Slide show: Microbial Sciences Building

Pedestrians walk past the exterior of the Microbial Sciences Building. The 330,000-square-foot facility is the campus’s largest academic building.

Joanne Weber, center, a faculty associate in medical microbiology and immunology, teaches a laboratory class, in which students learned to identify different microorganisms through colony and cellular morphology.

A medical microbiology class meets in one of the lecture halls. More than 200 undergraduate students major in the two academic programs served by the new building.

Signage printed on the glass walls near the elevators provides directions to the building’s different “neighborhoods” of research suites that promote idea-sharing and interaction among faculty and students.

Nichole Broderick, a Ph.D. student in the microbiology and entomology, works in one of the graduate student office suites in bacteriology professor Jo Handelsman’s new research lab. 110 students are enrolled in the Microbiology Doctoral Training Program, one of the largest such programs in the nation.

Cindy Chin, a graduate student in the Graduate Program in Cellular and Molecular Biology, works in bacteriology assistant professor Karen Wassarman’s lab. The building houses 40 faculty-led research laboratories.

Undergraduate Megan Kaiser takes a break from studying to read the newspaper in the atrium, which overlooks historic Hiram Smith Hall.