Case Western Reserve University has opened the Roger E. Susi Interdisciplinary Research Building in Cleveland, a 189,000-square-foot, $300 million research hub that the university calls its largest single investment ever in research, according to the university’s newsroom.
The building, on the Case Quad along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, opened in October during the university’s bicentennial celebration. It brings together 65 faculty members, 300 researchers and dozens of students from the College of Arts and Sciences, the Case School of Engineering and the School of Medicine under one roof, in wet labs, dry labs and about 11,000 square feet of shared core facilities.
The design is built around collision as much as containment. Open lab configurations, a ground-floor cafe and meeting rooms throughout are meant to push researchers from seven interdisciplinary clusters — working on everything from new materials and battery chemistry to bio-inspired robots, drug delivery and restoring movement after paralysis — into each other’s paths…