The university announces a long-anticipated campus big build

The $200m project, “blurs typical boundaries between education and research,” in STEMM (as in STEM plus medicine). Work starts this year with opening in 2023.

This will be good news for those staff on the suburban Callaghan campus who have felt abandoned by the university’s big, and continuing developments in Newcastle city.

Under previous VC Caroline McMillen, the university built the flash $95m NeW teaching-building in the CBD. Work gathers pace at the nearby Honeysuckle site, to house an innovation precinct, plus staff and facilities for the creative industries faculty.

But Callaghan will look dowdy and dated no longer – there are said to be two more projects there to come.

“Longer term we have ambitions to accommodate leading STEM companies in or new campus precinct and to embed work-integrated learning into every undergraduate degree,” Vice Chancellor Alex Zelinsky says