There are two reasons for any university to invest in new research facilities. The first is the most obvious—new facilities allow you to do new and different kinds of research. One of the core resources of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS), which I run, is our bio-imaging tools, which enables our bio-imaging group to combine x-ray based techniques, computer tomography, MRI and a variety of other techniques to get a view of human systems from the atomic level all the way to a whole body scan. That capacity provides a foundation for a plethora of different research applications. The other reason to build new facilities is to attract the most talented and ambitious researchers. At CBIS, we have chemical engineers who are producing new proteins by modifying cellular structures or designing new kinds of enzymes. We have biologists who are studying the structural biology of proteins. We have biomedical engineers who are using proteins to make new scaffolds that elicit different stem cell characteristics. We have chemists who study the mechanism of protein folding and unfolding—or mis-folding, which characterizes many kinds of diseases—and use the mis-folded proteins as a diagnostic bio-marker. And this combination of facilities that allow new and different kinds of research, and the talent that those capacities attract, allow Rensselaer to design new drugs and diagnostic tools for treating cancer, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, Alzheimers, dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases—all through an interdisciplinary approach that combines engineering and science in a way that just isn’t possible in a traditional medical school environment.