Hester Marine Sciences Hall Opens to Classes on September 8
This note was issued in February 2026, while the building was still a construction site. Classes began in Hester Marine Sciences Hall on September 8, 2026, as scheduled. The paragraphs below are the announcement the campus used, left in the newsroom so the figures stay in one place.
The building
Hester Hall is 86,000 square feet on the Seacliff bluff, between Alder Hall and the path to the jetty. It holds eight teaching laboratories, a kelp culture room supplied with pumped seawater, the faculty offices of the College of Marine & Environmental Sciences, and room 114, which is the operations desk of the Harbor Data Observatory.
The project cost $48 million. The Hester family gift, pledged in 2011 and paid in full by 2023, covered $29 million. The State of Oregon matched $19 million under the coastal teaching-facilities program. The Society did not borrow for the building.
What moved, and what did not
Introductory marine biology and the coastal-engineering studio moved out of the 1976 wing of Alder Hall. The marine laboratory on the jetty did not move. Boats, dive lockers, and the seawater intake stay at the dock. Students walk the path between the hall and the dock, which is the point of putting the new building on the bluff rather than in town.
Visiting the hall
Weekday campus tours now include the ground-floor lobby and, when a class is not in session, the window into the kelp culture room. The laboratories themselves are not on the public tour. Press requests for a walk-through go to [email protected].
The hall is named for Edith and Carl Hester, who ran a processor on the Calder Bay waterfront from 1952 to 1988 and made the 2011 gift that also funds the Hester Marine Scholarship. A short biography is posted in the lobby. There is no naming opportunity left on this building.