Posts tagged CU
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/.
19th annual water festival teaches students how to protect and conserve water
May 4th
More than 1,000 4th and 5th grade students from 44 classrooms in 17 Boulder area schools will take part in the 19th annual “Operation: Water Festival” from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Wednesday, May 11, at the University Memorial Center (UMC) on the campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder, 1669 Euclid Ave.
The water festival engages students in hands-on activities that teach them where drinking water comes from and how to protect and conserve this valuable natural resource. Students attend a series of classes where they also learn about the history, geography and science of water, explore the Boulder Creek watershed and its geology, and investigate the animals and plants that rely on water for survival.
This year marks the sixth year of the Operation Water Festival pre-festival program where teachers and students complete pre-festival activities on fundamental water awareness, conservation, pollution prevention and flooding. The packet includes a complete teacher’s packet featuring teacher’s guides, student worksheets and trivia questions for each water topic. “Water Agents” receive a certificate upon completion of the activities.
A key benefit of the Operation Water Festival materials is the take-home water agent book. This book features homework assignments that encourage students to work with family members to complete the assignments. As a result, parents and siblings alike also learn about water protection and conservation.
Festival sponsors include the Keep it Clean Partnership, the City of Boulder, Northern Water, the UMC, the CU-Boulder Community Relations Office and the Federal Bureau of Reclamation.
For more information, contact Curry Rosato, City of Boulder watershed outreach coordinator, at 303-829-9316.
CU APPLIED MATHEMATICS PROFESSOR HARVEY SEGUR TO RECEIVE 2011 HAZEL BARNES PRIZE
May 2nd
Harvey Segur, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been selected to receive the 2011 Hazel Barnes Prize, the highest faculty recognition for teaching and research awarded by the university.
Segur will receive an engraved university medal and a $20,000 cash award, the largest single faculty award funded by CU-Boulder. He will be recognized at a reception in his honor next fall and at the winter commencement ceremony on Dec 16.
The prize recognizes Segur’s highly cited and influential research on nonlinear waves, along with his exceptional teaching record as a CU-Boulder faculty member since 1989.
“Professor Segur’s transformational teaching and curriculum enhancements in service to our students embodies our Flagship 2030 Strategic Plan to redefine education for the 21st century,” said Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “It is because of faculty like Professor Segur that learning and teaching is one of our pillars of impact at CU-Boulder. But this honor also recognizes his influential scholarly work and service and that is why it is our highest faculty honor.”
Segur is helping to transform undergraduate education at CU-Boulder, focusing on improved student performance in lower-division calculus. The subject is a gatekeeper for majors and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, fields, according to Segur.
To bolster student success in introductory calculus courses, Segur, instructor Mary Nelson and others in the applied mathematics department have implemented more reflective discourse in the classroom through oral assessments. They also expanded CU-Boulder’s Calculus I curriculum to include a two-semester alternative to the usual one-semester course, with the alternative designed to help students with weak mathematical backgrounds. Several universities across the United States are now adopting these reforms.
Segur received a 1994 Teaching Excellence Award from the Boulder Faculty Assembly and was awarded the Minority Engineering Program’s Faculty Award in 1995.
In 1998, Segur was named a President’s Teaching Scholar by former CU president John Buechner. He also served as chair of the applied mathematics department from 2000 to 2003.
Segur was selected to give CU-Boulder’s 97th Distinguished Research Lecture in 2005, the highest honor bestowed by the Graduate School on a faculty member, recognizing an entire body of research and creative work. His talk was on fluid dynamics, describing several types of ocean waves, including common, wind-driven waves and much rarer tsunami waves.
Segur has authored several books and numerous journal articles. He has been a principal lecturer at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. He also has been a guest lecturer in 15 countries including Germany, Russia, Japan, China and Denmark.
Segur has conducted research in various mathematical fields for the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NATO, the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Army Research Office. He also has worked extensively in private industry.
Segur received his master’s and doctoral degrees in aeronautical sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to CU-Boulder he was a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology, an associate professor at Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, N.J., and a professor at State University of New York, Buffalo.
The Hazel Barnes Prize was established in 1991 to recognize the enriching relationship between teaching and research. The prize was named in honor of CU-Boulder philosophy Professor Emerita Hazel Barnes, who taught at CU-Boulder from 1943 to 1986 and is noted for her interpretations of the works of French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. Barnes died in 2008 at the age of 92.
For more information on the Hazel Barnes Prize and a list of recipients visit http://www.colorado.edu/chancellor/awards/index.html.
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