Science building to be topped out this Friday

The final steel beam will be placed on the Institute of Behavioral Science building during a topping-out ceremony at 10 a.m. Friday, March 12.

Chancellor Phil DiStefano and Provost Stein Sture will present brief remarks to begin the ceremony, on 15th Street just north of the Continuing Education building.

"Construction of a new building to house the entire Institute of Behavioral Science has been undertaken to foster work on urgent problems of societal – indeed, global – importance," said Dick Jessor, director of the Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS), health and society program. "By bringing the scholars and their research programs together in a single, cohesive, collaborative and intellectual community, we intend to create a synergy that will amplify and accelerate the contributions of IBS to human welfare in the U.S. and abroad."

IBS has been on the CU-Boulder campus since 1957, and currently has researchers working in Colorado, across the United States and on five continents. The institute comprises five research programs that have made major contributions: the problem behavior program, the health and society program, the population program, the environment and society program, and the political and economic change program.

The $14 million building project is funded by campus revenue and private gifts. The 50,000-square-foot building on the corner of Grandview Avenue and 15th Street is expected to be completed this fall.

The last beam to be placed on the building will carry quotations from two philosophers and a social scientist:

"The science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences." – David Hume

"I have sedulously endeavored not to laugh at human actions, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them." –  Baruch Spinoza

"The behavioral sciences are one of the major intellectual inventions of the twentieth century." – Bernard Berelson