What’s New at Rutgers in Fall 2025
Students, faculty, staff and alumni returned to campus this year to find new or upgraded facilities, resources and amenities, including the Cooper Street Gateway project at Rutgers-Camden, the One-Stop Student Center in Conklin Hall at Rutgers-Newark, the Jack & Sheryl Morris Cancer Center at Rutgers Health, continued construction on the new home of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in the New Jersey Health + Life Science Exchange (HELIX) in downtown New Brunswick, as well as teaching lab renovations and a helium recovery lab at Rutgers-New Brunswick.
Here are some of the newly completed and currently upgraded buildings and facilities across Rutgers this fall:
Rutgers-Camden
Cooper Street Gateway
The Cooper Street Gateway project, one of most anticipated and exciting projects at Rutgers University-Camden. The $60 million investment will unite thirteen lots and eleven contributing structures along Cooper Street and Lawrence Street into a cohesive building through the construction of a new three-story structure, with an event plaza in the rear yards of the existing buildings. By limiting construction primarily behind the existing buildings, the project retains the historic streetscapes. The new addition will consolidate faculty spaces currently spread across five campus buildings.
The design will restore existing historic urban fabric while simultaneously providing forward‐thinking spaces for learning and community gathering. This facility will become a vital link between the campus and the Camden community.
Rutgers-Newark
One-Stop Student Services Center
Rutgers-Newark’s new One-Stop Student Services Center opened in a renovated and expanded Conklin Hall. The center, which replaces the previous offices, located on two floors in Blumenthal Hall, includes a call center, and offices for cashiering, financial aid, ID services, registrar, and student accounting. It’s designed so visitors can go seamlessly from one enrollment services area to another, with student guides directing them. There are also “huddle rooms,” where staff from different offices can convene to work with students and families on overlapping issues.
Rutgers Health
The Jack & Sheryl Morris Cancer Center
RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers Cancer Institute, the state’s only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, recently unveiled New Jersey’s first and only freestanding, fully comprehensive cancer hospital. The Jack & Sheryl Morris Cancer Center in New Brunswick is one of only 13 freestanding cancer hospitals in the United States.
The 12-story, 520,000-square-foot facility, connected by a skybridge to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and Rutgers Cancer Institute, brings together inpatient and outpatient cancer services coupled with cutting-edge research laboratories all under one roof and delivered in an environment focused on compassionate, patient-centered care. Designed with the patient at the center, the Morris Cancer Center creates an exceptional patient experience to enhance healing and recovery.
New Jersey Health + Life Science Exchange (HELIX)
In addition to Rutgers Health’s Translational Research and the future Rutgers School of Medicine, H-1 @ The HELIX, expected to open in April 2026, will be home to the New Jersey Innovation Hub which will be made up of pre-built and furnished labs/office space alongside additional key partners such as RWJBarnabas Health, Hackensack Meridian Health, New Jersey Economic Development Authority, Middlesex County and others.
Ranging in size from 3,500 to 9,500 square feet, each suite offers a move-in-ready, state-of-the-art environment equipped with mobile casework, biosafety cabinets or chemical fume hoods, central compressed air, vacuum and CO₂ services, and modern office furnishings. Tenants will benefit from the unique balance of dedicated private space and access to a full ecosystem of shared services and amenities aimed at streamlining operations and catalyzing innovation.
On the ground floor, H-1 will offer a market hall with a variety of food options, a coffee bar, and an upscale restaurant. The maker space will also be found as part of the ground floor public space – a shared collaborative environment that will feature equipment such as 3D printers and scanners, digital cameras, traditional wood and metal shop equipment, and sewing machines in an environment that combines high- and low-tech fabrication. The maker space will provide students, faculty, researchers, and entrepreneurs with the tools and resources to build and prototype their next great idea.
New Clinical Skills Center Opens for New Jersey Medical School Students
Rutgers New Jersey Medical School (NJMS) in partnership with University Hospital (UH) has officially opened its new Clinical Skills Center (CSC), a cutting-edge educational facility designed to enhance student learning and assessment. This partnership underscores a crucial milestone between NJMS and the hospital, reinforcing the shared mission to enhance educational benchmarks and provide quality care to patients.
Building on the shared mission, the center provides a supportive and judgment free setting – allowing medical students to confidently build their clinical skills.
Rutgers-New Brunswick
Serin Physics Lab 164 Helium Recovery Equipment
This project required the renovation of Room 161 to install Cryomech Helium Recovery equipment to serve Lab 164. The room was originally used for the central vacuum pumps for the lab. A new electric panel was installed and new chilled water piping was installed for cooling. The chilled water piping was connected to a process chiller previously installed under the Serin Lab 162 project.
The new Cyromech equipment will recover helium which was previously lost to the atmosphere as part of the research process. Since helium is a finite resource, it’s imperative the gas be recovered and recycled so it can be used over again.
Science Lab Renovations
In addition to a complete renovation of an existing lab for the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, where all the existing casework, fume hoods and other hardware were removed and replaced with new devices, new air handling unit, lab exhaust fan, controls and more were installed to create a new teaching lab.
