Plans for a new science and molecular engineering building on the corner of East 56th Street and S. Ellis Avenue have been scaled down due to the University’s budget deficit and uncertainty surrounding federal funding.
On November 10, the University announced that the IonQ, a quantum startup, would receive naming rights to the building after agreeing to partner with UChicago. Details regarding the financial terms and intellectual property implications of the agreement have not been disclosed at this time.
The announcement follows an August 2025 statement from Office of the Provost disclosing that the building will be significantly reduced in scale due to “given limited capital funds and great uncertainty about future infrastructure support.”
Dean of Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) Nadya Mason said the plans will no longer cover the University’s needs as far into the future as before: “What we were trying to do originally is really account for all of our needs, needs 20 years into the future,” she said. “And so that meant that we were looking at space even beyond what we imagined that we needed, space that we just thought we wanted to grow into.”
Mason told the Maroon the building is now expected to meet the specific growth needs of PME for the next 10 years or so.
“We’re at a stage right now where we have to be very, very careful fiscally while still meeting the core needs of our research and our students. And that’s what we’re trying to do with this new design of the building,” Mason said.
The new building, which is specifically designed for quantum collaboration, has been in planning for over five years.
Construction on the site was initially scheduled to start in 2024 and finish in the fall of 2028, according to initial announcements. Recent changes have delayed the start of construction and pushed the expected opening date to 2029.
The IonQ Center for Engineering and Science is currently slated to house UChicago PME, as well as the Chicago Quantum Exchange, a partnership with the Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and other institutions.
Current office and lab spaces for the PME are spread out over 15 different on-campus and four off-campus buildings. These facilities are also shared with other departments in the Physical and Biological Sciences Divisions.
Mason said that “the [current] building is fantastic, but a lot of the staff, administrative staff are housed in mobile buildings we call MeMo” [“Molecular Engineering Modular Offices,” located behind the Eckhart Research Center], due to the lack of space. “So the space is great, but we need more of it and we need to consolidate a bit as well.”
Editor’s note: All interviews were conducted before the announcement of the IonQ partnership on November 10. A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to the colloquial name of the modular office as “Nemo.”
