Philip P. DiStefano

Today marks a red-letter day at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We break ground on a revolutionary biotechnology and biomedical research and teaching facility on the East Campus.

The Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building will be home to researchers from a broad diversity of disciplines who will collaborate to take on urgent human health challenges.

The work within its walls will have the power and potential to regenerate cartilage for human joints, develop replacement heart valves through tissue engineering, develop inhalable vaccines and other new pharmaceuticals, identify disease indicators, and advance therapies for cardiovascular disease, infectious disease and cancer.

The brightest minds in life sciences, physical sciences, math, computational sciences and engineering will combine forces to improve patient and medical care as part of our Colorado Initiative in Molecular Biotechnology (CIMB) directed by Distinguished Professor and Nobel laureate Tom Cech.

The Caruthers building and CIMB are the very definition of Flagship 2030 initiatives on fostering interdisciplinary research and enhancing education. In fact, this great new facility and the work that will go on inside of it touch on at least half of the 18 core and transformational initiatives that make up Flagship 2030.

For example, it meets our Flagship 2030 ideals of outreach programming in Colorado communities, as it will bring hands-on science education to thousands of K-12 teachers and students through teacher workshops, courses and programs in schools.

The Caruthers Biotechnology Building embodies our goals of creating a Colorado research diamond as CU-Boulder researchers work with faculty at the University of Colorado Denver Anschutz Medical Campus in a union of basic science and medical research.

It will energize Boulder Valley and Colorado as a biotech hub by building on our strong track record of generating more than a dozen biotech startup companies and attracting tens of millions of dollars annually in sponsored research awards. Biotech companies will collaborate with faculty and students using state-of-art equipment in the new facility.

The Caruthers building will support student participation in biomedical research, advancing Flagship 2030 commitments to undergraduate and graduate education.

The building will house 60 senior faculty researchers and more than 500 research and support staff. In addition to housing CIMB, it will host the department of chemical and biological engineering and the biochemistry division faculty of the department of chemistry and biochemistry.

Almost exactly two years after Distinguished Professor Marvin Caruthers gave the foundational gift, we are breaking ground on this fabulous building named for his late wife and CU faculty member Jennie Smoly Caruthers.

With this building we are creating a community of researchers who are charting new frontiers in interdisciplinary research and addressing pressing human needs.

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People Behind the Scenes

Today is a red-letter day for CU-Boulder