2020 - 2025 Impact
As we continue undaunted in our interdisciplinary exploration of some of the greatest scientific challenges in human health and welfare, we invite you to learn more about how we are pursuing transformational discoveries and educating the science and engineering leaders of the future.
Recent Research Discoveries
2020 - 2025 Highlights
The Marvin H. Caruthers Endowed Chairs for Early-Career Faculty are endowed faculty positions in the BioFrontiers Institute given to interdisciplinary young faculty members with exceptional promise for making transformational discoveries that benefit society. Marv Caruthers is a world-renowned biochemist, a distinguished professor at CU Boulder, and a biotech giant. In the 1970s, Marv’s CU lab developed the chemistry for building sequence-defined DNA strands, which gave birth to the biotech industry and the human genome project, among other advances. Inspired by Marv’s accomplishments and continued vision, several of his previous students and colleagues endowed these Chairs in his honor.
- Sammy Ramsey (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)The Ramsey Lab focuses on pollinator health with an emphasis on understanding parasitic mites to combat the pollinator pandemic.
- Ed Chuong (Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology)The Chuong Lab investigates the choreography of gene activity underlying processes from cancer to individual immune traits.
- Nathan Belliveau (Biochemistry)The Belliveau Lab focuses on “galvanotaxis”: the study of electric field-directed cell migration, with relevance to cancer, immunity, and human development.
- Jennifer Hill (Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology)The Hill Lab studies how gut microbes support the pancreas with implications for preventing and treating Type I Diabetes.
- Orit Peleg (Computer Science)The Peleg Lab investigates how organisms and communities buffer themselves against large environmental fluctuations with applications to robotics, telecommunications, and more.
- John Rinn (Biochemistry)The Rinn Lab examines the mechanisms through which the class of functional RNAs known as long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) regulate essential biological processes.
- Saad Bhamla (Incoming Summer 2026, Chemical & Biological Engineering)The Bhamla Lab uncovers livings organisms' extraordinary solutions to daunting problems and leverages this to build frugal technology for global health.
We are proud of the many achievements of our outstanding faculty, many of whom have been recognized by prestigious organizations.
- Dan Larremore (Computer Science) won a 2022 Alan T. Waterman Award, the NSF's most prestigious award for early-career scientists and engineers.
- Kristi Anseth (Chemical & Biological Engineering) won a 2024 VinFuture Special Prize for Women Innovators, the biggest scientific prize based in the Asia-Pacific region.
- Jason Burdick (Chemical & Biological Engineering) was inducted into the National Academy of Medicine in 2024, a major scientific honor and a rare one for engineers.
- Sammy Ramsey (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology) was named to the 2024 Explorers Club 50 People Changing the World, an award for extraordinary explorers and researchers creating the future.
- Orit Peleg (Computer Science) was selected as a 2024 Schmidt Sciences Polymath, which supports interdisciplinary researchers transforming the way science is conducted.
- The Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology (IQ Bio) PhD Certificate Program marked its 10-year anniversary in 2022 with an alumni reunion, scientific symposium, and gala celebration.
- IQ Bio was also awarded a $3M NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) in 2020 to provide 1st year student fellowships and training in Integrated Data Science: Teams for Advancing Bioscience Discovery.
- Beginning summer 2025, a $1.7M NIH T32 Training Grant will provide 2nd year PhD students with competitive fellowships and training in Biological Data Science.
- We extended educational offerings to undergraduates with the launch of the Computational Biology minor, a cross-college program serving students from Computer Science, Molecular Biology, and many other STEM majors.
- Retention is higher among IQ (85%) than non-IQ (76%) PhD students
- 35% of IQ Bio students are NSF-funded and 50% have stipend-based awards
- Average class size has increased 50% and applicant numbers have quintupled over the program lifetime
- IQ Bio has brought $7.5M to academic departments
- Dan Knights graduated from our first IQ Bio cohort and is now Associate Professor of Data Science and Machine Learning at the University of Minnesota. His group develops data-mining tools in computational genomics to study the microbiome’s role in human health, with an emphasis on modeling sustainability. He has been named multiple times among the Top 1% of Highly Cited Researchers in the world by Clarivate Analytics. He has also founded a company focused on applied microbiome analysis and won a named professorship and teaching award.
- Joey Azofeifa learned to bridge benchtop biology with machine learning to solve complex gene regulation problems while in Robin Dowell's lab. Joey and Robin co-founded Arpeggio Biosciences to use AI and genomics to build a drug discovery pipeline targeting master genome regulators previously thought to be undruggable in conditions such as lung cancer and chronic kidney disease. In 2020, he was named one of Forbes’s 30 Under 30 in Healthcare.
- Kate Bubar joined Dan Larremore’s group just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. She leveraged her IQ Bio training in computation, math, and biology to tackle literal life-or-death questions, such as vaccine prioritization strategies to minimize COVID deaths. As a second-year PhD student, she presented to the World Health Organization, published her work in Science (now cited 900 times), and was awarded the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Kate is now a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford studying infectious disease transmission to inform public health policies.
