One of the two main feature stories in the 2015 edition of Outlook, the magazine of Temple University’s College of Science and Technology, highlights the impressive new research faculty that the university lured away from Arizona State, Penn State, Rutgers and Tulane universities. “Collaborative Partnership: New Research Centers Blur Scientific Boundaries” is the fourth feature I’ve written in the past three years for Outlook, which contains two feature stories each issue.

This year’s feature was twinned with a story about the opening of the college’s new Science Education and Research Center, the largest interdisciplinary science building in the Philadelphia region, where most of the new researchers’ laboratories are housed. For the researchers, Temple’s allure included a critical mass of other top-notch researchers and the ability to mine and analyze huge data sets with the Temple’s ultra-fast, powerful High-Performance Computing Cluster and its related virtual server, TUcloud.

The professors featured in the story include:

• Jody Hey, director of the Center for Computational Genetics and Genomics, which uses new genome sequencing data methods to study the divergence of populations, from fruit flies to apes to humans, particular the evolutionary history of human populations in Africa, and
• S. Blair Hedges, a biologist who works to preserve biodiversity in Haiti
• Ron Levy, director of the Center for Biophysics & Computational Biology, which focuses on developing new HIV pharmaceutical inhibitors
• Sudhir Kumar, director of the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine (iGEM), which explores the genetic components of diseases, and
• John Perdew, a physicist who directs the Center for Materials Theory

With so many professors to feature, the challenge was to weave their disparate stories together in a narrative that gave each of the researchers their due while flowing smoothly from one researcher to the next.

Click here to view a full PDF of the story.