The Scripps Research Institute has received a $12.5 million challenge grant from an anonymous donor for construction of a new building complex on its La Jolla campus.
The gift is contingent on raising an additional $12.5 million in matching gifts for the project by the first quarter of 2018.
“I am extremely pleased to announce this generous and inspiring pledge,” said Acting President and CEO Jim Paulson. “The gift and matching funds will support TSRI’s world-renowned research by providing additional advanced laboratories and new operating efficiencies.”
“Thanks to this generous donor, every contribution to this important project will be amplified,” said Dick Gephardt, chair of the board and president/CEO of Gephardt Government Affairs. “The challenge grant is a meaningful invitation to other members of the community to join us in an initiative key to Scripps’s work expanding the frontiers of knowledge and finding new ways to combat disease.”
Paulson added the planned facilities will consolidate research labs on the La Jolla campus, encourage collaboration among the institute’s scientists and strengthen ongoing programs in global health, neuroscience, addiction, structural biology and immunology.
The building complex, projected to open in 2019, will include two laboratory buildings totaling 147,000 square feet of space and an advanced 12,000-square-foot nuclear magnetic resonance facility.
Situated at the intersection of John Jay Hopkins Dr. and Genesee Avenue, the new complex is planned on a site adjacent to TSRI’s electron microscopy suite, graduate offices and architecturally renowned auditorium and plaza. Currently, the site is occupied primarily by a parking lot, which will be replaced by a four-level parking structure and subterranean parking spaces under the laboratory buildings.
