Brick by brick, Nursing and Pharmacy Education Building progresses toward January 2027 opening
Written By: Rebecca Hoffa, rhoffa@purdue.edu
As steel beams rise from the ground and the building’s structure takes shape, the Nursing and Pharmacy Education Building moves closer and closer to welcoming students through its doors for the spring 2027 semester. Currently scattered throughout buildings across campus, nursing and pharmacy students and faculty will find a home in the new four-story building located at the corner of Mitch Daniels Boulevard and Russell Street.
With construction well underway, faculty, staff, students and alumni of the Purdue University School of Nursing eagerly watch as the building comes to life.
“One of our priorities is to make sure students feel like it is their home on campus,” said Libby Richards, interim head of the School of Nursing, who noted furniture selection was recently completed. “We were intentional in choosing soft, comfortable seating with readily available power outlets, creating a space where our students will want to stay, study and collaborate. We want this space to become their academic home.”
As a cornerstone of the nursing program, simulation technology will continue to increase in prominence through the new building.
“We are going to have a more advanced simulation management system,” Richards said. “It is an audiovisual system with expanded capabilities that will allow us to annotate and assess student videos. In addition to incorporating this new system into our simulation center, we are also adding it to our skills and assessment labs, which we currently don’t have. Our goal is to streamline our student assessments while providing really strong feedback to our students. This is a significant investment that we are making for the new building.”
The building will also feature a space dedicated to learning with virtual reality and augmented reality, which will further enhance students’ education and simulation opportunities.
“That will allow us to continue to give students experience in real-world health care settings, especially with scenarios that they may not encounter frequently as a student, so we can give them a safe space to experience that,” Richards said.
Richards explained none of this would be possible without the generous contributions of donors who allow for these technologies, experiences and spaces to be available to students.
“Without our donors, we wouldn’t have a building, and we wouldn’t have the necessary specialized equipment that we need to teach our students at the highest-quality level,” Richards said. “Simulation is truly one of the gold standards of nursing education, and that comes at a cost. Simulators that are able to mimic a variety of complex patients are especially costly. Donors giving in a manner that allows us to purchase the necessary equipment is truly what’s going to make a difference in the types of educational experiences we can give our students.
“One of the great things about nursing donors is they often give because they’ve been touched by nurses in their lives, and nurses at some point touch everybody’s lives. Many times, our donors are giving back because of those experiences.”
For United States Air Force Lt. Col. Alex Parker, a 2004 nursing alumna, the most exciting part of being a nursing donor and contributing toward the building and its technology is the impact it will have for the students.
“Now that I’ve been a nurse for so long and have had a successful career, it’s a way to give back to the students who are going through the program now,” Parker said. “I’m currently at a schoolhouse for the military, and I see the next generation of medics come through every single day, and I know the next generation of nurses are coming through Purdue’s doors every single day as well. It’s important to me that they get the best training they can get — the most high-fidelity manikins, the most realistic scenarios — because that’s what’s really going to help you when push comes to shove down the road. Some of our best scenarios in the military are the ones where you’re outside and you’re really practicing what a combat situation is going to look like and how your reactions are going to be.”
Richards noted the Nursing and Pharmacy Education Building will also enhance the collaborations among the College of Health and Human Sciences’ nursing faculty, staff and students with the College of Pharmacy, with interspersed classroom, offices and collaboration spaces.
“The College of Pharmacy has been great to work with during this whole process,” Richards said. “We’ve been very mindful that one of our key goals is to increase collaborative opportunities — not just in educating our students, but also in research and interprofessional education. We have been deliberate in designing our spaces to ensure there is space for multiple disciplines to be educated together, that our research space is shared and that our faculty will have the opportunities to comingle.”
As four new health care systems move into West Lafayette, opportunities will continue to expand for Purdue nurses.
“When we move into the new building, we anticipate increasing our enrollment in our undergraduate and graduate programs so we can help meet the workforce needs of this area, Indiana and beyond,” Richards said. “In addition, we hope that the new health care systems will provide additional opportunities for our students to engage in cutting-edge clinical experiences.”
For Parker, the enhanced simulation technology is particularly exciting for the opportunities it provides students to learn in a safe environment where they can make mistakes.
“The sim center where the students are really getting their first hands-on practice with skills will be really awesome,” Parker said. “That’s really exciting to me.”
Faculty and staff will begin moving into the building in fall 2026, with a spring 2027 grand opening for classes and collaboration.
We talk about what’s new with the building all the time,” Richards said. “I look at the webcams to see the progress. We’re definitely excited knowing that moving in is really just over a year out, which could seem like a long way, but considering how far we’ve come, seems like it’s going to be here quickly, especially with students being in there in January 2027.”
Help the School of Nursing continue to reach the highest level of learning by contributing to the Nursing and Pharmacy Education Building.
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