Overview | The Building Inside & Out, with Video | Education & Research | Construction Progress

Students are now using the new Education and Research Building, a signature facility for the Eastern Virginia Medical School campus in downtown Norfolk.

The four-story brick, glass and stone structure opened to fall classes in 2011. It includes state-of-the-art education facilities, a new home for the school's modeling and simulation activities, and consolidated lab space for the Leroy T. Canoles Cancer Research Center.

The construction firm W.M. Jordan is general contractor. The primary architect, Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas + Company, partnered with Cambridge, Mass., architectural firm Ellenzweig to design the structure. Ellenzweig has designed health sciences structures at Harvard, MIT and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, among others.

The project includes something the campus is short on: green space. The building fronts on a large grass courtyard surrounded by shade trees and benches.

The new space - 100,000 square feet in all - will allow the medical school to meet a critical need by providing increased capacity to train more physicians and physician assistants. National health-care officials have called on all medical schools to boost enrollment to stem a pending medical staffing shortage as Baby Boomers begin to retire and require more care.