Phase one of the $222 million, 350,000-square-foot biomedical campus began in May of last year and is expected to be fully operational by the summer of 2027.
The project will combine WSU’s College of Health Professions programs, the health care program at WSU Tech and the Wichita campuses of the KU School of Medicine and the KU School of Pharmacy. The campus aims to strengthen collaboration and professional health care learning.
“The first thing would be to have a more collaborative, interactive teaching and learning environment for Health Sciences,” said Sheree Utash, president of WSU Tech and vice president of Workforce Development at WSU. “That kind of looks like interactive, collaborative, collegial types of learning opportunities in the simulation hospital, and in its purest form, if you think about what it takes to run the interaction, to run an actual center. Like what you would have in the workplace, it’s like emulating that.”
Phase one started on May 8, 2024, and has expanded since construction began, including a $2.5 million donation from Blue Cross and Blue Shield and a $1 million grant that will support the Doctor of Audiology and Master of Arts. The $1 million grant will also support Wichita State’s Evelyn Hendren Cassat Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic, which will move to the biomedical campus from WSU’s Eugene M. Hughes Metropolitan Complex during phase one.
Stacy Christie, the project’s director of special projects for facilities planning, started in early 2024 to oversee the construction and collaboration between the two universities.
“Before I started working on this project, I worked as a healthcare architect,” she said. “I did a lot of rural hospitals. And just the need of doctors and medical professionals in Kansas, in our city, but especially in our state — we need more health care workers, and so to try to grow that here in Wichita, I make a difference in our whole state.”
The biomedical campus will have nine floors. WSU students will use primarily the first four, while KU students will mainly occupy floors six through eight. The fifth floor will be a joint space for medical simulations between the two universities. The ninth floor will be mechanical storage.
Christie said the construction team has not had major problems since the project began, but the weather in the last year has been a challenge that they’ve had to navigate. Construction crews have used 32 of the 44 weather days allotted due to rain and snow, but Christie said they are still on track to finish on schedule.
“But they (the contractor) still feel … they’re not going to tell me quite yet that they’re off target, but we still have plenty of time to try to hit that goal,” Christie said. “There’s issues that we’re working through, but that’s how it is on construction projects. There’s a lot of moving pieces.”
Christie said they originally had problems with the budget, but the collaborators have since come together to solve this issue.
“We came in a little over budget when we bid the project, but not much,” Christie said. “And then we’ve been able to cut some out, and that felt like a win.”
The construction of the campus is set to be completed by the end of 2026. Furniture and equipment will be installed by the beginning of 2027, with classes scheduled to begin in the summer of 2027. A livestream of the construction can be viewed here.
