Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2011 > March > 03 > Entry
Grand Opening of the Norman Hackerman Building
The opening of a science building does not sound, at first blush, like a prime social option. Unless it is the refined Norman Hackerman Building, built for the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Texas.
Consider the number of UT grandees attending the grand opening, timed to a still dusk on Tuesday: William Powers Jr., Peter Flawn, William Livingston, Bill Cunningham and Larry Faulkner. And those are just the presidents, past and present. Front and center was Dean Mary Ann Rankin, an educational leader of the first rank, wearing a dress designed in the college’s school of human ecology. She spoke forcefully to 100 or so guests, variously attired under the high Hackerman loggia.
Also mingling in the crowd of scientists and civic bigwigs were powerhouse donors and social connectors: John Paul and Eloise DeJoria, Ernest and Sarah Butler, Becky Beaver, Linda Ball, Evan Taniguchi, former Austin City Council Member Louise Epstein and two former Austin mayors: Lee Cooke and Bruce Todd.
Yet the magnified focus of the evening was the late Norman Hackerman, president of UT and Rice University, longtime advisor to the Welch Foundation, chemist, and, by every account available, a force of nature, as well as natural science. His daughter Katy Hackerman spoke for the family and handed out awards to donors, builders and others who helped finish his huge building, which will house, among other activities, research on “alternative energies, safer production of pharmaceuticals and plastics, tools for disease diagnosis, new therapies for infectious disease, neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s, and other afflictions such as autism, addiction and traumatic brain injury,” according to the college’s website.
Tour it if you get a chance. The vast, well-supplied labs are stupefying to the layman. And the scientists present confirmed that they will provide not only education but basic research essential to the city, state and country.
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