UCSF Breaks Ground on Major New Building at Mission Bay
New Global Health & Clinical Sciences Building Strengthens Campus as World-Class Hub for Discovery, Translation
UC San Francisco has broken ground on “Mission Hall,” also known as the Global Health & Clinical Sciences Building, which will be a major new structure on the Mission Bay campus.
Chancellor Emeritus Haile Debas and current Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann
assess the site of the new Mission Hall at the March 22 groundbreaking ceremony.
Made possible by a $20 million gift from philanthropist Chuck Feeney through his foundation Atlantic Philanthropies, the seven-floor, 265,000-square-foot building will house some 1,500 professionals when it opens in 2014. The building will pull together under one roof all the faculty, staff and students involved in the University’s global health programs, as well as the offices of the chancellor.
Located at the corner of 3rd and 16th streets – just across from the UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay, scheduled to open in February 2015 – the structure also will provide office space for many of the clinical faculty from UCSF’s School of Medicine who will be practicing at the new children’s, women’s and cancer hospitals.
At the March 22 groundbreaking ceremony, Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, remarked how central the Mission Hall Global Health & Clinical Sciences Building will be to fulfilling the vision of the University.
Jaime Sepulveda, executive director of the Global Health Sciences program,
addresses guests at the groundbreaking ceremony.
“Global health has and will continue to play an important role in what we do here at UCSF,” she said, “and Mission Hall will become the gateway to expanding discovery, translational and implementation science with a focus on improving global health.”
Jaime Sepulveda, MD, DSc, MPH, added that the groundbreaking will help cement the Mission Bay campus as one of the world’s leading centers for biomedical research and translation, where top scientific and clinical talent will collaborate to tackle intractable diseases worldwide. The University has been fostering this growth over the past decade, with both the Mission Bay campus and the Global Health Sciences program marking its 10-year anniversaries in 2013.
“Ten years ago, Global Health Sciences was composed of only a handful of faculty and staff, and today we have more than 200 faculty and staff and have trained more than 600 students,” Sepulveda said.
He added that the new building was made possible in no small part due to the gift of Feeney, whom he predicted would go down in history along with Andrew Carnegie as a pioneer of philanthropy.
Feeney has done more than simply help finance the construction of a new building, Sepulveda said. “He has made a major investment in the future of the global health community.”
Photos by Cindy Chew
When completed in 2014, the seven-floor, 265,000-square-foot Mission Hall will house some 1,500 professionals. Schematics courtesy of architecture firm WRNS Studios.