A graduate-school experiment helped computers stop waiting for one another. From Hogwild! to Alation, Lattice Data and Evidently, Feng Niu has kept returning to the obstacles between information and useful work.

Before Roland Green built antibody platforms, he wrote poetry, chased snow, and taught English in Prague. The same curiosity later turned a graduate-school workaround into NimbleGen - and now shapes how Invenra moves complex biology from bench to business.