Shepherd Engineering Services (SES), headquartered in York, UK, has been appointed by Morgan Sindall and the University of Cambridge to deliver mechanical and electrical services as part of a £40m chemical engineering and biotechnology facility (CEB).
The contract, which is said to be worth about £12m, includes: high efficiency specialist ventilation systems, laboratory gases, process cooling, steam, RO water, a building and energy management system, photovoltaics, security and lighting services.
The CEB centre build, designed by architect BDP, follows the merger of the university’s Department of Chemical Engineering and the Institute of Biotechnology, and will bring its teaching and research departments under one roof on the site to the west of Cambridge. The new building will become the focus for the university’s activities in sensors and diagnostics research as well as reaction engineering.
The engineering services work for the facility, which will house biotech labs, cleanrooms, optics and imaging labs, a magnetic resonance research centre, materials and processes labs and an undergraduate teaching laboratory, begins this month, with project completion scheduled for summer 2015.
This contract follows a number of other project wins across the science and research sectors for SES, including work on a new research laboratory for the Pirbright Institute centre of excellence for research into viral diseases of livestock in Surrey, which was completed earlier this year.
SES’s London & South East Regional Director, Tim Cunningham, said: 'The Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology represents an exciting opportunity to create a leading research facility, the first of its kind, which will enable the University of Cambridge to bring together top scientific and entrepreneurial minds in a vibrant, creative environment.
'Our strategy for delivering the most stringent standards for the client, which incorporates the use of our off-site PRISM pre-fabrication factory, fully recognises the challenges of working on a campus style environment to ensure the safety of students and the site’s surroundings.'
As part of its ongoing commitment to engaging the local community and supporting the local economy on all of its sites in the UK, SES will be providing a number of local apprenticeships in Cambridge through the Training and Apprenticeships in Construction (TrAC) initiative.