AVÃûʪ

The University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science landed three top 20 grad programs today in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2018 edition of Best Graduate Schools across the country. CU Boulder’s environmental engineering had the biggest jump going from No. 21 to No. 9. The...

Donald Strickland has chosen to be prepared in all aspects of his life, and that began with his choice of school to attend and degree to achieve. Strickland is a California native and had a choice of colleges. He was offered athletic scholarships to both CU Boulder and UCLA, a school that was much closer to home, and one where he had family connections. Even though UCLA might have been an easier choice to prepare for with family nearby, he chose to play football for CU Boulder because of the college of engineering.

The flow and movement of individual solid particles — be it grains of lunar dust or the powdered contents of a medication — holds tremendous research value for scientists in a variety of fields. Now, a $3 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) will allow University of Colorado Boulder researchers to simulate particle behavior to a greater degree than ever before.

New oil and gas development techniques like horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing have dominated public concern in recent years about groundwater contamination in oil and gas basins. However, older vertical wells are more likely to cause groundwater contamination than newer wells, according to a new study from CU Boulder.

The research project, led by Richard Noble, Douglas Gin and Hans Funke of CU Boulder’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, will focus on improving the sophisticated membranes hidden inside powerful flow batteries. Unlike small, self-contained consumer batteries (AAAs, for example), flow batteries use external tanks to store the chemicals needed for an electrical reaction. The chemicals are commonly separated by a semi-permeable membrane.

Life is messy, and mostly we use technology to keep it tidy. But is there a place for technology that embraces messiness and unpredictability? It’s a question that fascinates Assistant Professor Laura Devendorf, who came to CU this spring, joining the ATLAS Institute with a tenure home in the Department of Information Science in the College of Media Communication and Information.

You might call someone like Derek Driggs a big-data whisperer, looking through enormous sets of computational information to find what's corrupt or missing. Driggs studies applied mathematics and has become the third CU Boulder student ever to receive the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, established in 2000, for doctoral studies at Cambridge University in England. The highly competitive award is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Zoya Popovic, the Lockheed Martin Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, will visit UT to talk how technology might change the way we communicate, work, and play in the future.

On January 20, The BOLD Center co-sponsored a special viewing of the movie Hidden Figures for students. Initial demand was so large, a second theater was added. All in all, more than 400 students, faculty, staff, and alumni attended the event, which was preceded by a talk by Dean of...