$70-million research building opens at U of O
Robin Levinson King, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: September 30, 2014, Last Updated: September 30, 2014 7:26 PM EDT
Deep below the hustle and bustle of King Edward Avenue, a photon is stirring.
Technically, photons — elementary particles of light — are stirring everywhere, but in the basement labs of the brand-new Advanced Research Complex at the University of Ottawa, the photons should be particularly jazzed.
The opening ceremony for the $70-million building, which will house two of the U of O’s strongest departments — photonics, the study of light, and earth science — took place in the sleek and light-filled lobby of the complex on Tuesday.
But the star of the show isn’t the sleek design. It’s the ultramodern labs like the André E. Lalonde Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) Laboratory, which will house Canada’s only accelerator mass spectrometer, an instrument that measures trace radionuclides. The $10-million lab is named after the beloved U of O prof and former dean of the faculty of science who died of cancer in 2012. Rock was able to tell Lalonde, who helped to conceive of the complex, about the lab’s name before he died and his family was on hand to see its opening.
“It was André’s kind of vision to put science on display,” said the building’s architect Stephen Jones of Cole and Associates, noting the building’s use of glass and light.
Mona Nemer, vice-president of research at the U of O, led the ceremony, which featured university president Allan Rock as well as politicians such as Minister of Research and Innovation Reza Moridi, Ottawa-Vanier MPP Madeleine Meilleur, and Ottawa-Orléans MP Royal Galipeau.
“This beautiful complex will serve as a symbol and a sign” of the research and innovation at the University of Ottawa, Rock told the crowd of faculty and students who packed the lobby.
But the pomp of the opening ceremony did not go unchecked. A group of students interrupted Nemer’s opening speech to protest rising tuitions. Holding up a handmade banner emblazoned with the university’s new tag line Defy the Conventional, the students chastised the administration for lauding the investment in the new building while raising tuition nine years in a row.
“Invest in your students,” one of the protesters asked of Rock, before agreeing to leave the ceremony.
After the ceremony, Nemer told the Citizen the building was created with the aim to attract more top talent to the school. “We have the world experts [in photonics and earth science] here in Ottawa and it’s very important that we keep them here and that we attract others,” she said.
One of the experts Nemer spoke about is Robert Boyd, the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in quantum non-linear optics. Boyd joined the university in 2010 after being offered $25 million to establish a major research facility and the promise of a new building. Fast forward to today, and Boyd has about 30 students and a the brand new building — as promised.
“I came because there was going to be this building,” he said, beaming.
Nemer said ideas for the building started to take shape in 2008 — right at the depths of the economic recession.
“We weren’t sure how the markets were going to be,” she said. “The university wasn’t in a positive situation financially. It was a great risk.
“But we truly believed in the future of these areas for Canada, for Ontario and for Ottawa.”
A major challenge for the $70-million building had nothing to do with finances and everything to do with the traffic on King Edward. Every day, thousands of trucks and cars rumble by the campus, and finding the right spot to safely house the highly sensitive equipment proved difficult.
The solution, it turned out, lay below. The building’s photonics labs are housed many feet underground so that they can remain undisturbed by the tremor and jostle of traffic. In order to keep the photonics measuring equipment totally stable, the labs are floored with slabs of floating concrete that are anchored to bedrock by hundreds of pillars.
“A cement truck going by will have almost no impact,” Boyd said with a smile.
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-...pens-at-u-of-o
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