Posts tagged CU-Boulder
CU-Boulder professor inducted into American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Oct 27th
She was elected to the academy in recognition of her exceptional achievements in scientific research. Among the other 218 new members elected this year were U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actor and director Clint Eastwood, journalist Judy Woodruff and Amazon.com founder and chairman Jeff Bezos.
Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business and public affairs.
Vaida’s research uses spectroscopy to explore different chemical reactions in the atmosphere, with many of these reactions having environmental implications. She is the 23rd CU-Boulder faculty member to be elected to the academy.
The academy’s unique strength lies in the distinguished leadership of its 4,600 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members and the wide range of expertise they bring to its multidisciplinary analyses of compelling contemporary issues.
The only other new academy member elected from Colorado this year was Mark Johnston, a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at CU Denver.
CIRES is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. To learn more about Vaida’s current research, visit her laboratory home page at http://www.colorado.edu/chem/vaidalab/index.htm.
Reports: CU degree as good as gold
Oct 15th
nationally for return on investment
When it comes to landing “good paying” jobs and receiving a high return on investment, University of Colorado Boulder graduates are in good shape nationally, according to two recent reports.
CU-Boulder ranked in the top 20 in a recent report released by SmartMoney that rated the return on investment for 50 of the nation’s priciest colleges for out-of-state tuition. CU-Boulder, at No. 19, finished just behind Princeton University and ahead of Harvard University, Cornell University and Yale University in the rankings, which compared starting tuition (class of 2009) to recent and mid-career median salaries of graduates.
CU-Boulder also fared well in PayScale.com’s mid-career salary ranking, coming in at No. 35 out of 452 state schools ranked for return on investment.
“This is good news for our graduates,” said CU-Boulder Provost Russell Moore, the chief academic officer of the Boulder campus. “It is good news for the constituents of the state of Colorado and the parents of students who attend the University of Colorado.”
The median salary for recent CU-Boulder graduates (out of school three years) is $45,000, while the mid-career (out of school 15 years) median salary is $87,100, according to figures compiled by PayScale.com.
“What this shows us is the return on investment for our out-of-state students is very good, but for our in-state students, who receive the same median salary coming out of school, the return is even better because they don’t have to put as much money in up front,” said Lisa Severy, director of CU-Boulder’s Career Services office.
There are several reasons for CU-Boulder graduates excelling in the job market, according to Moore.
“For a large research university, we engage undergraduates in experiential learning,” Moore said. “Our students have significant opportunities to engage in cutting-edge research, creative work and studio activities. We engage them at a higher frequency than most other public research universities, in fact, I would argue, many private research universities.”
The interdisciplinary nature of the curriculum at CU-Boulder also plays a role, according to Severy.
“We have a lot of programs that are multidisciplinary,” Severy said. “Since the world of work is multidisciplinary, this training is especially marketable when you graduate, because our students are used to working with other people outside their specific areas of study.”
While proud of the recent rankings, Moore expects the bar to be even higher in the years to come.
“We think we bring a lot of value to higher education and we are very excited about some of our innovative programs that will move the bar even higher,” Moore said.
CU-Boulder wins $1.4 million NSF award for climate change, water sustainability study
Oct 10th
The grant, part of the National Science Foundation-U.S. Department of Agriculture Water Sustainability Climate Program, was awarded to Assistant Professor Noah Molotch of the geography department. Molotch and his team will be identifying thresholds, or “tipping points,” of change in land use, forest management and climate that may compromise the sustainability of the policies and procedures that dictate the timing and quality of water diverted from Colorado’s West Slope to the Front Range.
Molotch said that in Colorado and semi-arid regions around the world, trans-basin water diversions that redirect water from areas of surplus to areas of demand are based on policy agreements and infrastructure operations made under climatic and land use conditions that may differ considerably from conditions in the near future. Measurements over the past 50 years, for example, suggest a broad-scale reduction in snowpack water storage in the western U.S. because of regional warming temperatures, a trend due in part to a shift from snowfall to rainfall, he said.
In addition, land-cover changes associated with population growth, fire suppression and mountain pine beetle outbreaks have altered the hydrology of mid-mountain ecosystems in the West, said Molotch, who also is a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. CU is teaming up with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder on the NSF-funded project.
The NSF award comes on the heels of a May 2012 agreement between water managers in Summit and Grand counties on Colorado’s West Slope and in the Denver area on how best to share water from the Colorado River basin. “This is a great example of communities that historically battled for water resources coming to the table in a good faith effort to find solutions to water allocation issues,” said Molotch. “These groups have no pretenses about the potential impacts of climate change and realize we can’t afford to bury our heads in the sand on this issue.”
Collaborators on the project include Patrick Bourgeron and Mark Williams, fellows at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, and David Gochis, Kathleen Miller and David Yates of NCAR.
A study led by Molotch published Sept. 10 in Nature Geoscience tied forest “greenness” in the western United States to fluctuating year-to-year snowpack. The study indicated mid-elevation mountain ecosystems — where people increasing are building second homes and participating in a myriad of outdoor recreational activities — are most sensitive to rising temperatures and changes in precipitation and snowmelt.
“We found that mid-elevation forests show a dramatic sensitivity to snow that fell the previous winter in terms of accumulation and subsequent melt,” said Molotch, also a fellow at INSTAAR. “If snowpack declines, forests become more stressed, which can lead to ecological changes that include alterations in the distribution and abundance of plant and animal species as well as vulnerability to perturbations like fire and beetle kill.”
As part of the new award, Molotch and his team will evaluate regional climate models in the mountain West developed at NCAR in an attempt to make temperature, precipitation and snowpack projections “more robust,” Molotch said. While the efficiency of water in trans-basin diversion projects in the western U.S. has in the past been enhanced by the natural storage of moisture in mountain snowpack that allowed for a slow, steady delivery of water into the system, warming temperatures are already causing this beneficial “drip effect” to be greatly reduced, he said.
If the winter temperatures are hovering around 15 degrees Fahrenheit and the climate warms by a few degrees, for example, there will be negligible impact on snowpack, Molotch said. But if temperatures hover near freezing, slight temperature increases can trigger earlier snowmelt, and precipitation that used to be in the form of snow turns to rain, significantly affecting trans-basin water diversion activities.
“One of the most interesting aspects of this project to me is the changes we are seeing in the ‘wildland-urban interface,’ particularly in Colorado,” he said. “There is some irony that Front Range people who have built second homes in Summit County, for example, may actually start to have an effect on the water they have relied on to be piped through the Continental Divide to the Denver area.”
In addition to providing land and water resource decision makers with projections on how future water supply and demand will change in the future, the NSF-funded project will provide a unique educational experience for graduate students, Molotch said.
“We have climate change, snowpack, changes in land use, all feeding into the pipeline that is bringing water to Colorado’s Front Range,” he said. “As the two main stressors, climate change and land use increase, there is the possibility of pushing the systems into an unsustainable state.”