March 5, 2002
GW Acquires PSINet Building
Facility Nearly Triples the Size of the Virginia Campus
By Greg
Licamele
GW’s Virginia Campus recently acquired a 204,000-square foot facility
and accompanying 40 acres, which, says John Wilson, executive dean,
will present new opportunities for faculty members looking for office
and research space.
“We will expand the list
of faculty members we’re going to be working with and who will
be doing most of their work on our site,” Wilson says. “We’re
going to look to have a more active environment now.”
The former corporate headquarters
building sits adjacent to GW’s current facility. With PSINet filing
for bankruptcy, GW decided the time was right to nearly triple the size
of the facilities.
“We anticipate using the
new facility to work collaboratively with industry and government to
build upon our extensive research expertise in transportation safety
and advanced information technologies and to develop new research initiatives
in emerging areas such as biotechnology,” Wilson says. He expects
the former PSINet building to be ready this summer for faculty members.
With the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute planning a $500-million facility scheduled for completion
in 2005, Wilson says GW will position itself as a leader in collaborative
medical research.
“Howard Hughes will be
an important partner for us,” Wilson says. “There is a possibility
that we will position the biotechnology and biomedicine activity in
the new building, but no firm decisions have been made.”
In addition to GW’s current
77,000-square foot facility and the former PSINet building, the University
plans to build a 72,000-square foot complex at the Loudoun County campus
to house the National Transportation Safety Board Academy. This facility
will be built on land previously owned by GW and is scheduled to open
in 2003.
“This will be the site
of a state-of-the-art training facility,” says Marion Blakey, NTSB
chair. “It’s going to enhance the skills of our accident investigators,
while at the same time sharing that knowledge with accident investigators
from all over the globe who will be coming here to learn how we can
prevent accidents.”
“We are now going to have
a 90-acre campus, which is not trivial,” Wilson says. “We’ll
have three buildings and others are planned. We really do have an ambitious
research agenda, an ambitious teaching agenda, and much space is required.
It will put us in a much better position to be the kind of resource
we imagine being for this region and beyond.”
In 10 years, the Virginia Campus
has conducted more than $28 million in funded research in areas such
as transportation safety, information technology, and the Internet.
Key research labs include the America Online Home of the 21st Century,
GW NetLab, the Federal Highway Administration’s National Crash
Analysis Center, and the East Coast’s largest earthquake simulator.
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu
