The Milan campus
The Bicocca campus is located in the Milanese district of the same name, which was once home to large industrial companies such as Pirelli and Breda. The new university became part of a large-scale redevelopment project launched around 1986 and coordinated by the architect Vittorio Gregotti. The 21 buildings occupied by the university are all located in the Bicocca district, with the exception of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, which is located next to the San Gerardo university hospital in Monza.
At the Bicocca Hub, redevelopment and expansion work was completed on Building U9, which is home to laboratories used for specific inter-departmental research activities as well as the university’s Multimedia Production Centre and an inter-faculty teaching sector.
Building U14 – located in the former Breda complex – was finalised, with a total surface area of 4500 square metres, and is home to the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication. In front of this building, the university acquired a similar structure, together with some attached industrial warehouses, which need to be restructured in order to be used for university business as well as spin-off initiatives and start-ups, particularly those associated with biotechnology and pharmaceuticals companies who wish to open premises in the Bicocca area.
The Monza campus
The original plan for the Monza campus was to create a site for research and teaching activities for the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery with close links to the San Gerardo Hospital, which is a partner of the university. In order to accommodate significant increases in scientific and teaching activities, due in part to the creation of new technical/health degree courses, a new teaching building named Building U18 was constructed near to the Faculty of Medicine headquarters. Thanks to an agreement with the San Gerardo Hospital, the University of Milano-Bicocca is able to use a section of a building named Villa Serena, which is located on the hospital site, for its scientific activities.
As part of its collaboration with the hospital, the university used funding from the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research and the Region of Lombardy to build the Bio-imaging Centre, one of the university’s most important research initiatives in the field of health. The center is used for the study of new diagnostic methods in the oncological, neurological, and cardiovascular sectors. It has undertaken 3500 highly complex diagnostic tests in its two years of operation. The initiative also includes the Pet-TC pavilion, which will be joined by a bunker home to a cyclotron for the production of radiopharmaceuticals by 2009.
In order to guarantee effective management of the center and its associated research activities, and to promote, organize and manage highly technological biomedical facilities – including on behalf of other hospitals – the university created the TECNOMED foundation.
In order to facilitate the process of technology transfer through collaboration with companies in the sector, the Region of Lombardy – which is keen to promote research in molecular biology, stem cells, and nano-technology – contributed 48% of the funding necessary to build a new 10,600 square meter building in the Municipality of Vedano al Lambro, 68% of which will be used for laboratories.
The various initiatives supported by the Faculty of Medicine would benefit significantly from the availability of accommodation services for students and Italian and foreign researchers in the local area. To this end, the Municipal Administration of Monza made itself available to promote the construction of residences for students and researchers and to consider expanding existing structures for teaching and research in new sectors, particularly Economic Sciences, in order to add this to the already-active Organisational Sciences course.
