Once it's up and running, the facility will house at least 50 employees of RUCDR, roughly 30 of which will be new hires, Tischfield said. Meanwhile, other new positions may be created in the areas of maintenance, security, landscaping, grant management and facilities.

In addition, the project will provide between 50 and 100 constructions jobs for about a year.

And, afterward, there will be an ongoing need for lab equipment and supplies.

"Some of these will be purchased through New Jersey middlemen, or actually produced in New Jersey," Tischfield said.

The project is a plus for students in the Department of Genetics, many of whom do research in the center or in other genetics laboratories and some who end up working there after graduation.

"Many of the employees in the RUCDR are Rutgers graduates," Tischfield said. "Every year I would say that more than half of the employees we hire are Rutgers graduates. These are kids who saw the RUCDR when they were undergraduates, thought it would be a good place to spend a few years when they graduate and learn some skills, or stay forever."

In the end, however, some of the biggest benefits of the expansion will be felt over the course of many years - from medical breakthroughs that help those suffering from illness and disease.

"These diseases, we speculate, are not caused by the same things in each affected person," Tischfield said. "So one of the things we've done here is we put together one of the world's largest collections of subjects with various diseases. Now we can interrogate very deeply the DNA of thousands if not tens of thousands of people. And this allows us to get a real handle on the causes of these common diseases."

Source: Rutgers University