Room for Research
	by Brady Huggett and Neil Caudle

hen Phillips Hall was completed in 1917, the average annual salary was $750, and studying physics did not require lasers and scanning probe microscopes and high-powered computers. Physics has grown. Carolina has grown. And Phillips Hall is just too small.

“We don’t even have enough room for our faculty members,” says Tom Clegg, professor of physics. “We’re playing musical offices here.”

Even with some recent renovations, funded with a grant of $622,000 from the National Science Foundation and matching funds from Carolina fundraising, the building needs work. Walking the halls, Clegg stops in undersized labs and research rooms, describing how his department has tried to squeeze high-tech research into outmoded quarters. The floor of one laboratory had to be cut away to provide headroom for a two-story cryostat. The entire apparatus had to be enclosed inside a new electrically shielded room so that sensitive measurements would not be disturbed each time someone pushed an elevator button nearby.

And Phillips Hall’s problems aren’t just with research. The library can’t hold all its books because the floor in the main room isn’t strong enough to support additional stacks. Classrooms are archaic and cramped. When UNC’s former chancellor Michael Hooker first toured Phillips and entered the lecture hall, he was amazed to discover that it was virtually unchanged from the time when he had taken physics there. With funds from the university, the hall has since been updated with new seats and writing surfaces, and a screen for presentations.

“It’s wonderful,” Clegg says. “We could do this to a lot of other classrooms on campus if we just had the money.” Even though his department’s high-profile programs help it leverage large research grants and private donations, outside funds alone cannot provide new buildings or large-scale renovations.

In Phillips Hall, physics and astronomy shares space with the Curriculum in Applied and Materials Sciences, a relatively new program with strong appeal to students and researchers alike. With no real home of its own, the curriculum draws from other departments on campus. Faculty members and students go wherever they can to meet, work, and study.

“You’re all over the place,” says April Chambers, who graduated in May with her undergraduate degree in computer engineering. In her engineering studies, she took classes in four buildings and used study space in two others.

o work on her engineering projects, Chambers went to a cramped workspace in Macnider Hall, sharing its three workstations with as many as 15 biomedical students. She still goes there, finishing a remote-controlled device that will be used to help strengthen the eye tracking of visually impaired children.

“If there are three people in here, we’re literally bumping elbows,” Chambers says. “We're really busy. I think I got four hours of sleep a night last semester. We don’t have time to wait for computers to come free.”

But the problems go beyond the inconvenience of sharing crowded space. The Curriculum in Applied and Material Sciences is applying to the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). The program badly needs the accreditation to help it compete with other engineering programs. ABET will look at the program’s ability to grow, its financial support, and its facilities.

“We need laboratory space, we need computer space, and space for the students to get together, to work together,” Stephen Quint, associate chair of biomedical engineering, says from Medical Research Building E, the double-wide trailer that contains his office. “We’re going to have to have these things if we are going to be accredited.”

Next: "We're facing new questions in science."
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