A look inside UO’s newest science hub

The University of Oregon’s second Knight Campus building is open, capping a three-year, $330 million expansion of the flagship scientific complex. 

The four-story 185,000-square-foot facility in the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact opened March 30. Built to house between 17 and 20 research labs, it will serve as a hub for bioengineering work ranging from neural and protein engineering to medical device development, computational biology and regenerative rehabilitation.

A skybridge connects the new building to Building 1, which opened in 2020 following a $500 million donation from the Knight family. A second $500 million gift from the family in 2020, along with $10 million in state funding, made way for the construction of Building 2, which began in 2023. 

The construction budget was $330 million. Officials don’t yet know the final cost, Knight Campus Director of Communications Lewis Taylor said, though UO’s website states that the development is “well within budget.”

Lookout Eugene-Springfield toured the building Tuesday, April 21. Move-in efforts are still underway as the university hires new faculty, and researchers wait for equipment to ship, evidenced by pristine, though empty, lab spaces. But anticipation from staff and researchers was high. 

“We’re laser-focused on getting things out of the lab and into users’ hands as fast as possible,” said Rachel Bedford, a research associate for science communication. “This new building provides expanded space to be able to do that, and recruit high-tier faculty from across the world interested in moving their discoveries from the lab to people that need them most.”

Like the design of the first building, the exterior of Building 2 is modern — a mix of tall, narrow vertical windows and dark metal panels. Parts of the glass are fritted — a type of patterned glass — to avoid bird injuries in areas considered high-risk for aviary migration.

Landscaped vegetation lines walking paths leading to the building, which sits just by the millrace and UO’s Urban Farm; in a controversial move, UO removed a large portion of the farm years ago to make space for the new development.

The first and second floors of the building are open to the public during business hours. The ground floor has an open layout with floor-to-ceiling windows, anchored by the new Riverfront Bistro, a central wood staircase and lounge area with contemporary furniture. 

The second floor, which overlooks the first, features more common space, including cushy armchairs and desks that were already being used by students during Tuesday’s tour. Artwork by Terry Haggerty hangs on the wall.

“At the science level, this is pretty much a best-case scenario for starting out as a new principal investigator,” said assistant professor of engineering David Peeler, who works on the third floor. 

The first floor features a biofoundry: a $4 million lab space for cell and tissue growth and testing that will be fully operational by the end of the summer. 

The space will be shared by university researchers, who can use it for free, as well as start-up companies that lack funds to buy their own equipment for experiments, said Kurt Langworthy, senior director for shared equipment and core facilities. Commercial researchers will pay subsidized user fees that UO will reinvest in equipment maintenance, he said. 

“This is really for the community in the biosciences to come and study growth, manipulation and characterization of biological and biomaterial things,” he said. 

The biofoundry is equipped with technologies including volumetric 3-D bioprinting, which researchers use to build polymer structures that hold cells and study how they break down in the body; confocal imaging systems to examine tissues in detail; and a metabolic analyzer that measures ATP and oxygen levels in cells. 

“Tools we’re buying are very unique and very cutting edge,” creating a regional demand for the equipment, Langworthy said. “Even Oregon Health & Science University is saying, ‘Hey, if you invest in that, we’ve got a whole group here that can use it.’”

Reserving space is first-come-first serve, but officials may add guardrails as the space gets busier. Users must complete general and tool-specific safety training before using the space for experiments, Langworthy added. 

Building 2 is home to a second Papé Family Innovation Center, an “incubator space” for budding entrepreneurs leaving UO, and local biotech companies starting up in Eugene, to lease office and lab facilities. It includes private lab and office spaces split across two wings, a shared lab support room, conference space and a break room. 

Officials want to move tenants in as early as this summer, but don’t yet have firm commitments from interested companies, said center lab manager Terra Hiebert. The lack of affordable local lab space is a “gap” that pushes budding startups in Eugene to move their operations elsewhere, she said. 

“We have key basic infrastructure in place — biosafety cabinets, chemical fume hoods, autoclaves, freezers,” Hiebert said. “But otherwise, they’re designed to be flexible spaces so that startups can come in and make them their own.”

This innovation center is bigger and better-suited for larger companies than the first innovation center in Building 1, Hiebert said, which five startup companies are using for work like environmental contaminant testing, microbiome source therapeutics and DNA synthesis. 

One company making implantable wireless sensors for medical use recently outgrew its space in Building 1, Hiebert added. 

The new Knight Campus building features a computational suite, where UO bioengineering faculty will research data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and theoretical physics. 

The suite will also serve as the home for the Center for Biomedical Data Science, a partnership between UO and Oregon Health & Science University to combat cancer with data that recently sent out a first round of seed funding to Oregon research projects.

“These are for labs that aren’t doing pipetting or things in giant freezers,” Bedford said. “They’re all doing it on their computer.” 

There are three instructional lab spaces in the building for undergraduate and graduate students in UO’s bioengineering doctoral or minor programs — the site of classes like Advanced 3D Printing — which will be “built out” to suit students’ needs as the university launches more elective courses, Bedford added. 

Nearby is a “student makerspace,” open for undergraduates and graduates to tinker on engineering and prototyping projects. The space was designed to be “modular,” Bedford said, with work benches attached to wheels and fume hoods fixed to the ceiling with flexible claws.

“This space up here is truly for students,” she said. “It would not be available to external users or even really research labs.”

Much of the research coming out of the Knight Campus revolves around technology invented by professor Paul Dalton called melt electrowriting, a micro 3D-printing technique that produces microscopic scaffolds.

Maya Kasteleiner, a bioengineering doctoral student studying in the Dalton Lab, is using those scaffolds to mimic structures within the brain and research the spread of glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. She said the expanded facilities will expedite her research and allow her to collaborate more with other researchers.

“Now we can work with multiple people on either the same project at the same time, and we don’t have to share one cramped little bench, or have multiple people working on different projects,” Kasteleiner said.