Posts tagged education
Open Space and Mountain Parks receives Excellence in Working with the Disabled Award
Jul 29th
“OSMP is very honored to receive this award,” said Downham. “Connection with nature and the outdoors is important for everyone, including the disabled.”
OSMP provides access to the outdoors for people with disabilities through numerous accessible trails and trailheads. An online wheelchair-accessible trail guide is available at www.osmp.org. Many free educational hikes are also available to people with disabilities, and most are led by a person with a disability.
CCDC is Colorado’s only statewide organization run by and for people with all types of disabilities. CCDC enforces and implements the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) statewide, provides quality advocacy assistance to thousands, works with allied disability organizations on important issues, and offers expertise on creating polices and legislation benefitting people with disabilities throughout Colorado. The CCDC’s Annual Disability Awards honors those whose work has enriched or benefitted the lives of people with disabilities statewide.
NASA MISSION TO MARS LED BY CU-BOULDER COMPLETES MAJOR MILESTONE
Jul 22nd
A $670 million NASA orbiting mission to probe the past climate of Mars led by the University of Colorado Boulder reached a major milestone last week when it successfully completed its Mission Critical Design Review by the space agency.
Known as the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, the mission underwent Critical Design Review at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., July 11-15. The independent review board was comprised of members from NASA and several external organizations who met to validate the system design.
Critical Design Reviews, or CDRs, are one-time programmatic events that bridge the design and manufacturing stages of a project. A successful review means the design is validated and will meet its requirements, is backed up with solid analysis and documentation and has been proven to be safe, according to NASA officials. MAVEN’s successful review grants permission to the mission team to begin manufacturing hardware.
“The Critical Design Review is a real benchmark for the MAVEN team as we progress toward launch,” said CU-Boulder Professor Bruce Jakosky, principal investigator for the mission. “We are on schedule and on track, which is good news and a tribute to the hard work by all of the MAVEN team members.” Jakosky also is associate director of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
“This team continues to nail every major milestone like clockwork, as laid out three years ago when the mission was proposed,” said Dave Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “CDR success is very important because it validates that the team is ready for fabrication, assembly and test of all mission elements. It also enables us to stay on plan for launch in November 2013.”
MAVEN will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The goal of MAVEN is to determine the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time. MAVEN will determine how much of the Martian atmosphere has been lost over time by measuring the current rate of escape to space and by gathering enough information about the relevant processes to allow extrapolation backward in time.
“Understanding how and why the atmosphere changed through time is an important scientific objective for Mars,” said Jakosky. “MAVEN will make the right measurements to allow us to answer this question. We’re in the middle of the hard work right now — building the instruments and spacecraft — and we’re incredibly excited about the science results we’re going to get from the mission,” he said.
The spacecraft will carry three instrument suites. The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California, Berkeley with support from CU-Boulder and NASA Goddard, contains six instruments that will characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet.
The Remote Sensing Package built by CU-Boulder will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer provided by NASA Goddard will measure the composition and isotopes of neutral ions.
CU-Boulder will provide science operations, build instruments and lead education and public outreach efforts. NASA Goddard will manage the project. Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colo., will build the spacecraft.
The Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley also will build instruments for the mission. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will provide navigation support, the Deep Space Network, and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
“This is good news for the University of Colorado Boulder that the MAVEN mission has reached this milestone,” said CU-Boulder Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. “Our Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics has partnered with NASA on successful missions to Mars dating back more than 40 years, and we are confident the MAVEN mission will return some of the most exciting data yet.”
The MAVEN science team includes three LASP scientists from CU-Boulder heading instrument teams — Nick Schneider, Frank Eparvier and Robert Ergun — as well as a large supporting team of scientists, engineers and mission operations specialists.
MAVEN will include participation by a number of CU-Boulder graduate and undergraduate students in the coming years. Currently there are more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students working on research projects at LASP, which provides hands-on training for future careers as engineers and scientists, said Jakosky.
For more information about MAVEN go to http://www.nasa.gov/maven.
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GIFT ESTABLISHES ENDOWED CHAIR IN FINANCE AT CU’S LEEDS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
Jul 7th
The Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder announced today that alumnus Richard “Dick” M. Burridge Sr. (’51 finance) has made a $2.5 million gift that, combined with other commitments, will establish a new chair, the Burridge Chair in Finance, the first to be established within the school.
“This endowed chair is one major step in my drive to advance not only the finance division, but the entire Leeds School to the forefront of business education,” said Dean David Ikenberry. “Given the remarkable Colorado-based investment community, it is fitting and appropriate that this gift be named for one of the pre-eminent experts in investment finance and that, in turn, it will help Leeds educate future leaders in key areas of finance. Gifts such as this are indeed vital for the Leeds School to compete at the highest level.”
Through this gift, Burridge, whose early philanthropic efforts in 1997 also helped establish the Burridge Center for Securities Analysis and Valuation at Leeds, is extending his ongoing support for the school and the center through volunteering and philanthropy. “My gift enhances the efforts of new dean David Ikenberry to expand the depth and quality of the school’s finance faculty,” said Burridge. “It will also help the dean realize the goal of being one of the top business schools in the country.”
The center creates and shares knowledge relating to financial markets, principally the U.S. financial markets. The center also encourages professional investment managers, finance scholars, policymakers and the investing public to exchange ideas, and ultimately helps stimulate relevant financial research to help both markets and investors.
“Dick Burridge Sr. is a longtime supporter of the Leeds School as well as the University of Colorado Boulder campus,” said Phil DiStefano, chancellor of CU-Boulder. “His investment in the endowed chair will enhance the visibility and reputation of the school and further elevate an already very strong finance faculty.”
“Over the past three decades, no one has had a greater commitment to the success of the university, and the Leeds School in particular, than Dick Burridge,” said Michael Leeds, co-chair of the Creating Futures campaign for the Leeds School of Business.
“He has been a true partner to the school and the CU Foundation as the Investment Policy committee chair. It is no surprise that Dick is spearheading the recent public announcement of the Creating Futures campaign with this wonderful gift,” said Leeds.
The Burridge gift is one of the first major gifts announced during the public phase of the Creating Futures fundraising campaign launched in April 2011. Since inception in 2006, the campaign has raised over 200,000 gifts toward a goal of $1.5 billion to support teaching, research, outreach and health programs on the University of Colorado’s four campuses.