Marquette University officials this week unveiled the university’s new $24 million Athletic and Human Performance Research Center, located at the corner of West Wells and North 12th streets.
Members of the media were given a sneak preview tour of the center on Tuesday.
Located across North 12th Street from the Al McGuire Center, the 47,000-square-foot building includes 5,400 square feet of research space, laboratories for conducting human performance research, locker rooms for the lacrosse and golf teams, and strength and conditioning spaces for the athletic department.
“This is a really exciting facility because it gives our student athletes, particularly in lacrosse and golf, a state of the art facility,” said Jeanne Hossenlopp, vice president for research and innovation at Marquette. “It will help us recruit the next generation of student athletes, but it also provides them an opportunity to participate in research and perhaps even be student researchers.”
Hossenlopp said the research conducted at the facility will focus on optimizing the performance of student athletes, along with examining how exercise can improve the lives of other populations.
“We anticipate research projects that will extend studies across the lifespan, from youth to older adults, for people of all abilities; we’re really interested in gearing up and doing more work in adaptive sports and athletics, so we’ll have a wide range of research studies going on,” Hossenlopp said.
Marquette broke ground on the long-planned project in March 2018. Initially, the university planned to build it on a 10-acre site in downtown Milwaukee, but later relocated it to the current site, which was formerly a parking lot on the campus.
Aurora Health Care pledged in January 2017 to contribute $40 million to the project, but in May 2018 the two organizations said they were ending their partnership on the project.
The building is the second facility to open as part of the university’s $600 million campus master plan. The university opened The Commons, a new $108 million residence hall on the northwest end of campus, in August 2018.
