Building on Iowa’s brain sciences legacy

The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa is well on its way to having a new home.

UI officials, including President J. Bruce Harreld, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Interim Dean Joseph Kearney, and psychological and brain sciences faculty spoke at a groundbreaking ceremony Oct. 8 to celebrate the new building that will transform the department’s teaching and research, and will position the department to better prepare students for learning modern psychology and finding jobs in the field.

“This is a significant building, a historic facility for the university,” says Harreld. “What we’re doing here today is putting an exclamation point on the legacy that has been built, but also it’s the center of so much of the future for us—the discovery around why we do as humans what we do, and how we help our fellow humans.”

With the UI’s renewed emphasis on neuroscience—the 2016 establishment of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute and the 2017 introduction of an undergraduate major in neuroscience—faculty, staff, and students in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences are looking forward to soon having a new campus headquarters.

“Psychological and brain sciences is like an academic triple threat for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and for the university. It is a highly productive department in teaching, one of the most popular student majors, a place of cutting-edge research, and it serves the state through its clinic and community-engaged research,” Kearney says. “Now, faculty, students, and staff will have a home befitting the historical and current excellence in the department.”

The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences is the largest undergraduate department at the UI—with more than 1,400 declared psychology majors, more than 200 undergraduates performing research in faculty labs, and about 22,000 student credit hours taught in psychology each year.

Yet faculty, students, and staff have been scattered in three buildings on the east side of campus: Spence Laboratories, built in 1968; Stuit Hall, built in 1915 and renovated in 2011; and Seashore Hall, originally built in 1899 as the university’s first hospital.

The new building will collect faculty in one place and have state-of-the-art classrooms and cutting-edge labs, and provide commons space for students. It will be easier to navigate, more integrated, and more functional.

“It is hard to overstate the significance of this new building for our department,” says Mark Blumberg, professor and chair in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. “We have waited many decades for a suitable home and there is no question that we will make the most of it. Our faculty, staff, and students are eager to move in and we thank the many individuals across the university who made it possible.”

The project costs $33.5 million, and is being paid for by a combination of funding sources, including the UI, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and donors. Construction is expected to be complete in January 2020.

Research in the department is at the forefront of unlocking the secrets of the brain and behavior—with clear benefits to Iowans. One example is work by Michelle Voss, an assistant professor studying whether exercise helps prevent cognitive decline in older adults.

Another example is research by Professor Bob McMurray. Collaborating with colleagues across campus, McMurray is using eye tracking to examine the moment-by-moment processes of recognizing spoken and written words from early childhood through adolescence, with a particular emphasis on clinical conditions such as dyslexia and language disorders. McMurray’s team recently won a grant from the National Institutes of Health to open a laboratory in Iowa so a larger sample of children can be studied.