As students returned from summer break to Loyola’s campus, one new feature of the quad may have caught them by surprise: a construction zone, where the university has recently broken ground on an 18,200 square-foot addition and renovation of the Donnelly Science Center.
According to the new strategic plan for 2030, Together We Rise, the future Donnelly will improve the student experience and respond to innovation within the natural and applied sciences aligned with the initiative to “grow our footprint, influence, and enrollment” through investments into health and STEM. Until Donnelly’s launch in 2026 to 2027, however, students and faculty are caught in the crosshairs of inconvenience.
The Donnelly Science Center has been home to Loyola’s science programs since 1978. In the decades since, the Department of Natural and Applied Sciences has launched several new science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs, including data science, forensics, and environmental science. Most recently, Loyola’s new Bachelor of Science in Nursing program, in partnership with Mercy Medical Center, will welcome its first cohort in fall 2025.
According to Dr. Braham Roughani, associate dean for natural and applied sciences, health and STEM have been a growth area for the university. Undergraduate enrollment in the sciences has doubled from around 600 students in 2013, when Roughani arrived at Loyola, to over 1,000 students in 2023, though the total of undergraduates has remained steady at around 4,000.
“Our faculty have been very innovative and creative. They have created new programs that are in demand and align both with what students want and what the industries, businesses, and government agencies want. We are really making Loyola a destination for STEM within liberal arts Jesuit education,” Roughani said.
Students may have only just found out about the Donnelly renovation this semester through email updates to the Loyola community, but the construction project has been in process for multiple years. Talks of renovation began in 2019 in response to faculty complaints of outdated equipment, old-fashioned labs, classrooms, and study spaces.
“We had to upgrade our labs to ensure the safety of the students. In sciences, things will get old. We have new technology, but it is very hard to retrofit new technology into old buildings,” Roughani said.
Meredith Sullivan, director of project management, design, and construction, shared that the Donnelly project started as a minor renovation. However, the project evolved following a January 2020 to January 2021 feasibility study and plans moved forward with the 18 month design process for a more invasive addition.
According to Sullivan, the addition is largely inspired by the Miguel B. Fernandez Family Center for Innovation and Collaborative Learning, which opened in fall of 2021. In alignment with Loyola’s Laudato Si’ commitment to sustainability, the construction aims to secure the same LEED gold environmental certification in energy efficiency. The new and improved Donnelly Science Center will also look and feel like a modern, 21st century building, complete with distinctive, large glass windows.
“[The addition] plays nicely off the architecture and the materiality of the Fernandez Center. Fernandez has wider circulation and more spaces for students to meet, and the addition allowed us to put more of those types of spaces that we saw were really successful in the Fernandez Center into Donnelly, which we weren’t going to be able to do without the addition,” Sullivan said.
A full interior renovation will resize classrooms and add six brand new large teaching labs, which will allow the university to be more industry-adaptable and forward-thinking in creating future programs.
“These new labs will also better prepare students for the workforce,” Dr. Theresa Nguyen said, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry.
“We want to upgrade lab spaces to mirror what students would see when they do research, when they go out and do internships, or when they go to grad school or med school, so that students have all the right tools they need to succeed,” Nguyen said.
The renovation will also add new office spaces to house additional faculty for future programs and install lounge, study, and collaboration areas for students. These changes, Roughani hopes, will facilitate better student-faculty interaction and enhance the learning experience.
“The best I can describe traditional lectures is like a lion in a cage, going back and forth in front of the blackboard. New knowledge [informs us that] the best teaching is not passive, but requires active learning, group work, and sometimes, the ability to quickly reconfigure the room. The correct design of the space is in everything, even from the shape of the table… these small details add up to create the best and most productive learning environment,” Roughani said.
When it comes to navigating construction in an occupied setting like a university, safety of the students and faculty is paramount, followed closely by limiting interruptions to the learning environment. Certain effects, including increased noise and restricted building access, are unavoidable.
Furthermore, with half the building offline for renovation at a time during the first of two phases of construction, many science faculty have been displaced into temporary office spaces within residential halls like Newman Towers. These measures disrupt the ease of faculty-student interaction, forcing many professors to rely on mobile or virtual office hours to compensate for the loss.
Amber Delgado ’25, a biology and psychology major and president of the Society for Underrepresented Health Students, shared that the limited in-person space made it difficult to find biology courses that suit her schedule and impacted the way students study and learn together.
“For example, when four people all had the same question, we would all go to office hours together and all bounce off each other’s questions, which is not something we can really do anymore because we don’t have that space,” Delgado said.
Access to critical experimental equipment and resources are also limited, which drives professors to brainstorm solutions to replace traditional course plans. Nguyen, for example, has taken the opportunity to introduce elements of liberal arts and ethics into her coursework.
“Any challenge, be it the pandemic or a major renovation, really forces us to focus on what’s important, which is the learning outcomes. Can my students learn what they need to? So, for instance, if one of the centrifuges that we use for our experiment is going to be inoperable, what can I do to creatively answer that problem?” Nguyen said.
The construction team and science faculty have worked hard to maintain lines of communication to reduce inconvenience to students where possible. Sullivan helps lead a committee that meets biweekly to evaluate the impact of construction on classes, a space where faculty can share certain days or times where noise needs to be limited for exams, for example.
“It will be noisy sometimes. It will be a little disruptive. We’re asking people to be patient with us,” Sullivan said.
Upon its opening during the 2026 to 2027 school year, the new Donnelly Science Center will not just be a distinctive new feature of the academic quad. It will represent new forms of collaboration, innovation, and academic excellence for Loyola students and faculty, according to Nguyen.
“You don’t choose a school because of the buildings, you choose it for the faculty and the people. If we continue to focus on the people in everything that we do, I think that will be the success story,” Nguyen said.
