The new College of Pharmacy building located on East Huron Street opened after spring break on March 9, 2026. It’s unusual for a building to open in the middle of a semester. New buildings are usually opened at the start of a semester or during the summer. The College of Pharmacy felt it was important, however, that the 2026 graduating cohort have at least part of the semester in their new building. The original plan had been to open in January but construction was delayed. Despite this, the opening went smoothly and LSA Technology Services successfully assisted classes with the technology in their new locations.
Prior to opening the building, LSA Technology Services audio-visual technicians performed operational testing to make sure classroom technology was working as designed, ensuring faculty and students a delightful technology experience on day one. Two new audio-visual technicians were hired specifically to support this building, providing LSA’s standard of service of in-person assistance within ten minutes of contact. They continue to monitor rooms, perform room setups, and answer technology questions. If the technicians can’t resolve the issue, they escalate it to LSA Technology Services’ Engineering team. The Engineering team was responsible for the design, purchasing, integration, and installation of all of the AV equipment in the classrooms, classlabs, conference rooms, and community spaces. Additionally, the LSA Technology Services Instructional Computing team supports the classroom and conference room PCs. “It’s really a team effort to support,” says Jean Arnold, LSA Technology Services Assistant Director of Sight and Sound Operations.
LSA Technology Services supports the new College of Pharmacy building for several reasons. One reason is that we provided support to the College of Pharmacy classrooms in the North University Building before the move. Another is “LSA will likely have some classes in the new College of Pharmacy building. The College of Pharmacy will probably still have classes in CCCB, so it’s really important for students and faculty that the experience of technology is as common as possible,” says Monika Dressler, LSA Technology Services Director of Academic Technology Services. “We share a lot of spaces [with other schools]. They are teaching classes in our spaces and we teach classes in their spaces. The more seamless the experience for faculty and students, the better the experience for everyone.”
How did LSA start supporting the College of Pharmacy? Stephen McClatchey, the College of Pharmacy Director of IT, approached LSA leadership in 2022 to establish a partnership to support the College of Pharmacy's classrooms following the retirement of its small support staff. Knowing how well Pharmacy faculty liked the experience of using LSA-built and supported spaces around campus, Stephen said, “It just simply made sense to try and partner with LSA to provide that same level of experience and service.” Starting then, a partnership was born, and LSA has supported the College of Pharmacy classrooms ever since, and now, with the new building, classrooms, and conference rooms. When planning started for our new building, Stephen said, “I did not even think twice about another contractor and immediately recommended LSA for our project, and the rest is history.”
LSA Technology Services staff have been involved in the preparations for the new building for some time. We first started conversations with the College of Pharmacy about renovations in 2018. Following construction postponement during the pandemic, the Provost’s Office reopened the project. This entailed two years of design and two years of construction, which is typical of other construction projects that LSA Technology Services has been involved in. There were a number of construction delays as the industry was still recovering from COVID with tariffs impacting shipments and construction labor shortages. All of this affected the project, but with steady work, the plan was seen to completion.
To design classrooms and class labs that meet the needs of instruction for the College of Pharmacy, there were several meetings with the owners and faculty of the spaces regarding what they need when they teach. That translated to the classroom designs and installed technology. Before the College of Pharmacy approved final designs, Dressler and Karl Aldag, Manager of AV Engineering and Design, had frequent meetings with architects regarding classroom standards and AV technologies. The architects transferred all of that into the plans. LSA Technology Services reviewed multiple plans at various stages of completion. Each time, they identified problems and reported them to Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) and the architects before construction began. “The technology changes, infrastructure doesn’t,” explained Aldag. “AEC makes sure they have a solid structure with pipes so they don’t need open heart surgery to change cables.”
Now, there are 28 spaces that LSA Technology Services supports in the new College of Pharmacy building. This includes five classrooms, one classlab, and a range of conference rooms, huddle rooms, and digital signage. One highlight is two 98” monitors on top of each other with a picture of all the graduating classes displayed. Careful consideration is taken into each space. “There are a lot of environmental questions we go through that people may not correlate with technology, but steer our choices of our technology,” says Aldag. “Is there an AV rack? Does that have to be housed in technical furniture? We talk about usage and scope. Then that leads to more technical questions. Things that other people don’t care about, like whether you’re in a carpeted room or tiled room, which could lead to audio feedback and Zoom feedback that become support tickets. The more unique the room the more challenges there are.”
One of the challenges was that the College of Pharmacy knew it needed spaces to bring the entire college together, however, expanding the size of the footprint just wasn’t possible. This led to integrating a large event space into the design and support of three team-based learning classrooms divided by moveable skywalls that can be raised or lowered by the College of Pharmacy staff. LSA Technology Services had to program the AV systems for the classrooms and the student stations, so that the classrooms could be combined and separated with the skywalls as needed. There are four viable configurations of the rooms total: one large room, three separate rooms, and two combinations of grouping two rooms together. The LSA Technology Services engineers programmed the touch panel for the audio and video so all of the technology could separate or combine depending on the room’s configuration. When the walls are down, the audio and video would be contained in that one room.
There is great value for both our staff and LSA at large in these complex setups. “When we take on these complicated new projects, we are developing staff on equipment and skill sets that they can’t get anywhere else. We can apply these to our spaces,” says Aldag. “There’s probably not a group of classrooms more complex than this in North America.”
The transition is complete at this point, but there will always be ongoing changes. LSA Technology Services will continue to address new classroom technology and needed features along the way.
