Research & Creative Work 2017-18
Our research enterprise has again attracted record external research funding—more than $511 million this year—a fitting indication of the impact our campus is having on the wider world.
Thousands of campus contributors—faculty, researchers, staff, postdocs and undergraduate and graduate students—play crucial roles in the university’s impact. Add in the contributions of our many collaborators, including partners in industry and federal labs, government, the entrepreneurial ecosystem, the local community and others, and you have something special that can happen only in Boulder.
Grand Challenge: Solar storm chasers
Mass media representations of space weather—variable conditions in space that can affect the technological systems modern society depends on—often evoke visions of catastrophic power grid failures and global chaos. The result can be gripping film or literature but, while such worst-case scenarios are possible, they can distort our understanding of space weather’s more frequent and broader effects.
Clunky, metallic droids like C-3PO? Old news. CU Boulder engineers have created a new class of soft, flexible robots that rival biological muscles, pointing the way to the future of prosthetics, automation and other human-robot interactions.
At this year’s New Venture Challenge, a rowdy annual CU Boulder startup competition at the Boulder Theater, well-known entrepreneur and venture capitalist Brad Feld witnessed a transformative moment for the campus.
In mid-June, as he had done so many times before, George Rivera packed more than a hundred pieces of art into a suitcase and boarded a plane bound for a place where rifles can seem more common than paintbrushes.
When Shane the therapy dog was hit by a Jeep, life changed for him and his guardian, Taryn Sargent. Today, Shane has dramatically reduced pain and dependency on medications, and is bounding around like a puppy again, 18 months after receiving a single injection of an experimental gene therapy.
Each year, ranchers in Colorado and the Mountain West face difficult decisions regarding drought. This year, scientists set out to get a better understanding of how ranchers actually use climate information to make crucial choices that could make or break their agricultural futures.
As Hurricane Harvey bore down on Houston in August 2017, the Twitterverse lit up with satellite images warning of danger and 140-character exchanges between worried residents. For those in Harvey’s path, the tweets provided information, comfort and sometimes confusion. For Leysia Palen, they provided data points.
