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College Plays Leading Role in C2B2 | Graduate School Rankings Published | DSST Students Visit CU Engineering | Honors and Awards | College Calendar | In the News | Fast Facts

CU-Boulder was well represented at the March 19 launch of the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels (C2B2). Pictured after the press conference at the State Capitol, from left to right, are chemical engineering professors Will Medlin and Al Weimer; Carl Koval, director of the campus Energy Initiative; Dean Robert Davis, and Paul Hamilton, EAC member and president of Shell Global Solutions (U.S.)

College Plays Leading Role in C2B2
The University of Colorado at Boulder is joining with Colorado State University, the Colorado School of Mines, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to establish a Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels. Known as C2B2, the center’s mission is to become the world’s leading center for research, education, and innovation on integrating renewable energy sources into the chemical and fuels industry.

The center is a joint venture between several large and small businesses and the Colorado Renewable Energy Collaboratory, an association among CU-Boulder, CSU, CSM and NREL aimed at increasing the production and use of energy from renewable resources. The four institutions are committed to combining their faculties and resources to allow C2B2 to pursue broad and intensive research and development projects on a scale that no university in the world can manage on its own. The center’s research program will involve six thrusts, ranging from basic efforts to engineer plants for biofuels and refining applications, to developing methods to biochemically and thermo-chemically convert engineered biomass to useful end-products, to developing efficient and economical production processes and systems.

The center will be administered in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at CU-Boulder, with Al Weimer as executive director, Ryan Gill as managing director, and Will Medlin as CU-Boulder site director. C2B2’s industry sponsors include Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Dow Chemical and Shell Global Solutions, among others. For more information visit the center’s website at C2B2.

Graduate School Rankings Published
CU-Boulder graduate programs in engineering were ranked 40th best in the nation in the latest (2008) edition of U.S. News and World Report. A total of 191 engineering schools that grant doctoral degrees responded to the survey on which the rankings are based. CU-Boulder ranked 23rd among public engineering schools on the list and 18th among AAU institutions. The engineering schools at Colorado State University and Colorado School of Mines, by comparison, were ranked 55th and 66th in the nation respectively.  CU engineering specialty rankings are posted online at Fact Sheets.

DSST Students Visit CU Engineering
Twenty-six eleventh-graders from the Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) visited the college on March 9 to explore engineering opportunities at CU-Boulder. Hosted by the ITL Program, MEP, and WIEP, the students visited several engineering labs, toured the campus, had lunch at Farrand Hall, visited a dorm room, and heard from students and faculty involved in CU’s undergraduate scholars programs.

The students peered at skin cells and saw a human heart valve in Kristi Anseth’s tissue engineering lab, learned about computerized clothing that makes music in Mike Eisenberg’s JavaGami lab; got a look at high-atmosphere data gathering projects at Space Grant, and learned how scientists use lasers to understand more about water flow in John Crimaldi’s fluid-flow lab. “I had no idea CU had these fantastic labs! They were very cool,” one student said.

DSST is rated an “excellent” high school and achieved “significant growth” on its academic growth rating. Half of its students are from low-income families and two-thirds are from populations underrepresented nationwide in engineering. Thank you to the engineering labs for welcoming these academically motivated students into their environments.

Honors and Awards
Congratulations to the following individuals on their outstanding achievements.

Faculty
Jeffrey Forbes of aerospace engineering sciences is the PI on a new MURI award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research titled “Neutral Atmosphere Density Interdisciplinary Research.” The award, which is aimed at improving our ability to predict satellite positions and re-entries into the atmosphere, could total as much as $7.5 million over five years with involvement by the aerospace department, CIRES, LASP and some external participants.

Y.C. Lee and Victor Bright of mechanical engineering and Zoya Popovic of electrical and computer engineering are part of the Chip Scale Atomic Clock team recognized as the Teledyne (former Rockwell) Scientific Team of the Year. This recognition was for the effort and accomplishments involved in advancing to Phase III and the progress to date in the Phase III development.

Doug Gin of chemical and biological engineering/chemistry and biochemistry was selected to receive the Boulder Faculty Assembly’s outstanding research award for 2007.

Donna Gerren of aerospace engineering sciences has been invited to participate in the 2007 Boeing Welliver Faculty Fellowship Program this summer.

Fred Glover of electrical and computer engineering/business is identified as the “most central actor” in a recent study of the research and publishing network in the field of metaheuristics.  In a network linking 8,000 authors, he has a ‘betweenness’ measure of 7,788 in the largest component of the network, while the second most central actor has a measure of 5126, according to "Building Bridges," SIGEvolution (ACM), Dec. 2006.

Marian Klein and Vladimir Leuski of the Center for Environmental Technology in electrical and computer engineering were selected as recipients of the CIRES Bronze Medal award for 2007, in recognition of their key roles in the 2005 NOAA UAV demonstration program, for which the General Atomics Altair UAV was outfitted with instrumentation to illustrate the role that UAVs can play in environmental monitoring, forecasting, and stewardship.

Kenneth Strzepek of civil, environmental and architectural engineering was designated as a co-recipient of the Zayed International Prize for the Environment, as a contributing author of Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

Students
Farheen Rizvi, an undergraduate in aerospace engineering sciences, and Bejamin Safdi, an undergraduate in engineering physics/applied mathematics, have been selected to receive the Goldwater Scholarship. This prestigious national scholarship awards $7,500 per year to sophomores and juniors interested in pursuing a research career (after earning a PhD) in the fields of math, science, and/or engineering.

Erin Towler, a graduate student in civil engineering-water resources received the American Water Works Association’s Water Conservation Division Best Paper Award and Student Best Paper Award for papers published in 2006.

Lauren Gunderson, student outreach coordinator for Space Grant, was named the CU Student Employee of the Year. She is a mathematics major and has worked for the college for three years.
 

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