Visual journalist Grant Slater recently traveled to the remote Siberian city to document the tech boom and create a broad portrait of the people driving, and caught up in, the changes.

"Initially, I was just curious to see what the inside of a Russian tech incubator looked like," he says. "As I spent more time there, I became interested in the character of this town as a whole."

Akademgorodok has a storied past when it comes to innovation but only recently became the center of Russia's tech world. The town, founded in 1957 by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was the result of a plan by Nikita Khrushchev to huddle the Soviet Union's sharpest minds. At its peak, Akademgorodok (which translates as 'Academy Town') was home to a university, 35 research institutes, a medical academy, and 65,000 scientists and their families.