CU Partners with Mesa State College
Students at Mesa State College in Grand Junction will be able to select a new degree option in mechanical engineering starting this fall, thanks to a partnership with CU-Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. The partnership will bring the first-ever baccalaureate degree in engineering to Colorado’s Western Slope.

Under a memorandum of understanding announced by the two schools in Grand Junction on Feb. 22, CU-Boulder will extended its degree program in mechanical engineering to students in residence at Mesa State. Cohorts of 15 to 20 students per class will study with Mesa State faculty for lower-division courses during their first two years. Included will be an opportunity to take a First Year Engineering Projects course modeled on the one at CU-Boulder. Upper-division mechanical engineering courses will be taught by CU faculty at Mesa State beginning in fall 2010.

The program extension is supported by a gift from CU-Boulder alumnus S.J. "Arch" Archuleta (ArchEngr’61) and his wife, Bonnie. The gift provides funding for various programmatic expenses, faculty support, and undergraduate scholarships for Western Slope students to study engineering either at Mesa State or CU-Boulder.

COSGC Takes RocketSat National
The Colorado Space Grant Consortium has received funding from NASA Headquarters to facilitate a national workshop for faculty on the development of sounding rocket programs. The “RockOn!” workshop, which is patterned after COSGC’s RocketSat program, will be jointly conducted with the Virginia Space Grant Consortium and will take place June 22-27 at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.  Participants will build sounding rocket payloads and be involved in a rocket launch on the final day.

COSGC has received national attention for its highly successful “Starting Student Space Hardware Programs Workshops” (SSHPW) that have been held at CU-Boulder for the last five summers.  Both RockOn! and SSHPW are hands-on workshops where faculty from schools across the country learn how to develop and implement space hardware programs at their own institutions. 

While SSHPW focuses on BalloonSats―simple payloads flown to 100,000 feet on high altitude balloons―RockOn! will take hands-on student hardware experiences one step further by teaching faculty to develop and implement programs using sounding rockets, which can carry student payloads to a height of over 300,000 feet. CU students have been instrumental in the development of a platform that is reproducible in both a workshop and classroom setting. 

Honors & Awards
Congratulations to the following on their outstanding achievements:

Faculty
Chris Koehler of the Colorado Space Grant Consortium has been elected chair of the National Council of Space Grant Directors as well as chair of the Executive Board for the National Space Grant College & Fellowship Program.

Victor Bright of mechanical engineering has been named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Y.C. Lee of mechanical engineering was selected to receive the ASME Electronics Packaging Applied Mechanics Award.

Alan Weimer of chemical and biological engineering received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Dept of Agriculture and U.S. Dept of Energy to develop rapid solar-thermal chemical reactor systems for the conversion of biomass material to syngas. The grant is part of an $18.4 million USDA/DOE package funding 21 biomass research and development demonstration projects over three years.

Students
Steven DeGroot, a senior in civil engineering and member of the Navy ROTC, was awarded the first CU Proud Award, created by the CU Parents Association to recognize students who demonstrate character, service, courage, compassion, and moral values.

Laurren Kanner, a graduate student in aerospace engineering sciences, was the only student to serve on the planning committee for the third annual K-12 outreach conference focusing on space exploration at the Colorado Convention Center. A dozen CU aerospace engineering students volunteered for the two-day event, which was co-organized by NASA and AIAA, and was attended by nearly 2,000 youngsters from along the Front Range.

New Faculty & Staff
Welcome to the following new faculty and staff:
Sharon Anderson, graduate advisor, ME
Jennifer Lauer, co-op program coordinator, ChBE
Coral Longmore, accounting tech, AES

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