Lasry Center for Bioscience
The Biology Department is located in the state-of-the-art Cathy ’83 and Marc ’81 Lasry Center for Bioscience, a 50,000-square-foot space that received a Gold Certification by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System.
The building houses classrooms, research laboratories, conference rooms, lounge spaces, and faculty offices, with an abundance of natural light. Its teaching and collaborative spaces, and an impressive collection of equipment, are used by faculty and students in biology, biochemistry and molecular biology, and environmental science.
Designed by Tsoi/Kobus and Associates of Cambridge, Mass., the Lasry Center for Bioscience was the first building in Worcester to receive a Gold Certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, in 2007.
The LEED Gold is the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high-performance green buildings. LEED promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health:
- Sustainable site development
- Water savings
- Energy efficiency
- Materials selection
- Indoor environmental quality
Core Equipment
The Biology Department has an autoclave and dish room as well as the following core equipment:
- A dark room equipped with a UV transilluminator, a gel imaging system, and a phosphorimager
- Molecular biology equipment, including a Qubit fluorometer, Nanodrop spectrophotometer, Agilent AriaMX real-time PCR machine, and Oxford Nanopore MiniON sequencers.
- An image analysis facility housing a Nikon Eclipse e600 compound microscope with fluorescence and DIC capability, a SPOT RT Slider digital camera, and Nikon SMZ stereo microscope
- Four-degree Celsius and 37-degree Celsius walk-in environmental chambers
Within the Biology Department and in the Arthur M. Sackler Sciences Center, additional laboratory and field equipment includes:
- BioRad C1000 and MJ Research PTC 200 thermal cyclers
- Fuji FLA4000 imager
- Fuji FLA 7000 Phosphorimager
- Shimadzu UV-1550 PC spectrophotometer
- A collection of Thermo Electron 4001 Genesys 20 digital spectrophotometers
- Sorvall RC6, RC-5C and RC-5B high speed centrifuges
- Sorvall Legend Micro17 and Galaxy 14D microfuge collections
- Percival I-30 algae growth chamber
- Chlorophyll and Walz PAM-2500 fluorometers
- Backpack electroshocker
- Savant SC1100 SpeedVac
- Collections of Canon and Panasonic still and video cameras for use in animal behavior studies
- Shared minus 80°C freezers
- An extensive collection of small laboratory and field equipment used in teaching as well as in undergraduate and graduate student research, including analytical balances, digital and dial calipers, Hewlett Packard and Mac laptop computers, electrophoresis apparatus, hand-held GPS units, incubators, heat and stir plates, microscopes, oscilloscopes and arbitrary function generators, pipettors and pipet aids, shakers, vortexers, and water baths.)
Students also have on-campus access to a 48-node Linux-based parallel high-performance computing cluster.
Clark’s Biology Department partners with other institutions in the Worcester area and beyond, providing additional opportunities for collaboration and equipment access.
