The Log | School News

Duke Marine Laboratory Breaks Ground for New Ocean Science Teaching Center

  More than 100 faculty, students, Marine Lab Advisory Board members and distinguished guests joined Dean William Schlesinger and Michael Orbach, director of the Duke Marine Laboratory, to celebrate the groundbreaking of the Marine Lab’s new $1.5 million Ocean Science Teaching Center in April at the Beaufort campus. Orbach is optimistic that construction will get underway by the first of the year.

  The 5,000-square-foot center, to be located at the point of Pivers Island, will be the first new academic building constructed on the Be aufort campus in 30 years, and plans call for it to be the Marine Lab’s first totally “green” building, designed to the highest standards for energy and environmental efficiency adopted by the U.S. Green Building Council. It will house a teaching laboratory; a televideo-capable lecture hall for team teaching and distance education; interpretive educational displays; and spaces for social interactions.

  When completed in fall 2005, it will greatly expand the Marine Lab’s teaching capacity and enhance its capabilities for public outreach and education.

  A $2.3 million gift from naming donors Randy Repass, chairman of West Marine Inc., and his wife Sally-Christine Rodgers to Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences helped fund the center and create a new University Professorship in Marine Conservation Technology at the Marine Lab.

  Repass and Rodgers were honored for their support of the Nicholas School at a dinner at the Marine Lab on Friday, April 23, as were longtime Marine Lab friends and supporters Charles and Bernard Blanchard.

  At the groundbreaking ceremony itself, 10 Naming or Leadership donors joined Schlesinger and Orbach in turning the first soil for the new center. They were: Randy Repass, Sally-Christine Rodgers and their son, Kent-Harris Repass; Howard Hardesty; Carolyn Thomas and her granddaughter Margaret Wilbanks; Richard Seale; Albert Oettinger; Mrs. Alton B. Smith; and Robert Hardy. Two donors, Bob Schwartz and the Wade Family, were unable to attend.

  A grant from the Wallace Genetic Foundation will help make it possible to build the new Ocean Sciences Teaching Center to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification standards.