Inside UW-Madison’s new Chemistry Tower: modern labs, study spaces and a ‘library of the future’

Goodbye, crowded chemistry labs. So long to space crunches so severe that some 20% of UW-Madison students took introductory organic chemistry at a different university.

UW-Madison opened its gleaming nine-story Chemistry Tower to students this semester after months of construction delays. The new building at 1101 University Ave. will ease enrollment bottlenecks that have plagued the department for decades.

Graduate Student Creates Free Library of 3D Chemistry Teaching Tools

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced UW–Madison’s in-person instruction online in 2020, undergraduate and graduate research students encountered a massive obstacle in their learning: How would they perform their research if they were unable to go into their labs? Michael Aristov, a 5th-year graduate student in the Berry lab in the Department of Chemistry, pivoted to another one of his interests when the pandemic impeded his research. He decided to build augmented reality models to aid chemistry education.