Irvine Hall

Irvine Hall houses two large lecture halls for the Clinical Presentation Continuum curriculum and the small group rooms for the Patient Centered Continuum curriculum. It also contains the Ohio Musculoskeletal Neurological Institute, Tropical Disease Institute, biomedical research labs, and the college’s communication office. It is also home to The Bricks, a space used for receptions and other college social gatherings.

Lecture Halls

The building’s two lecture halls let students and faculty take advantage of the very latest in educational technology. The resources include a student response system, built-in microphones on the desks, and plenty of outlets for laptops and other devices. All lectures that take place in the halls, which seat 168 and 120 students, are digitally recorded and available to students for download as MP3s. The larger of the two rooms has videoconferencing capabilities.

The rooms, which are the site of talks such as those by visiting speakers, are also the location for lectures to students in the Clinical Presentation Continuum―one of two curricular tracks offered at the Heritage College that offers a more structured, faculty-directed learning environment consisting of week-long modules based on clinical presentations of patient symptoms.

Small Group Meeting Rooms

Irvine houses several small group meeting rooms that are available to students in our Patient Centered Continuum, a curriculum that lets students set their own learning objectives based on patient-centered case studies designed by faculty.

Ohio Musculoskeletal Neurological Institute (OMNI)

OMNI is housed here at the Heritage College, but is an interdisciplinary institute with faculty affiliates spanning eight departments in four colleges—the Heritage College, Health Sciences and Professions, Engineering, and Arts and Sciences. The institute supports research aimed at improving the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disorders of the musculoskeletal and neurological systems.

The 8,300-square-foot Irvine Hall facility provides an optimal setting for conducting controlled studies by both basic and clinical investigators. OMNI has the infrastructure necessary for investigators conducting research with human subjects, including a patient reception area, three patient examination rooms, an overnight stay suite, a metabolic kitchen, an exercise physiology laboratory, a clinical trials management office, and a bioanalytics laboratory suite.

The facility is equipped with a transcranial magnetic stimulation unit, a noninvasive technology used to research the brain’s physiology; ultrasonography; and state-of-the-art electrophysiology instrumentation, such as numerous electrical stimulators and the capability to take electromyographic and microneurographic recordings for studying muscles and nerves, respectively. Additionally, OMNI has the facilities necessary to obtain and analyze human skin and skeletal muscle biopsies. Across campus, OMNI investigators make use of technologies such as motion-capture systems; mechanical response tissue analysis, used to predict bone strength; magnetic resonance imaging, also known as MRI; computer modeling and virtual reality programming, among others.

A new Athens-based OMNI facility is expected to open in 2018 as part of the 2011 gift from the Osteopathic Heritage Foundations.

Tropical Disease Institute

The Heritage College’s Tropical Disease Institute (TDI) pursues strategies to eliminate or minimize the effects of infectious diseases. TDI faculty work in several labs across Ohio University’s Athens campus, but the institute is headquartered in Irvine Hall, where scientists conduct molecular biology and immunological research in three offices and four standard bench research labs. These spaces include three biosafety level two laboratories, where research is carried out with several infectious agents, including Trypanosoma cruzi, T. rangeli, Leishmania spp and Shigella dysenteriae. From the Irvine Hall location, TDI’s director oversees research efforts at a facility in Ecuador, where most of the institute’s international activities take place under the title Center for Infectious Disease Research.

The Ecuador facility is located at Catholic University’s main campus in Quito and is jointly administered by Catholic University, Ohio University and TDI. The building houses a staff of 20, including four researchers, eight technicians, a data manager, graduate students, an administrative associate and a projects manager. The space includes offices, Biosafety Level 1 and 2 labs stocked with incubators, microscopes and other technologies needed for molecular research; a deep freezer room; a small animal facility and an insectary that houses approximately 7,000 live triatomine bugs, known as “kissing bugs,” which are known vectors of infectious disease.

Research in this area continues to grow, and construction is under way on a new 90,000-square-foot regional research and training facility at Catholic University to house TDI’s Ecuador-based initiatives. Also jointly administered by Catholic University, Ohio University and TDI, the facility will provide space for 16 researchers and their staff. It will include a bioinformatics suite, small animal facilities, an insectary, tissue culture rooms, freezer and heavy equipment rooms, a dark room, a cold room, conference areas, and a clinical research unit with two examination spaces. It is expected to open in 2013.