A look inside George Mason’s $107M high-tech labs

In a third-floor lab at George Mason University‘s new $107 million Life Sciences and Engineering Building in Manassas, students will dissect and study the effects of decomposition on human remains. A few floors away, their peers may dangle from harnesses while wearing sensors to research gaits while others test fly an autonomous blimp in a two-story aviary.

Open to students since January, George Mason’s 132,000-square-foot interdisciplinary lab and research space was unveiled to the public in late March. Part of the university’s Science and Technology Campus, it brings together students from George Mason’s colleges of science, education and human development, engineering and computing, as well as visual and performing arts and offers classrooms, collaboration space and 30 labs for hands-on training in the sciences and technology.

Mary Ellen O’Toole, a former FBI profiler who directs George Mason’s forensic science program, says the new space is a vast improvement over what her program had at the university’s main Fairfax headquarters, where it shared an old, cramped chemistry lab. Now students have five labs for forensic research, as well as cadaver space and 3D-imaging cameras that can help map out crime scenes in minute detail.

“Forensics in 20 years is not going to be what forensics is today,” O’Toole says. “It’s going to be different. We’d like to think we’re preparing our students for that.”

George Mason’s newest space aims to push forward scientific research, and it also serves as an anchor for Prince William County‘s sprawling Innovation Park, which focuses on life sciences and technology and includes a growing town center, offering housing, retail and an entertainment district. In 2022, the county opened its Northern Virginia Bioscience Center in the park, offering space for expanding businesses and startups.

In December 2024, George Mason opened its $250 million, 345,000-square-foot Fuse tech hub at its Mason Square campus in Arlington County, which will focus on undergraduate and graduate education in technology and offer commercial space to industry partners.

George Mason President Gregory Washington notes the university’s growing status, including being named as a top 50 public university by U.S. News and World Report in recent years.

“We needed more labs on campus so that students can do more experimental learning, more hands-on,” Washington says. “This has been a godsend to be able to put all these labs here.”