PSEB Town Hall, Monday, March 25

March 13, 2024

Dear Colleagues,

Since announcing plans for the Physical Sciences and Engineering Building (PSEB) in 2020, we’ve made great progress toward making this ambitious project a reality. We last met as a community in December 2022 to gather input and discuss progress up to that point. As we rapidly approach groundbreaking on the first stages of this multi-year project, we invite you to participate in a third PSEB town hall meeting on Monday, March 25, at 4:00 p.m., on the 14th floor of Kline Tower. This location offers a unique vantage point of the project site on upper science hill.

At this third town hall, we will present updates on building progress on upper science hill, and offer an important opportunity for the community to provide feedback on the project’s latest plans. We will have several graphical and informational displays and a 3-D scale model of the project on view. Due to time constraints, we will focus our presentation on the design of Phase 2 of the PSEB project, but we will also provide a brief update on the status of Phase 1. For reference, a brief summary of the overall upper science hill building program is provided below this message.

For those who cannot attend in person, a livestream option will be circulated in advance. A recording will also be distributed post-event.

We are extremely fortunate to have many dedicated faculty and staff contributing to this project. In particular, we thank the PSEB Phase 2 Committee, led by co-chairs Karsten Heeger and Sohrab Ismail-Beigi, for their continued leadership and contributions.

Community input remains critical to this project’s success and its impact on the future of the physical sciences and engineering at Yale. We look forward to your participation.

Sincerely,

Michael Crair
Vice Provost for Research

Background: Upper Science Hill/Physical Sciences and Engineering Building (PSEB)
 

We began exploring the feasibility for this facility in response to the recommendations made by the University Science Strategy Committee (USSC) in 2018. The Upper Science Hill project includes numerous new buildings and infrastructure elements, while PSEB entails several new interconnected structures, all across two distinct phases:

•    Phase 1 creates new, dedicated spaces for an Advanced Instrumentation Development Center (AIDC), an addition to Wright Lab (WL-A) for the Department of Physics, a Chemical Safety Building (CSB), a new parking structure, and a new utilities and thermal plant.
•    Phase 2, facilitated by the completion of all the enabling components during Phase 1, entails the construction of the new Physical Sciences and Engineering Building. Some of the programmatic elements in Phase 2 include a cleanroom, a materials characterization core, research laboratories, and a convening and event space.

The resulting Upper Science Hill complex will directly support and elevate the physical sciences and engineering at Yale, with a particular emphasis on initiatives in Quantum Science, Engineering and Materials, and dedicated space for advanced instrumentation and core facilities (as recommended by the USSC). It will serve faculty from the Departments of Physics and Applied Physics and several other departments across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS).