Posts tagged applications
Affordable housing funds available
Jun 13th
Three million dollars available for Boulder affordable housing programs
The City of Boulder’s Department of Housing & Human Services, along with the Boulder-Broomfield Regional HOME Consortium, will issue a joint application for 2012 affordable housing funds on Friday, June 10, 2011. The application will be available at www.boulderaffordablehomes.com . Residents can also pick up a copy of the application on the second floor of 1101 Arapahoe Ave. in Boulder or call 303-441-3167 to request a copy.
Funding is available for projects that increase the supply and availability of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income households.
All applications are due by July 14, 2011 at 4 p.m. No late applications will be accepted. For more information about the application or specific questions regarding the affordable housing funding program, please contact Jeff Yegian at 303-441-4363 or YegianJ@bouldercolorado.gov. Additional information is also available at www.boulderaffordablehomes.com.
CU, MIT TOP UNIVERSITIES FOR DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY EARLY CAREER RESEARCH AWARDS
May 17th
Three University of Colorado Boulder professors will receive five-year, $750,000 grants as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program created in 2010 to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce with top young researchers
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/.
“Boulder is for Startups” from White House Office Of Science and Technology Policy
May 13th
On Monday, I had the pleasure of travelling to Boulder, CO, to participate, along with a number of other Administration officials, in the seventh of eight stops that are a part of the Startup America Roadshow. The local newspaper captured some of the high points in this article. Before touching on my observations from the event, let me first answer the question, “Why Boulder?”
Fifteen years ago, Boulder was considered a sleepy college town known mostly for its great rock-climbing. Today, Boulder is home to one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the country, with close to 200 fledgling tech companies and a city campaign that proclaims “Boulder is for startups.” In fact, last year BusinessWeek named Boulder America’s best town for startups, and it was featured in The New York Times for its entrepreneurial scene. Part of its success rests on the fact that Boulder has the highest U.S. concentration of software engineers and PhDs per capita. It is second only to Silicon Valley in percentage of workers employed in the technology sector.
In discussing the success of Boulder as an entrepreneurial success story, I speak from personal experience, having worked at the University of Colorado Law School and run the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship from 1999 until joining the Obama Administration in 2009. The success of Boulder as an entrepreneurial ecosystem is not merely attracting smart people—it’s really about the community. Notably, in Boulder and the surrounding areas, there is an amazing willingness of successful entrepreneurs to help the up-and-comers.
The rabbi of the Boulder entrepreneurial ecosystem—and someone who has done more than anyone to set this tone—is my good friend Brad Feld, who along with his co-founders of the Foundry Group have given enormous time and energy to building an entrepreneurial community. Brad also brought a number of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to the White House last summer to talk about what could be done to celebrate, support, and spur entrepreneurship. Along with input from many others, that discussion helped shape the Startup America initiative.
One of the great success stories in Boulder is the rise of TechStars, which is now the top startup accelerator in the world and a key partner of Startup America. Since TechStars was founded in Boulder by Brad, Jared Polis (now our representative in Congress), and David Cohen, it has since expanded to four other cities, with offices in Boston, Seattle, and New York City. The program accepts applications from early-stage startups and provides them with seed funding and mentorship opportunities from some of the best and brightest minds in tech. Boulder TechStars alums include Brightkite, which was acquired for $1.5 million; Ignighter, which has received $4.2 million in funding; and, Graphic.ly, which also now has received $4.2 million in funding.
Later next week, Boulder will hold its second annual Startup Week. Startup Week Boulder is five spring days full of events and stars from inside and outside the Boulder tech community. From May 18-22, the city’s startups will be rolling out the red carpet for talented developers, designers, marketers, and general startup enthusiasts.
Many entrepreneurial communities ask how they can be the next Silicon Valley? As Brad has often explained, that’s the wrong question. The right question is how any entrepreneurial community—whether Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Phoenix, or Portland—can be the best it can be. Each community has its own particular attributes and leaders. Working together and supporting each other, as Boulder leaders have done, is a core part of building a more successful ecosystem.
Monday’s discussion reflected the level of engagement and thoughtfulness that I have come to expect from the Boulder entrepreneurial community. We touched on a series of topics, ranging from access to capital to attracting great employees to reforming regulation to enabling better technology transfer from government labs. As the Roadshow effort comes to a close, I know that these ideas will inform a number of ongoing policy development and implementation initiatives, including the Commerce Department’s upcoming report on innovation and competitiveness.
Phil Weiser is Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation to the National Economic Council Director
