The UC Regents were expected this week to approve the design for the new UC Davis Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility.

To be completed in 2004, the six-story, $95 million building will be located just north of Tupper Hall in the Health Sciences Complex on the campus’s west side.

It will feature state-of-the-art research laboratories, and house the new UC Davis Genome Center and other research and administrative units.

"This is the first major building to be added to the health-sciences district in many years and sets the tone for a number of other facilities to go up in the next decade," said campus architect Robert Strand.

In other genomics news, UC Davis today will host a group of French scientists visiting the U.S. to study the development of multidisciplinary centers in genomics. The group earlier visited Harvard and Stanford universities, the University of Washington and UC Berkeley.