ASU launches Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory with audacious goal: Transforming the world for a better future

Lab will encompass new College of Global Futures, a major research institute, a solutions service and engagement initiatives

Building on a strong tradition of commitment to shaping a sustainable future for all humankind through innovation, ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory will encompass a new college with three unique schools, as well as a major research institute and a practice arm devoted to solutions, each significantly enhanced by and integrated with global partnerships.

“We have decided it’s in the collective interest of humankind to build something that’s on the scale of a national laboratory in the United States, but not devoted to weapons and other defensive strategies — devoted to creative strategies and positive global futures,” said ASU President Michael Crow.

Its creation represents the next quantum leap in the evolution of ASU as one of the world’s premier centers for studies of sustainability and the future of life on our planet and the systems supporting it, an evolution that started in 2004. The emergence of the Global Futures Laboratory is the outgrowth of a 16-year effort to systematically build these fields of endeavor as anchors of ASU’s discovery, learning, problem-solving and engagement mission — and at a scale unmatched by any other university or research setting. 

This includes construction of a headquarters for the laboratory, to be completed in December 2021, at a cost exceeding $200 million. The new Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building 7 on the Tempe campus will be a high-performance research facility to foster an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge generation and leading-edge research across more than a dozen intellectual focal areas. The building — the largest research building on the campus — will be a hub for more than 550 faculty and scholars distributed across all ASU campuses and representing many disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary areas dedicated to the future of our planet, as well as for more than 1,300 students in the College of Global Futures.

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