BioFrontiers' impact extends far beyond academic spheres: 1/2 of our faculty have founded at least one biotech company so their labs' discoveries can reach the public. We incubate many of these companies in their nascent state at JSCBB, providing access to the university research infrastructure and intellectual capital. Some exciting recent achievements include:
Pioneering molecular cardiologist Leslie Leinwand co-founded MyoKardia to develop the first ever, and first-in-class, treatment for the genetic heart disease hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). HCM afflicts over 1 in 500 people and is the leading cause of sudden cardiac death in young people. MyoKardia was acquired for $13B by Bristol Myers Squibb, and the drug Camzyos was approved by the FDA in 2022. Twice as many patients experience symptom relief and four times greater reduction in obstruction compared to standard of care.
After a serendipitous conversation over coffee in a JSCBB break room, virologist Bob Garcea (BioFrontiers) and engineer Ted Randolph (ChBE) forged a collaboration to engineer single shot, heat stable, low-cost vaccine nanoparticles that led them to found Vitrivax. Now with tens of millions of dollars in funding from the Department of Defense, the Gates Foundation, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, and other entities, they are poised to break global vaccine barriers for HPV, polio, rabies, melioidosis, and countless other diseases. No cold chain. No boosters. Low-cost. Highly effective.
In 2023, The BioFrontiers Institute hosted an exciting international conference, The RNA Worlds: Past, Present and Future. Organized by Tom Cech along with RNA luminaries John Atkins, Jennifer Doudna, Venki Ramakrishnan, Joan Steitz, and Jack Szostak, this conference gathered some of the most impactful scientists working in the RNA world, from pillars of the field (including 5 Nobel Prize winners) to emerging stars. Over 4 days, they covered "The Primordial RNA World", "The World of Present-Day RNA Research", "The World of RNA Medicine", and "The Future World of RNA". Many of the speakers and VIPs are pictured below. CU Boulder has long been considered a capital in the world of RNA research, so we were proud to welcome so many thought leaders at the foot of the Flatirons.
BioFrontiers is committed to serving our broader community. We believe that science is a continuous dialogue, not just among scientists but also with the public, who are interested in, impacted by, and benefit from scientific discoveries. We have approached engagement in several formal ways:
These talks discuss diverse scientific issues of interest to the local community and showcase how BioFrontiers research is making discoveries that improve lives. In the first 7 talks, we covered topics such as sex differences in heart disease, causes and solutions to the pollinator pandemic, the future of neurodegenerative disease research, and tissue engineering for regenerative medicine. Watch past talks and learn about the upcoming season here.
In concert with our RNA Worlds scientific conference, we hosted a free public forum that included a keynote address by Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna (UC Berkeley & IGI; former CU postdoctoral trainee) and a panel discussion moderated by Nobel Laureate Tom Cech and featuring leaders from academic research and biotech: Jason Chin (EIT and formerly MRC Cambridge), Tracy Johnson (UCLA & HHMI), Eric Olson (UTSW), and Özlem Türeci (BioNTech co-founder).
RNA has suffered from relative obscurity compared to its famous molecular parent DNA, which has entered the common vernacular. This all changed when mRNA vaccines burst onto the scene to change the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tom Cech, 1989 Nobel Laureate for his discovery of catalytic RNAs, seized this moment to write an approachable and informative book about the decades of research, and researchers, that unlocked our understanding of the many biological roles of RNA. He highlighted how basic science discoveries led to biotech breakthroughs. This book was met with overwhelmingly positive reviews from scientific outlets and popular booksellers.
BioFrontiers served as the scientific hub for CU's pandemic operational response. Through the Scientific Steering Committee assembled by Leslie Leinwand and Roy Parker, we connected with key collaborators from medical services, epidemiology, environmental engineering, student affairs, communications, and campus executive leaders to use concrete data gathered daily to make science-informed policy recommendations. For this work on behalf of our campus and community, the team won a CU Robert Stearns Award for extraordinary service.
BioFrontiers researchers simultaneously contributed many impactful studies (included among the works collected here) that informed on disease dynamics, modeled different public health intervention, testing, and vaccination strategies, and outlined new individual and community testing approaches. This included the saliva-based PCR test developed by members of Roy Parker's lab and run by the COVID Lab based in JSCBB on over 190,000 samples for our CU students, faculty, and staff as well as Boulder community members at no cost to them.
Launched in 2022, the Crnic Institute Boulder Branch (CBB), a BioFrontiers-led initiative in partnership with the main Crnic site at Anschutz Medical Campus and funded through the generosity of the Anna and John J. Sie Foundation, integrates and supports a research community addressing Trisomy 21-associated co-morbidities. Their vision is to leverage the highly collaborative environment and multi-disciplinary research at BioFrontiers and across the CU Boulder campus to make discoveries that open channels to the diagnosis and treatment of pathologic conditions associated with Down syndrome. Their goal is to improve quality of life for people with Trisomy 21 (the genetic condition that causes Down syndrome) and their families. Their work will also have broad benefits because diseases that are difficulty to study in the genetically complex general population are often over-represented, such as Alzheimer's disease and leukemia, or under-represented, such as solid tumors like breast cancer, in people with Down syndrome. Learn more about the scientists, research projects, and opportunities through CBB at their website.
