A fund-raising campaign is underway at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in northwest Iowa to expand the role of the lab in scientific research and to make the lab more accessible to the Iowa Great Lakes community.

An important part of the lab’s publicity campaign is to make the laboratory a year-round facility. The lab currently operates for 10 weeks out of every year during the summer.

The first major fund-raising effort is for the building of a water quality laboratory at the field station. A fund-raising banquet was held at the lab on Friday, June 14, to publicize the new facility and get financial support. The presidents, or representatives, from all three Regents universities spoke their praise for further development of the Iowa Lakeside Lab.

“We see the involvement [of Iowa State] in the Lakeside Lab as helping us fulfill our broader mission as a university,” said Martin Jischke, president of Iowa State University. “Improving teaching and providing new hands-on opportunities for students to learn, expanding our research programs, particularly related to the natural sciences, ecology and water quality and also strengthening our outreach efforts as a land grant university.”

The planned facility will have a classroom for starting a year-round environmental education program and will have laboratories for research on water quality of the Iowa Great Lakes and other local watersheds.

The facility will be named for Andrea and Norman Waitt, who donated $300,000 of the more than $700,000 needed to build the facility. Norman Waitt is a co-founder of Gateway 2000, a computer company. The Waitts will give an additional $200,000 for future upkeep of the facility once it is built.

“This facility will enable us to make a quantum leap in terms of what we can do both during the [summer] and throughout the rest of the year,” said ISU professor Dr. Arnold van der Valk, director of the Iowa Lakeside Lab. “It will make us a much more important facility both to the Regents and even more importantly to this community here.”

Another change that will be made at the lab is a restructuring of the graduate research program, van der Valk said. In the past, research at the lab has been “whatever the people who came wanted to do.” In the future, the lab’s research program will have specific objectives.

“The main objective will be to study, and hopefully enhance, the water quality of the Iowa Great Lakes,” he said.

For more information about the Iowa Lakeside Lab, contact the Iowa Lakeside Lab office at Iowa State, (515) 294-2488, or send e-mail to [email protected].