Case Western Reserve University has opened the doors to its largest-ever project on Case Quad, a $300 million research building meant to pull scientists out of their separate departmental silos and put them to work under one roof. The 189,000-square-foot Roger E. Susi Interdisciplinary Research Building will eventually house 65 faculty members and 300 researchers drawn from multiple colleges and departments across campus.
Officials opened the building Thursday, Oct. 22, cleveland.com reported. The facility represents what Case Western Reserve University describes as its largest-ever project on Case Quad, a university-defining investment years in the making.
Labs Built for Crossover Science
According to News 5 Cleveland, the building was designed from the ground up to bring together researchers from across disciplines, with shared laboratories, equipment and common spaces meant to encourage collisions between fields that normally don't interact. The structure includes wet labs, dry labs and a core lab, the station reports, built to support scientists working side by side rather than in isolated departmental buildings.
Architecture firm HGA, which worked on the project, says the facility includes dedicated labs for Electrochemical Engineering and Energy Science, Advanced Materials and Manufacturing, Precision Diagnostics and Therapeutics, Molecular Therapeutics, NeuroTechnology, NeuroRobotics, and Climate and Ecosystem Science, per HGA. That lineup spans everything from Electrochemical Engineering to NeuroTechnology and NeuroRobotics, reflecting the university's bet that breakthroughs increasingly happen at the seams between traditional fields rather than within them.
A Donor's Name and a Replaced Dorm
The building was formerly known as the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Building before its renaming, the university notes on its website. Donors contributed a combined $165 million toward the project, including a $50 million gift from Roger E. Susi, a 1977 graduate of the Case Institute of Technology, and his wife, Kayoko, according to Case Western Reserve University.
As Crain's Cleveland Business reported, the building's opening represents a project years in the making for the university, which had described plans for the structure back in 2023. At that time, per cleveland.com, the university called the then-planned $300 million building the biggest single investment on its main campus in decades, one set to replace Yost Hall, a former dormitory with less than 50,000 square feet.
A $2.5 Billion Fundraising Campaign Kicks Off
The building's opening doubled as the launch of Breakthrough Point, Case Western Reserve's new $2.5 billion comprehensive fundraising campaign, the news station reports. Case Western Reserve University says the campaign arrives as the school closes out its bicentennial year, with a fundraising goal $680 million larger than the university's last campaign, Forward Thinking.
Cleveland.com reports the university says it has already raised $1.4 billion toward the new goal since fundraising efforts began in 2021, with the campaign set to continue through 2031. The university has said separately that it wants to boost annual research spending to $600 million within 10 years, a steep climb from the $421 million in research spending it reported in 2021, when it ranked 66th among American universities in the National Science Foundation's HERD Survey, per cleveland.com.
An AI Hub Still Taking Shape
Case Western Reserve University is also working on plans for a potential AI hub, though a location and funding source for that project have not yet been finalized, the station notes. No timeline for finalizing those plans has been disclosed. For now, the Susi building stands as the university's most concrete bet that housing chemists, engineers, neuroscientists and climate researchers under a single roof will accelerate the kind of cross-disciplinary work that increasingly defines modern research funding priorities.
