Gov. Bob Wise will join West Virginia University officials in dedicating the LifeSciencesBuilding at 2 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, outside the main entrance across from the College of Business and Economics.

The ceremony will feature speeches, a bronze plaque unveiling, ribbon-cutting, tours of the facility and a reception on the ground-floor lobby.

Speakers will include Wise; WVU President David C. Hardesty Jr.; Provost Gerald Lang; M. Duane Nellis, dean of the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences; Julie Smith, a member of the EberlyCollege advisory board; and two students.

Festivities, which are open to the public, will move indoors should it rain.

The $50 million building opened this semester at the corner of Campus Drive and University Avenue in the loop where old Mountaineer Field once stood. Its eight floors contain classrooms, teaching and research labs, a 250-seat auditorium, 125-seat auditorium, community mental health center, herbarium and greenhouse.

The 190,000-square-foot facility houses the biology and psychology departments, the two largest programs in the EberlyCollege. The biology department has 732 undergraduate students (including 147 forensics-biology majors and pre-majors), 37 graduate students, 26 faculty and 14 staff; the department formerly occupied four floors in Brooks Hall, which dates back to 1951. The psychology department has 692 undergraduate students (majors and pre-majors), 74 graduate students, 23 faculty and six staff; the program moved to its new quarters from Oglebay Hall, which was built in 1918 for agricultural sciences.

Payette Associates of Boston was the buildings architect, and Dick Corp. of Pittsburgh was the construction manager.

The Life Sciences Building is one of three projects included in the first phase of WVU s facilities master plan, a 10-year campus renewal program totaling more than $250 million. Other projects are a $34 million StudentRecreationCenter that opened in July 2001 and a $37 million consolidated downtown library complex that opened in January.