At seven above-ground stories, the utilitarian brick and concrete structure known as the Ford Science Center is the tallest academic building on campus. Its basement and three subbasement levels give it a whopping eleven stories to work with, and its generous square footage (helped along by the fact that the underground levels extend beyond the surface footprint of the building) easily makes it one of the most massive structures owned and operated by Greyson University.

Constructed in 1977, the Ford Science Center is named for one Joseph Ford, a Greyson alum who went on to found Ford Advanced Solutions, a highly successful agricultural research and development firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. While visiting the main campus for his twenty-year reunion, Ford became incensed by the abysmal condition of the existing Smith Science Center, which had fallen into obvious disrepair, and reportedly wrote a check to the university on the spot, insisting that they use the substantial donation to build a facility suitable for the education of the next generation of leading scientists. The exact size of the initial Ford contribution and the veracity of this story remain unknown, Ford did spearhead a massive fundraising drive, and the school ultimately delivered, building one of the most advanced university research facilities in the country. With the help of a trust fund later established by the Ford Group, as the donors came to be called, Greyson has been able to keep it that way, upgrading the building with remarkable regularity. The facilities at M.I.T. and Harvard aside, the Ford Science Center is without equal in the entire state of Massachusetts.

The building offers laboratory space to every conceivable department that might find a use for it, and as a result, most of the active psychology and parapsychology labs are housed right here, and most computer science classes are held within Ford's walls as well. The ample lab space and cutting-edge equipment aside, the Ford Science Center also houses the offices and classrooms of the Departments of Agriculture, Biochemistry, Biology, Botany, Chemistry, Geology and Physics. The Agriculture and Botany departments even have their own rooftop greenhouses, though most of the working greenhouses owned by the school are located just outside of Shadowgard.

The Science Center has been the site of any number of bizarre experiments over the years, and the apocryphal stories are still stranger, involving rumors of twisted mutations, human cloning, extraterrestrial beings, hidden levels...all the tales one might expect to be associated with such an advanced facility. Many of the professors, students and researchers who work in the laboratories here are notoriously eccentric, obsessed with their own personal projects, and God only knows what any one of them might get up to on a slow weekend.

Additionally, campus legend claims that the whole building is haunted by the vengeful spirit of Maxwell Smith, a noted physicist, mathematician and researcher for whom the original Smith Science Center, constructed in 1921, was named. In the last decade of his life, Smith became obsessed with the idea of an Ultimate Unified Theory of Universal Structure that would have reconciled science and the occult and served to explain the fundamental nature of life, death and the human soul. Reportedly, he succeeded, at least to some extent; upon his death in 1922, the story goes, Smith found some way to bind his spirit to the very walls of the building that bore his name. When that building was torn down, Smith's ghost was cast adrift, and his vengeful spirit now stalks the halls of the Ford Science Center, constructed on the very same spot. As yet, no one has actually personally encountered an identifiable apparition of Maxwell Smith himself, but their are countless tales of decidedly odd experiences within the night-darkened halls of the science center. Campus Security generally closes the building before midnight, and Smith reportedly only makes his appearances in the wee hours of the morning, but many students try to avoid lingering overlong in any event.