Montgomery Co. community reported that the university and its affiliated institutions, students and retirees injected $71 million of spending into the county s 1996 economy. This spending, in turn, created an additional $70 million in indirect, or spin off spending in the county, for a combined economic output totaling $141 million.

Hopkins directly employs or supports 1,391 county residents, who earn $3 million in salaries and wages. It indirectly supports an additional 714 county jobs that pay $25 million in salary and wages. County taxes are approximately $1.6 million.

Non-journalists who want more information on the center and the groundbreaking, can call 301-294-7000.

Related Sites:
The Montgomery County Center Home Page
http://jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu/~lfallon/newmcenter.htm