CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
TWO CU-BOULDER FACULY MEMBERS WIN NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION CAREER AWARDS
Oct 20th
Two University of Colorado faculty members have received prestigious National Science Foundation Early Career Development, or CAREER awards.
Assistant Professor Nils Halverson, who holds faculty appointments in both the astrophysical and planetary sciences department and the physics department, was awarded $875,415 over five years from NSF to support detector development and data analysis for cosmic microwave background studies with the South Pole Telescope.
Cosmic microwave background is relic heat from the Big Bang that scientists can detect with microwave-wavelength telescopes. The light is slightly polarized, much in the way sunlight is polarized when it is reflected off the surface of a pond. The polarization signal is expected to contain tiny ripples from gravitational waves set in motion a small fraction of a second after the Big Bang, said Halverson.
By measuring the signal, astrophysicists can begin to understand the physics of the universe during its birth. As part of the NSF award, Halverson and astrophysical and planetary sciences instructor Seth Horenstein will provide a graduate class focused on observations, data analysis and statistics with conceptual assessment tools, peer-instruction exercises and course notes.
Assistant Professor Amy Palmer of the chemistry and biochemistry department received $831,720 from the NSF over five years to support her research to provide a powerful new approach to illuminate disease-causing bacteria like salmonella that invade host organisms and can produce harmful and sometimes lethal effects.
Many bacterial pathogens use a set of proteins called “effectors” to invade and infect host cells, cooperatively working to hijack cellular signaling and to reprogram the host cell to enable bacterial survival. Palmer and her team are developing a new method that will directly tag a broad spectrum of effector proteins with fluorescent molecules in order to visualize their movements during infection of a host cell.
Palmer’s project also will contribute to a campuswide effort to reform undergraduate science education by developing and validating interdisciplinary, hands-on tutorials that will promote student engagement and transform student learning. She has worked with the Science Education Initiative on campus, which is part of the university’s STEM efforts, to integrate learning assistants into upper division physical chemistry classes, develop pre/post concept tests to measure learning gains and to promote active engagement in the classroom. Palmer also is a faculty member in CU’s Colorado Initiative in Molecular Biotechnology, or CIMB.
SOURCE: CU MEDIA RELEASE
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CU STUDENT’S LIFE PLANS CHANGE AFTER VOLUNTEERING IN RURAL NEPAL
Oct 18th
Taylor Roberts, a University of Colorado at Boulder senior majoring in architectural engineering, is an example of the growing number of CU-Boulder students who are civically engaged.
Roberts is co-president of the CU-Boulder chapter of GlobeMed, a national student organization focused on improving the health of impoverished people. The organization has 19 chapters across the nation that partner with different grassroots groups that work in communities throughout the developing world.
CU-Boulder’s chapter is partnered with Himalayan HealthCare Inc., a nonprofit organization that works to improve health care services, support education and create employment opportunities in villages in rural Nepal.
Before joining GlobeMed, Roberts got his first taste of civic engagement through his involvement in CU-Boulder’s Presidents Leadership Class and Engineers Without Borders.
“Both of these organizations helped push me in the direction of becoming civically engaged at CU-Boulder and becoming active with the GlobeMed organization,” Roberts said.
Roberts traveled to Tipling, Nepal, last summer with the CU-Boulder GlobeMed chapter, where he spent a lot of his time working with Project C.U.R.E.
“Project C.U.R.E. is an organization that donates medical supplies and services,” said Roberts. “They donated $100,000 worth of medical supplies to Tipling.”
The supplies included common surgical instruments, laboratory and diagnostic tools and machines for operating and delivery rooms, according to Roberts.
While in Nepal, Roberts and three other GlobeMed students worked on a community education project, which included teaching a women’s empowerment course and volunteering at two elementary schools. They also built a latrine for the community, a key component of maintaining a clean water supply.
Since returning from his trip to Nepal, Roberts has been focusing not only on graduation, which is quickly approaching next spring, but also on continuing the GlobeMed legacy at CU-Boulder.
“We’ve got our chapter solidified,” said Roberts. “It’s a fairly selective process, but it’s a good opportunity for students to learn about global health issues.”
After graduation, Roberts plans to pursue a professional engineering certificate, a process that will lead to becoming a licensed engineer.
“I want to move into engineering for developing communities,” he said.
Roberts encourages CU-Boulder students to get involved with GlobeMed, especially since the organization works closely with the university to foster a positive environment for civic engagement. His involvement in the group helped change his perspective on the world.
“I’ve traveled around Europe before, but Nepal was life changing,” said Roberts. “I want to spend a lot of time in Nepal and rural communities. That’s the direction I see my life going.”
For more information on GlobeMed, visit http://www.globemed.org/ or e-mail ucboulder@globemed.org.
SOURCE-CU media affairs
CU scientists discover earlier warming period
Oct 7th
If you think global warming is bad, 11 billion years ago the entire universe underwent what might be called universal warming. The consequence of that early heating was that fierce blasts of radiation from voracious black holes stunted the growth of some small galaxies for a stretch of 500 million years.
That is the conclusion of a team of astronomers led by the University of Colorado at Boulder who used the new capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to probe the invisible, remote universe.
Using the newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or COS, the team identified an era from 11.7 to 11.3 billion years ago when the universe stripped electrons off from primeval helium atoms — a process called ionization. This process heated intergalactic gas and inhibited it from gravitationally collapsing to form new generations of stars in some small galaxies. The lowest-mass galaxies were not even able to hold onto their gas, and it escaped back into intergalactic space.
CU-Boulder Professor Michael Shull of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department and his team were able to find the telltale helium spectral absorption lines in the ultraviolet light from a quasar — the brilliant core of an active galaxy. The quasar beacon shines light through intervening clouds of otherwise invisible gas, like a headlight shining through a fog. The beam allows for a core-sample probe of the clouds of gas interspersed between galaxies in the early universe.
The universe went through an initial heat wave over 13 billion years ago when energy from early massive stars ionized cold interstellar hydrogen from the Big Bang. This time period is called the Reionization Epoch because the hydrogen nuclei were originally in an ionized state shortly after the Big Bang, said Shull, also a faculty member at CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, or CASA.
A paper on the subject will be published in the Oct. 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Co-authors included CASA Research Associate Kevin France, CASA Research Associate Charles Danforth, CASA postdoctoral researcher Britton Smith and Jason Tumlinson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
But the Hubble data indicated it would take another 2 billion years before the universe produced sources of ultraviolet radiation with enough energy to do the heavy lifting and reionize the primeval helium that also was cooked up in the Big Bang.
This radiation didn’t come from stars, but rather from quasars, said Shull. In fact, the epoch when the helium was being reionized corresponds to a transitory time in the universe’s history when quasars were most abundant.
The universe was a rambunctious place back then, Shull said. Galaxies frequently collided and this engorged supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies with gas falling in. The black holes furiously converted some of the gravitational energy of this mass to powerful far-ultraviolet radiation that would blaze out of galaxies. This heated the intergalactic helium from 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit to nearly 40,000 degrees.
After the helium was reionized in the universe, intergalactic gas again cooled down and dwarf galaxies could resume normal assembly. “I imagine quite a few more dwarf galaxies may have formed if helium reionization had not taken place,” said Shull.
So far Shull and his team only have one sightline from Hubble to measure the helium transition, but the COS science team plans to use Hubble to look in other directions to see if the helium reionization uniformly took place across the universe.
The $70 million COS instrument, inserted during the final Hubble servicing mission in May 2009 was designed by a team from CU-Boulder led by Professor James Green and was built primarily by Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. of Boulder.
SOURCE: CU-BOULDER MEDIA RELEASE
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