The University of Oxford has awarded construction company Mace a contract worth an estimated £50m to build its Big Data Institute, a month after the project was given the green light.

The Big Data Institute will focus on the analysis of large data sets, which the university said will bring together leading researchers from across genetics, epidemiology and public health, clinical medicine, computer science and IT, statistics and bioinformatics.

The facility was awarded £10m from the Higher Education Funding Council for England through the second round of the Research Partnership Investment Fund. The facility, designed by architects Make, is expected to accommodate 552 staff.

As part of the sustainability strategy, a labyrinth is located beneath the lower ground floor which will draw in air through a light well and use the thermal mass of the ground to cool it, before circulating it to the main roof top plant room. The air will then be distributed via floor plenums as part of an assisted natural ventilation strategy and extracted via the atrium using the stack effect.