By Haley Herfurth
UAB News
A new group of freshmen is not the only change coming to the University of Alabama at Birmingham campus this fall. Four new facilities — UAB Police Department headquarters, the Collat School of Business, Intramural and Club Sport Field Complex, and the School of Nursing — will open to the public for the first times this month and in September.
Add these grand openings to your calendar and celebrate UAB’s growth at the start of the 2018-2019 academic year.
Police Department Headquarters
Grand opening: Aug. 9, 8:30 a.m.
UAB broke ground in April 2017 on the two-story, 28,000-square-foot facility located in the 1100 block of 14th Street South, adjacent to the existing police headquarters building.
The ground floor will include a lobby area for public information and interaction with UAB police, a records storage area, evidence processing and evidence storage areas, patrol department staff offices, and an officer roll-call area. UAB Security Services staff offices, a breakroom, men’s and women’s locker rooms with showers, an in-house weight room, communication department staff offices, and a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week emergency call center also will be located on the ground floor.
The second floor will house senior staff and administrative, investigation and training departments, as well as a conference room, breakroom and 1,500-square-foot training room for police department staff, where UAB police officers will host public training courses.
Collat School of Business
Grand opening: Aug. 24, 10 a.m.
Construction has been underway on the new business school building since December 2016, located along the north side of University Boulevard between 12th and 13th streets.
The new building will provide adequate space for growth of the Collat School of Business, the UAB Healthcare Leadership Academy, the UAB Regions Institute for Financial Education, and UAB’s Bill L. Harbert Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The 108,000-square-foot facility features breakout rooms, an innovation lab, classrooms designed for team-based learning, a high-tech finance lab, sales role-playing rooms, a three-story atrium, auditorium, two eateries, a career center and quiet study spaces.
Intramural and Club Sport Field Complex
Grand opening: Aug. 29, 5 p.m.
When it opens at the end of this month, UAB’s new Intramural and Club Sport Field Complex, located at 1101 Fifth Ave. South, will have been completed in about 10 months. The space is a joint project between UAB Student Affairs and Campus Recreation through the UAB Facilities Division. Campus Recreation will oversee the fields, programming and scheduling.
The fields will feature lights and scoreboards and a building that will have all-gender bathrooms, a water-bottle-filling station, fountains and storage for the fields. Two games can be played simultaneously, and the fields will be strategically rotated, so the grass fields do not wear away as quickly.
School of Nursing
Grand opening: Sept. 6, 5:30 p.m.
The School of Nursing’s (SON) new $32 million, 72,000-plus-square-foot building expansion has been under construction since October 2016.
The original nursing building was constructed in 1971, with an addition in 1992. The newly renovated and expanded building will be organized around teaching, research, office support and collaboration spaces.
