Hunter College is a proud leader in the sciences and medicine.
Its professors win research grants in record amounts – more than $15 million in 2005 alone.
Its graduates – 85% of them products of City high schools – go on to careers in health care and scientific research in extraordinary numbers: Sixty-five percent are accepted into medical and professional schools, well above the national average of 58%.

And Hunter is the only college in the nation to produce two women who have won Nobel Prizes in physiology and medicine. That’s no surprise. Women are 74% of Hunter’s science programs. Minorities are 59%.

But Hunter is at a crossroads. Its science building was constructed in 1939 – one of the oldest structures in the City University of New York. The building’s age and design make it impossible to retrofit in order to house the large, sophisticated laboratories that modern research requires. Hunter’s renowned Brookdale Center faces the identical problem. Its outdated building at First Avenue and 25th Street can’t meet the demands of 21st century science and medicine.

The Solution: A New Science & Health Professions Building

To meet these challenges, Hunter plans to construct a new science and health professions building on Second Avenue between 67th and 68th Streets. The site, which was chosen in cooperation with the City’s Department of Education and CUNY, is now the Julia Richman Educational Complex.

The new building will

• Consolidate all of Hunter’s science and health programs, including Brookdale’s, under one roof.
• Provide professors and students with the modern labs and cutting-edge equipment they need to keep pushing the frontiers of scientific research.
• Free up at least 150,000 square feet of space for Hunter’s liberal arts programs.

Why the Second Avenue Site Is the Right Choice

Because Hunter College is located in the heart of Manhattan’s Upper East Side – home to some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including many of the City’s landmarked structures – finding space for the new science and health professions building requires a creative solution.

The Second Avenue site is the right choice because:

• Its location will make it part of the Hunter campus, a crucial need for science majors who often must visit their labs several times a day. A more remote location would divide the campus and create daunting obstacles.
• A new science building on the Hunter campus eliminates the need for duplicate libraries, eating halls and other facilities, a big savings for a taxpayer-supported institution.
• The site will allow Hunter to maintain its close ties with the Upper East Side’s world- renowned medical and research institutions, including Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Rockefeller University, New York-Presbyterian, Weill Cornell Medical College and the Hospital for Special Surgery. These ties help Hunter attract top faculty and give students unparalleled opportunities – benefits that will erode if the science building is placed elsewhere.
• The proximity to Hunter’s other classrooms will make it easy and inviting for liberal arts students to take science classes and vice versa, a healthy mix of educational opportunities.

This new, state-of-the-art building will provide a far better learning environment than the current structure, which wasn’t designed to be retrofitted into several schools.

None of the Julia Richman schools is zoned — the students come from all five boroughs. Most commute from outside Manhattan, including a large percentage from Brooklyn.

Building a new science facility at East 67th Street will permit the faculty and students to maintain their collaborations with nearby institutions such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Rockefeller University, NewYork-Presbyterian, Weill Cornell Medical College and the Hospital for Special Surgery.   In October 2007, the Hunter College School of Nursing and the College’s Center for Study of Gene Structure and Function were selected to be part of an innovative biomedical complex on the Upper East Side—to work in collaboration with Weill Cornell Medical College and a consortium of other prestigious institutions in the neighborhood.  The effort will be funded through a $49 million award from the National Institutes of Health.  Consortium efforts like this will be greatly facilitated by the consolidation of the science and health programs and faculties near the main campus and these collaborating institutions.  It comes as no surprise, therefore, that important neighboring institutions such as Rockefeller University and New York Presbyterian have publicly expressed their support for this project.

The Conclusion

A great new building for Julia Richman schools, cutting-edge labs for Hunter College’s science programs, a new recruiting tool to help attract top researchers to New York and strengthen the city’s medical and science communities – the new science and health professions building is a win-win-win solution.