The physiology department at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center is recognized as one of the best in the country, but its facilities are among the worst.

The department’s faculty members have been conducting their research in two buildings as its main facility gets renovated.

UTHSC is using $11.5 million in state funds to renovate the top two floors of the Nash Building and Nash Annex, the physiology department’s home.

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The build-out of these two floors in the Nash Building represents one of the middle phases of an ambitious overhaul of facilities, and leadership believes it will help recruit top students and faculty.

“This is a project I’ve been working on probably for the better part of 15 years,” Executive Vice Chancellor and COO Kennard Brown said. “I actually vacated the Nash Building long before we had the money to do it.”

The department of physiology, which the Association of Chairs of Departments of Physiology has ranked in the top 10 nationally for years, has been working in the Coleman and Translational Science Research buildings. The Coleman Building is dated, but the latter was completed in 2014.

The Nash project is being designed by the Crump Firm Inc., based in Memphis, according to documents from the University of Tennessee System and the Office of the State Architect. Brown estimates labs will start moving back to Nash from the Coleman and Translational Science Research facilities by the end of 2023.

The Nash Building project builds on a renovation of multiple buildings at the university’s Historic Quadrangle, the centerpiece of campus.

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The state gave UTHSC $70 million to renovate the quadrangle and the four buildings along it, including a new home for the College of Nursing. That project also funded about 70,000 square feet of lab space in the Nash Building and Nash Annex, according to UTHSC spokeswoman Peggy Reisser.

“Having these facilities is critical for us,” Brown said.

Brown said wet labs are “where true, true experiments are being done,” as opposed to dry labs, where the work is more computational.

Next, Brown says he wants to renovate the Coleman Building and build a new home for the College of Medicine.

Brown said moving a lab from one building to another is not as simple as packing materials into a U-Haul. Faculty would often rather stay in a bad lab than have to deal with the move to a better one.

“In your professional career, if you have to go through one of those moves, it’s more than enough,” he said. “They go kicking and screaming.”

Brown noted that Tennesseans’ health outcomes are far below average, and so a locally oriented health science center plays a big role in the research that leads to breakthroughs in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases and more.

According to a 2018 annual report by America’s Health Rankings, from the United Health Foundation, Tennessee ranked 42nd in overall health. Among the state’s challenges were high rates of cigarette smoking, mental illness and people with multiple chronic conditions.

“It’s critically important, from a public health standpoint, for the state to make that investment,” Brown said. “(It’s) all predicated on what kind of infrastructure we have.”

He said UTHSC’s mission is different from that of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine or Meharry Medical College, which recruit nationally and whose graduates often seek elite jobs in other states.

“We’re interested in recruiting Tennessee kids to stay in Tennessee,” he said. “They consider themselves national treasures. We consider ourselves a Tennessee treasure.”