The Swenson Science Building

The James I. Swenson Science Building is one of the newest building on the UMD campus. This $33 million facility, designed by architect Carol Ross Barney of Chicago, has 2 floors with an area of almost 100,000 square feet. This modern science building is shared by the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Department of Biology. It was completed in June of 2005, with the first Chemistry and Biochemistry classes offered in its laboratories in July of 2005.

This building is named for Jim Swenson, a 1959 graduate of the UMD Department of Chemistry, who completed a research project on peat when he was an undergraduate at UMD.

There are ten teaching labs for general, organic and biochemistry courses. These labs were designed to integrate modern experimental methods with state of the art instrumentation; to encourage student lab teamwork; to meet all safety regulations and to allow for the expansion of undergraduate research. The building houses four research labs for Chemistry and Biochemistry faculty, along with several rooms for specialty research support; these include cold, tissue culture, variable temperature, radioisotope and equipment rooms. Faculty and graduate student offices, a computer laboratory, a classroom, two seminar rooms and an undergraduate tutoring room comprise the remaining space.