WSU lab to relocate Spokane facilities

Washington State University’s Applied Sciences Laboratory will lease about 12,000 square feet later this year in the Sirti Technology Center, officials from both groups said.

While final terms of the lease are not complete, the plan will be for the ASL to take most of the second floor of the technology center building, on the south edge of the Riverpoint campus on the east side of downtown Spokane.

The applied sciences lab now has four research scientists and three post-doctoral researchers engaged in contracts related to industry and government projects. One of those is directed toward improved performance in meter devices developed by Spokane-based Itron Corp.

Ken Spitzer, a retired WSU administrator and acting business manager for the lab, said the goal was to hire eight more research scientists within the next year.

After being launched in 2004, the lab moved into space in the WSU Health Sciences Building on the Riverpoint campus, as well as lab space and offices inside the Sirti main building, said Spitzer.

In order to grow, the lab needed to find enough space in one building to consolidate its work, he added.

“We’ve been hung up on the lack of space issue” for more than a year, he said.

An extension of the Pullman-based WSU Institute for Shock Physics, the ASL is under the direction of Professor Yogi Gupta. The ASL has three main areas of focus: advanced materials, optics, and computational modeling.

The second floor being taken by the lab previously was used by Signature Genomic Laboratories. That biotech and diagnostics company recently moved to a new building in north Spokane.