Northwestern officials offered more details Monday about their plan to turn a parking lot on the north side of Tech into a 54,000-square-foot research center for McCormick School of Engineering programs that combine biology and engineering.

The move “reflects the rapidly growing research enterprises at Northwestern,” Provost Daniel Linzer said.

The school has had little space to keep up with the its research ambition, Linzer and McCormick Dean Julio Ottino said. McCormick spent $97.08 million on research in 2007, an 24 increase in two years, said Kyle Delaney, an associate director of marketing at McCormick.

The university has yet to identify funding sources — how much will come from donors or if the university will get government grants — for the project, Linzer said.

“It’s always a mixture when you go after a big new project,” he said. He declined to offer an estimate on the facility’s cost, but the two-year construction project is due to start in June 2009.

“I think it’s a great idea,” said engineering senior Adrienne Smith of the project. She’s studying biomedical engineering and plans to go to medical school.

The move has “been percolating for a number of years,” Linzer said, but it originated from the need to renovate the Analytical Sciences Laboratory, where researchers study molecules.

Because a renovation would shut down the lab, Linzer said, the university decided to instead devote the first of the new building’s five floors to the Integrated Molecular Structure Education and Research Center. Linzer said the university wanted to make use of limited space.

Research that combines biology and medicine with traditional engineering gets significant funding and student interest, Ottino said when the university announced the plan in March.

“As disciplinary boundaries fall, traditional engineering departments have expanded into biological sciences,” Ottino said. All eight of McCormick’s departments include a biological component.

The expansion is driven in part by technological and medical needs, Ottino said Monday. In 2006, McCormick’s Center for Innovation in Global Health Technologies received a four-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to make diagnostic instruments for health care clinics in the developing world.

Smith wants to be a doctor or do medical research, but she has also thought of the Rehab Institute of Chicago, which specializes in technology to assist the disabled, such as prosthetics.

Smith said she took the same introductory courses as any other engineering student, but that her specific concentration applies the fundamentals to biology. While a civil engineer might apply fluid mechanics to studying a city’s water systems, a biomedical engineer would look at human blood vessels, she said.

As McCormick pushes for more interdisciplinary research, Ottino said that having more space will help the school recruit students and faculty. He said, it’s a “great way to showcase what’s going on in here.”