This May, we celebrated our expansion into additional space in the Salt Lake City Gateway, where our HQ has been located since 2018. We also welcomed The Recursion Foundation’s incubator, Altitude Lab, into a portion of our new space.
Altitude Lab was founded to elevate underrepresented founders in the life sciences field and provide access to laboratory equipment, mentorship, venture capital, as well as cultivate a community of founders facing the unique challenges of building a business.
In support of further building community in the Biohive, Altitude Lab residents and employees will now be able to eat lunch onsite at Recursion, which we hope will encourage deep technical discussions, creative thinking and innovation across Salt Lake City’s tech and life sciences hub.
As part of the expansion, we also collaborated on community art projects with local Muralist, Brooke Smart, and local non-profit, The Discovery Gateway Children’s Museum in an effort to educate and inspire the next generation of biotech leaders.
Read on to learn more about these initiatives.
In 2022, we initiated our partnership with The Discovery Gateway Children's Museum.
A close proximity (neighbors in the SLC Gateway Mall) and shared community development goals made the partnership a natural fit. Together, we combined powers to build a display case in the Gateway’s rotunda area that showcases Recursion’s technology and approach to drug discovery.
The display was completed in May 2023 and includes a detailed cell sculpture - complete with UV lights for a life-like effect - and gives viewers the opportunity to look deep inside biology as we do at Recursion. The display also features a robotic arm from our automation lab and microscope showing cell pictures as our scientists see them.
The intention behind this project was to create an accessible view into the work happening at Recursion, as well as foundational “fast facts” about biology, chemistry and data science. These serve as an educational component to express that while drug discovery is incredibly complicated, there’s much about science that we inherently understand and use to build our maps of biology.
While the showcase represents the beginning of the Recursion and Discovery Gateway partnership, ongoing collaboration goals will include community STEM education events and alignment to uncover opportunities to inspire the next generation of leaders in science and technology.
We were also grateful to receive the opportunity to contribute five donated murals to the Gateway’s growing collection in alignment with our expansion into additional space across the street from HQ.
A cross-functional team of self-selected Recursionauts, spanning from roles in communications to automation to science, ideated on mural concepts that represented our work, and researched local artists to gather proposals. Our team evaluated a variety of incredible local artists and pinpointed Brooke Smart as the best fit to execute on our vision due to her timeless and vibrant art style.
After months of installment in the hot, Utah summer sun, the murals were completed in the fall of 2022 — each representing a key area of our work: biology, chemistry, data science & engineering, automation and impact on patients.
We couldn't be happier with the final product, and love how the “impact on patients” mural is visible from our cafeteria to remind Recursionauts of the “why” behind our work every day.
