CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
WHITE HOUSE ADVISER ON TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION PHIL WEISER NAMED CU LAW DEAN
May 31st
“I am delighted today to name as the next dean of CU’s esteemed law school a legal scholar, a public servant and a great thinker and innovator: Phil Weiser,” said CU-Boulder Provost Russell L. Moore. “Phil has amassed a critical body of legal scholarship and has distinguished himself as a researcher, a teacher, and aleader. His work in technology law has made him a seminal figure in that discipline, his leadership in building the Silicon Flatirons Center represents a very significant accomplishment, and I look forward to the energy, imagination and vision he will bring in leading Colorado Law.”
Weiser joined the CU-Boulder faculty as a professor of law and telecommunications in 1999. Prior to joining the White House, Weiser served as the deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Weiser took that post in July 2009, taking a leave of absence from the University of Colorado Law School where he served as a professor of law, associate dean for research, and the executive director and founder of the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship.
“I am honored by this appointment,” said Weiser. “Over the years I have enjoyed the opportunity to work with and learn from the Colorado Law family — its faculty, staff, students, alumni and supporters. I am both humbled and excited by the opportunity to lead this community in the years ahead.”
Before joining the CU-Boulder law faculty, Weiser served as senior counsel to the assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division from 1996 to 1998, law clerk to Justices Byron R. White and Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the U.S. Supreme Court from September 1995 to August 1996, and law clerk to Judge David Ebel at the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver from September 1994 toAugust 1995. He received his law degree from New York University School of Law and his bachelor’s from Swarthmore College.
Weiser replaces David Getches, who is returning to teaching after eight years as head of the law school. Under Dean Getches’ leadership, financing and construction of the $46 million Wolf Law Building was completed and the academic offerings at the law school have been greatly expanded. New programs include an endowed Experiential Learning Program, three Master of Laws degrees, three legal clinics, three certificates and eight dual-degrees.
“I want to thank David Getches for his strong leadership over the last eight years,” said Moore. “Today, CU’s law school is academically sound, a national leader in a variety of legal disciplines, and positioned as one of the nation’s great law schools. It is a great resource for the people of Colorado, and David is one of the key reasons why.”
CU, MIT TOP UNIVERSITIES FOR DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY EARLY CAREER RESEARCH AWARDS
May 17th
The three CU-Boulder winners — Alireza Doostan of the aerospace engineering sciences department, Minhyea Lee of the physics department and Alexis Templeton of the geological sciences department — were among 65 winners nationwide selected by the DOE in 2011. They join four other CU-Boulder faculty selected in the 2010 — the most of any university in the nation — making CU-Boulder and MIT tops in the country with seven faculty each in the DOE Early Career Research Program.
Trailing CU-Boulder and MIT in total awards for the program in 2010 and 2011 were such schools as Princeton University, Caltech, the University of California, San Diego and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“For CU-Boulder to be honored by the U.S. Department of Energy with seven of these coveted Early Career Research Program awards in the past two years is testimony to our excellence as a research university and our ability to recruit extremely talented young faculty,” said CU-Boulder Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. “It also is great news for our students, who will be even more involved in critical energy research efforts that benefit Colorado, the nation and world,” said Sture, also dean of the graduate school.
Templeton will be exploring chemical reactions between water, carbon dioxide and several common minerals found beneath Earth’s surface, including olivine, which become unstable in water and will dissolve. Chemical reactions caused by dissolving olivine can react with and sequester CO2, essentially taking it out of the atmosphere and water and storing it in other rocks.
The twist, said Templeton, is that all of the experiments will be conducted in the presence and absence of bacteria that can survive extreme conditions. She and her team will be using high energy X-rays to study how “extremophiles” that can survive such high temperatures and pressures in the deep subsurface might change the reaction pathway involved in dissolving the rocks, producing new minerals, or creating other greenhouse gases like methane.
Lee’s research is focused on uncovering and identifying new states of matter resulting from strong interactions between electrons. The effort involves studying new materials with unusual properties, such as novel magnetism or unconventional superconductivity.
In addition to the fundamental interest in discovering new states, there is great potential for new technological applications in the future, according to Lee.
Doostan’s research centers on developing scalable computational techniques for uncertainty representation and propagation in complex engineering systems. To enhance the credibility of simulation tools and increase confidence in model predictions, Doostan and his group construct probabilistic approaches to characterize uncertainties and their impacts on model predictions.
One of Doostan’s research efforts will be to attempt to improve simulation-based prediction of failure mechanisms in lithium-ion batteries.
To be eligible for the DOE Early Career Research awards, researchers must have received their doctorates in the past 10 years and be untenured, tenure-track assistant or associate professors at U.S. academic institutions or full-time employees at DOE laboratories. The three CU-Boulder faculty winners in 2011 were selected from a pool of more than 1,000 applicants, as were CU-Boulder’s 2010 winners.
The four 2010 recipients from CU-Boulder were Michael Hermele, Alysia Marino and Tobin Munsat of the department of physics and Arthi Jayaraman of the department of chemical and biological engineering.
There was one other DOE Early Career Award winner from Colorado in 2011 — Zhigang Wu from the Colorado School of Mines, who will be studying quantum mechanical simulations of complex nanostructures for photovoltaic applications.
For more information on the DOE awards go to http://science.energy.gov/news/in-the-news/2011/05-06-11/.