A dedication ceremony for Clark Hall, the new home for biomedical engineering on the Homewood campus, will take place Friday, Oct. 12, in front of the building on Garland Field. The event, beginning at 10:30 a.m., is open to all faculty, staff and students.

The ceremony will celebrate the completion of the three-story red brick structure that provides space for greatly expanded biomedical engineering education and research on the Homewood campus. The exterior of Clark Hall features a classical design reminiscent of the campus's earliest Georgian-style buildings. Its interior includes high-tech labs and classrooms, along with modern offices and meeting rooms.

Designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects of New York, Clark Hall is detailed with multiple chimneys and copper-sheathed dormers reminiscent of those on early campus buildings.

Homewood's first new building since 1990 devoted solely to research and education, Clark Hall also will serve as the cornerstone of a new quadrangle at the southern end of the campus.

Friday's dedication ceremony will begin with a welcome and opening remarks from William R. Brody, the university's president. He will be followed by Ilene Busch-Vishniac, dean of the Whiting School of Engineering.

Other speakers, representing faculty who occupy the new building, will include Murray Sachs, director of the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Institute, and Raimond Winslow, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Center for Computational Medicine and Biology. Tara Johns, an undergraduate majoring in biomedical engineering, will present remarks as well.

G. Burtt Holmes, chairman of the Whitaker Foundation, will represent his organization, which provided a $17 million Leadership Award to support construction costs and the hiring of new faculty members based at Clark Hall.

Also slated to speak is A. James Clark, chairman and chief executive officer of Clark Enterprises and a university trustee emeritus. Clark, whose construction company served as general contractor, donated $10 million toward construction of the building, which was named in his honor.

Other funding for Clark Hall included a $3 million capital grant from the state of Maryland.

The dedication ceremony will be followed by a reception and tours of Clark Hall.

The building, designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects of New York, provides 55,000 gross square feet of space. Before it opened this semester, most research within Hopkins' highly regarded biomedical engineering program was based at the School of Medicine on the JHMI campus. Clark Hall is allowing the program to develop a strong presence on the Homewood campus as well and to establish more collaborations with Homewood-based researchers.

Biomedical engineering research at both campuses, along with related work by faculty members in other engineering disciplines, will take place under the auspices of the new Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Institute.

The first faculty members to move into Clark Hall have begun setting up labs to conduct research in tissue engineering and for the creation of detailed computer models of human organs.

For students, one of the highlights of the new building is the physiological foundations laboratory, which is used for a course that all biomedical engineering majors take during their junior year. The new lab, equipped with 20 computer workstations, has room to teach 40 students at one time.