Designing for Uncertainty: How Lab Facilities Can Stay Resilient Amid Shifting Priorities
2025 Lab Design Conference keynote speaker: Jim Blount, principal and life sciences market sector leader at Ellenzweig
The landscape of laboratory planning and design is undergoing a seismic shift. With rising construction costs, volatile supply chains, and major disruptions in federal research funding, institutions across the US are grappling with how to move forward—often with fewer resources and mounting uncertainty. In his keynote at the 2025 Lab Design Conference, Jim Blount, principal and life sciences market sector leader at Ellenzweig, took a candid look at these pressures and outlined strategies design teams can use to build resilience into every phase of lab planning.
Blount opened his talk, How to Prepare for an Uncertain Future, by underscoring the scale of the disruption: “I've been around this business for, believe it or not, 30 years—and I have to say, in that 30 years, I don't think I've seen this market in such volatility and such uncertainty,” he said, noting the impact of unpredictable government policy, a deflated life sciences market in regions like the East Coast, and new complexities in research funding and building operations.
The funding cliff and its ripple effects
The current moment, Blount argued, is defined by funding instability. With research institutions receiving up to 55 percent of their support from federal sources, any proposed cuts are seismic in scope. “There are proposals out there to cut some of this funding, anywhere from 50 percent to two-thirds to upwards of 75 percent,” he said. “What does that mean to our clients? What does that do to the way they think about their working day-to-day at their institutions?”
To gain deeper insights into how shifting federal funding is reshaping lab planning, timelines, and space allocation, be sure to watch our two-part webinar series on navigating uncertainty in lab design. All Lab Design webinars are free to watch live and/or on demand.
Blount illustrated the tangible impact of these cuts using Harvard University as a benchmark. In 2023, Harvard spent $58 million on NSF-funded research. “If we look at a kind of the middle-of-the-road budget cut of 50 percent, that $58 million drops down very quickly to about $29 million,” he explained. “At $750,000 for a six-person group, you're looking at about 40 lab groups that all of a sudden have no funding.” That also means hundreds of displaced postdocs and PhD students, he noted.
And it doesn’t end there. Institutions are also seeing caps on indirect cost recovery (ICR) rates—the funds used to support research infrastructure. “Capping everybody at 15 percent... that number is massive,” Blount emphasized. “How do you make up that amount of money at any of these institutions?”
A shift toward reuse and reassessment
Faced with dwindling resources and uncertain future needs, many institutions are pivoting to make better use of what they already have. “[Clients are] finding that we don’t know where things are going. We don't know if we're going to be getting funds to build some of these buildings. So we need to make the best and highest use of the spaces that we have right now,” Blount said.
His firm has worked with clients to conduct extensive building assessments, evaluating everything from hazardous materials inventories to space utilization across entire campuses. In one project, Blount’s team walked through 14 lab buildings over six months, validating research group assignments, space layouts, and physical conditions. “We prepared floor plans and updated existing assignment plans for every single floor plate for every single building in these two schools,” he said.
This process didn’t just highlight underutilized space—it also surfaced opportunities for consolidation. In one building, by reassigning and reconfiguring existing space, the team freed up 5,000 square feet—enough to support two additional principal investigators and up to 10 researchers.
Benchmarking to build a case
To help clients make tough decisions, Blount emphasized the importance of data-driven benchmarking. His team compares internal space metrics (e.g., net square feet per researcher) with peer institutions to identify inefficiencies. “They don’t like to take our word for granted,” he admitted. “So one of the things that they've asked for, and we did that for all of the benchmark metrics that we used for comparison, is we provided the actual metrics from the institutions that we had completed buildings.”
Blount also highlighted the value of financial benchmarking, where available. His team developed a metric of dollars spent per researcher to assess expenditures by group. Then they looked at projected grant funding to see what was in the pipeline. If a group’s current utilization was borderline and their funding was expected to drop off—a ‘cliff’ next year, for example—that signaled potential availability of research space.
“Good information, if you can get it, and it really does help to kind of tell the story,” Blount added.
Flexibility and forward-thinking design
Blount dedicated the final portion of his presentation to the importance of flexible, future-ready laboratory environments—especially when building without a defined end user. He cited a recent project at Stony Brook University, which used generic planning models to accommodate unknown future needs. “The project itself was completely programmed, planned and designed without a single end user to work with us,” he said.
The labs included modular infrastructure, pre-planned areas for future ductwork, and flexible partitions to convert space between open bench research and in-lab imaging. In total, nine locations were designed to morph from bench labs into more specialized setups as needed. “We orchestrated a little video session with some of the researchers to show the provost that, in fact, they could move these around and reset them. And it works,” Blount said.
Blount stressed the importance of early integration between architects, engineers, and construction teams to manage risk from day one. On a recent Boston-area project, his firm used design-assist delivery for the exterior envelope to mitigate schedule delays and supply chain concerns. “We saved four, five months of that entire schedule,” he noted. “We can’t imagine doing projects any differently now”.
Turning disruption into opportunity
In the face of funding volatility, rising costs, and shifting research priorities, Blount reminded the audience that their work centers on helping institutions make data-driven decisions about space utilization, resource allocation, and long-term flexibility. By combining detailed benchmarking, financial metrics, and strategic planning, Blount says, the design/build industry can empower clients to navigate uncertainty with clarity and resilience.
The lab design industry may be facing unprecedented disruption, but as Blount’s presentation made clear, proactive planning, robust data, and a willingness to rethink traditional models can help turn today’s uncertainty into tomorrow’s opportunity.
Continue the discussion at the 2026 Lab Design Conference, which will be held in Orlando, FL, on May 11-14! Join our mailing list at https://www.labdesignconference.com/ for regular updates on the speaker agenda, networking opportunities with lab design/build professionals, and our add-on lab tours and workshops.
