MURFREESBORO, TN — Turner Construction Company recently celebrated the topping out of a $39.6-million classroom building under construction at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) that will house three of the most popular academic programs in its College of Behavioral and Health Sciences. The event marked crews reaching the highest point of the 99,100-square-foot building, a milestone at Turner and its partners achieved seven months after groundbreaking — despite a record rainfall of 11 inches in February.

“Working on an active college campus is a constant balancing act, but one that our experience at MTSU and other universities has prepared us for,” said John Gromos, Vice President and General Manager at Turner Nashville. “Throughout this project, we’ve put our focus on keeping students and staff safe, making as little impact on campus activities as possible and completing projects on time and on budget.”

The three-story building, scheduled for completion in June 2020, will house the departments of criminal justice, psychology and social work, and it will include faculty offices, classrooms and laboratory space.

MTSU President Sidney A. McPhee said student and faculty research will be enhanced by the new facility. For example, neuroscience programs for the study of electroencephalography, which is the recording of electrical activity in the brain, and eye tracking, which measures eye positions and eye movement, will benefit from the building’s laboratories. Another feature of the new building will be a command center in which students from all three disciplines will be trained to interact with different types of emergency management personnel, he said.

“We’ve been impressed by the work Turner has already done on this building,” McPhee said. “We are confident it will rise to the same standards as their previous projects on our campus.”

Turner’s work on campus includes the university’s $147-million, three-building Science Corridor of Innovation, which features as its centerpiece a 250,000-square-foot Science Building that houses the biology and chemistry departments and is used for teaching, faculty and student laboratory research, and collaborative learning. Turner completed the Science Building, the largest single facility appropriated by the state for a public university, in 2014. The company then oversaw the renovation of MTSU’s older science buildings, Wiser-Patton and Davis, completing the corridor project for the College of Basic and Applied Sciences in 2016.

Architect Bauer Askew Architecture and engineers I.C. Thomasson, PWP Structural Engineers, Hodgson Douglas, Barge Cauthen and Merck & Hill Consultants are working with Turner on the current project for the College of Behavioral and Health Sciences, which broke ground in September 2018.