Of Biologists, Physicists and Computers

With the goal of creating what its Nobel Prize-winning director Tom Cech calls “productive collisions,” the new BioFrontiers Institute on the CU-Boulder campus hopes to model what can happen when walls — both physical and institutional — come down.

“The problems we face in medicine are getting too complicated to address within a single discipline,” said associate director Jana Watson-Capps. “We are trying to find people who do not fit into a single research box, and bring them together.”

Conceived in 2002, the BioFrontiers Institute officially opened its doors last spring, moving into a new 336,800-square-foot facility thoughtfully designed to bring together…