The Drain Academic Building (more commonly, the Lee Drain Building, or LDB) is a four-story structure bordered on the east and west by Avenues I and J, respectively, in the central campus. As the flagship building of the College of Sciences, the LDB houses the Dean’s Suite as well as classrooms, offices, and laboratories.
The $7.1 million, 424,348-square-foot General Purpose Classroom (GPC) Building was originally conceived for the area of the then-recently demolished Education Building, according to the 1982 Alcalde, but was instead built on the site of the Houston and Rix apartments.
Facilities of the Department of Biological Sciences include the S.R. Warner Herbarium, with over 20,000 specimens of regional flora; the Vertebrate Museum, with specimens of fauna from East Texas and adjacent regions; and the Texas Bird Sound Library, created in 1979, with over 2,000 different types of recordings of primarily Texas avian species.
On the third floor, the Department of Geography and Geology maintains a Geographic Information System (GIS) lab and remote sensing lab. The Reeves Center for Mathematics Education and the Ruth Lane Math Society are organized by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
The Lee Drain Mall, a campus beautification project from the mid-1980s, is the east/west pedestrian corridor outside the northern entrance of the LDB; once butting up against the nearby Wilson Apartments, today the area blends into Bearkat Plaza.
