CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Campus Alerts system gets a test Friday
Dec 3rd
The University of Colorado Boulder will test the Campus Alerts system on Friday, Dec. 6, at noon to raise awareness of how the campus community will be notified in case of a campus emergency. The test will include text messages, emails, social media and website announcements. Annual testing of emergency notification systems is required by the Clery Act, a federal law.
“As we saw during the recent floods, emergencies can happen quickly and without warning,” said Stuart Pike, CU-Boulder emergency management director. “The Campus Alerts system is our most effective means of communicating key safety messages to the campus community. It’s important for students, faculty and staff to be aware of this critical messaging platform.”
If the emergency involves a threat to personal safety or a campus closure, a campus alert will be sent using one or all of the communication methods available. Text messaging is the backbone of the system as it reaches the most individuals in the least amount of time.
More than 90 percent of CU-Boulder students, faculty and staff are registered for the Campus Alerts system and over 90 percent of those have at least one mobile device registered, according to Pike.
During an emergency that affects the campus, critical updates, additional details, and any necessary instructions regarding the nature of the emergency will be posted at http://alerts.colorado.edu, university social media sites, and on the campus Emergency Information Line at 303-492-4636 (303-492-INFO).
Active CU-Boulder student email addresses (@colorado.edu) are automatically registered and the university encourages students to add mobile phone numbers in order to receive text notifications as well. Faculty, staff, or affiliates of the CU-Boulder community with an @colorado.edu (or cufund.org, or cu.edu) e-mail address are encouraged to register on a voluntary basis. Additional information is available at http://alerts.colorado.edu.
Details on the decision process for determining a closure, how administrative leave should be handled for essential personnel and other employees, and answers to questions that frequently arise are covered in “Campus Closing Procedures During Emergencies” located at http://www.colorado.edu/policies/campus-closing-procedures-during-emergencies.
Any user who expected to receive an alert and didn’t, or who needs help signing up for the system, should call the IT Service Center at 303-735-HELP or email help@colorado.edu.
CU’s Mars mission off the ground
Nov 19th
NASA’s Mars mission led by CU-Boulder
successfully launches from Florida
successfully launches from Florida
A $671 million NASA mission to Mars led by the University of Colorado Boulder thundered into the sky today from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 1:28 p.m. EST, the first step on its 10-month journey to Mars.
Known as the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission, the MAVEN spacecraft was launched aboard an Atlas V rocket provided by United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Colo. The mission will target the role the loss of atmospheric gases played in changing Mars from a warm, wet and possibly habitable planet for life to the cold dry and inhospitable planet it appears to be today.
MAVEN spacecraft hauls CU research into space
“Our team is incredibly excited,” said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN’s principal investigator who is at CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). “Everything went absolutely perfectly, exactly as we had planned when we accepted the challenge to develop this mission five years ago. Now it’s on to Mars.”
The spacecraft is carrying three instrument suites. LASP’s Remote Sensing Package will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere, while the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will measure the composition of neutral gases and ions.
The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California, Berkeley, with some instrument elements from LASP and NASA Goddard, contains six instruments to characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of Mars.
NASA selected the MAVEN mission for flight in 2008. Scientists think Mars was much more Earth-like roughly four billion years ago, and want to know how the climate changed, where the water went and what happened to the atmosphere, said Jakosky, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department.
CU-Boulder also is providing science operations and directing education and public outreach efforts. NASA Goddard provided two of the science instruments and manages the project. In addition to building the spacecraft, Lockheed Martin will perform mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is providing program management via the Mars Program Office, as well as navigation support, the Deep Space Network and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
MAVEN is slated to begin orbiting Mars in September 2014. For more information about MAVEN visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/ and http://www.nasa.gov/maven.
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CU professor Steven Pollock is the BEST!
Nov 14th
CU-Boulder physicist Steven Pollock
named a 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year
named a 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year
University of Colorado Boulder physics Professor Steven Pollock has been named a 2013 U.S. Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Pollock is the second CU-Boulder faculty member to win a national Professor of the Year award. Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, also a physics professor, was honored with the designation in 2004.
POLLOCK WAS NAMED BEST PROFESSOR IN THE COUNTRY FOR 2013
“We are delighted to again have one of our professors named U.S. Professor of the Year,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “Steven Pollock’s work is a credit to him, our physics department and the dynamic teaching and research of our entire faculty.”
The U.S. Professor of the Year awards recognize the most outstanding undergraduate instructors in the country. Each year, a professor is chosen from four institutional categories.
Pollock, who is being honored in the category of doctoral and research universities, was chosen from a field of more than 350 distinguished nominees from across the country.
Pollock began teaching at CU-Boulder in 1993, when he took a job as an assistant professor in the field of theoretical nuclear physics. Over the last two decades, he has taught the full range of physics classes available to undergraduates, from introductory level courses, including the Physics of Sound and Music, to upper-division classes for physics majors, such as Principles of Electricity and Magnetism II, which he is instructing this semester.
“I care a lot about every student in my class, from introductory non-majors to advanced students,” Pollock said. “Some of them start out dreading physics, and it’s a real pleasure watching them turn on to the topic. It’s wonderful to help people see that physics is about their life, that physics is relevant to their future, that it’s interesting, a powerful way of examining the world around them, and that they can do it.”
Pollock says his teaching philosophy is rooted firmly in using strategies that have been proven to work. “Whenever possible, we should use evidence-based research to support whatever we do in class,” he said.
Pollock’s passion for teaching has overflowed into his research career—he now studies the effectiveness of different pedagogical techniques, especially in upper-division physics classes—and has earned him numerous teaching laurels.
Pollock received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in STEM Education, Innovation and Research in 2009; the CU President’s Teaching Scholar award in 2008; the Sigma Pi Sigma Favorite Physics Professor award multiple times; CU-Boulder’s Best Should Teach gold award in 2006; and the Boulder Faculty Assembly Teaching Excellence Award in 1998, among others. He became a Pew-Carnegie National Teaching Scholar in 2001.
Pollock’s teaching successes reflect on the larger culture of CU-Boulder’s Department of Physics, which values effective teaching.
“The people who created the culture that teaching is important were the legends in this department’s history, like Al Bartlett, George Gamow, Jack Kraushaar and John Taylor,” said Professor Paul Beale, chair of the physics department. “They conveyed to the young assistant professors that teaching is rewarding, valued and appreciated.”
CU-Boulder’s physics department has produced four University of Colorado President’s Teaching Scholars.
Pollock is being honored today at a luncheon at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.
This year, a state Professor of the Year award also is being given in 36 states. CU-Boulder has been honored with three state winners in previous years: physics Professor John Taylor in 1989, chemical engineering Professor Klaus Timmerhaus in 1993 and anthropology Professor Dennis Van Gerven in 1998.
CASE and the Carnegie Foundation have been partners in offering the U.S. Professors of the Year awards program since 1981.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center that supports needed transformations in American education through tighter connections between teaching practice, evidence of student learning, the communication and use of this evidence, and structured opportunities to build knowledge.
Headquartered in Washington, D.C., with offices in London, Singapore and Mexico City, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education is a professional association serving educational institutions and the advancement professionals at all levels who work in alumni relations, communications, fundraising, marketing and other areas.
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