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/.
Public input sought on Goose Creek ecosystem restoration project
May 16th
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps), in partnership with the City of Boulder, is accepting public feedback from May 16 through 25 regarding a potential aquatic restoration project. The proposed project would improve degraded habitat for approximately 4,000 feet of South Goose Creek, from Foothills Parkway to Cottonwood Pond, as well as Cottonwood Pond itself.
The proposed Goose Creek Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration Project would be a joint endeavor by the City of Boulder and the Corps. The project would be led by the Corps, which has been working with the city to plan for the project since 2002. These efforts complement the City of Boulder’s “Greenways Master Plan” and past investments in protecting open space.
Under Section 206 of the Water Resources Development Act of 1996, the Corps can undertake restoration projects in aquatic ecosystems, such as rivers, lakes and wetlands, with a non-federal sponsor, such as the City of Boulder. The program provides up to $5 million in federal funding, based on a 65 percent federal and 35 percent local sponsor cost-sharing agreement.
The Army Corps of Engineers has prepared a Draft Detailed Project Report (DPR) and an Environmental Assessment (EA) on the proposed project. The document is posted under “Related Documents” on the project website.
Comments for the Corps should be submitted to:
ATTN: Ms. Cynthia Upah, CENWO-PM-AC
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District
Planning Branch
1616 Capitol Avenue
Omaha, NE 68102
Cynthia.s.upah@usace.army.mil
402-995-2672
NEWLY DETECTED CHEMICAL IN SMOKE MAY HAVE SERIOUS HEALTH IMPLICATIONS, SAYS NEW STUDY
May 16th
Cigarette smoking, burning forests and even cooking fires all release a chemical compound not previously known to exist in significant quantities in smoke and which may have potential human health impacts, says a new study involving the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado Boulder.
The study was conducted by scientists at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES — a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NOAA — along with researchers from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory.
The molecule, isocyanic acid, is similar to methyl isocyanate, the gas that leaked from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984 killing more than 3,000 people within weeks. “The molecule has hardly been measured before — certainly not in the atmosphere,” said CIRES Fellow Joost de Gouw, coauthor of the new paper published May 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “So it was a complete surprise to find it in such large quantities.”
De Gouw and his colleagues were first able to detect isocyanic acid when they developed and tested a new instrument, a mass spectrometer designed to measure gaseous acids in the air. In the laboratory, they found biomass burning — the burning of trees or plant material — produced levels of the molecule approaching 600 parts per billion by volume, or ppbv.
“There is this molecule in smoke that we can now measure and it is there in significant quantities,” de Gouw said. “There are good reasons to believe that it can have significant health impacts.”
In the human body, isocyanic acid dissolves to form charged cyanate molecules, and the researchers found that the acid was very soluble at the pH level of human blood. This means it could potentially enter the bloodstream, said de Gouw. When the exposure levels of isocyanic acid are greater than 1 ppbv, the charged cyanate molecules are expected to be present at levels that can contribute to a variety of human health problems like cardiovascular disease, cataracts and rheumatoid arthritis.
Once the researchers discovered that fires produced the gas at the U.S. Forest Service Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Mont., they then took their instruments out of the lab to see whether smoke in a “real” environment also gave off this chemical. “We had a new tool to look around us and we just explored,” de Gouw said. “It was basically our chemical curiosity at work.”
Previous studies have shown that burning coal produces isocyanic acid, and the CIRES researchers have discovered the chemical also is present in tobacco smoke and smoke from the combustion of other plant materials. In rural areas of developing countries where biofuels are used for cooking and heating, exposure levels of the acid could be harmful, according to the research team.
But does a real fire, as opposed to a lab fire, give off the acid? The team didn’t have to wait long to find out. Starting on Labor Day 2010, the Fourmile Canyon wildfire raged in the foothills above Boulder, Colo., burning more than 6,000 acres and destroying 169 homes. Scientists at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder wasted no time in learning what they could about the event.
The team’s spectrometer detected levels of the acid up to 200 pptv in the air at the site, which was downwind from the fire. “Boulder has a world-class atmospheric chemistry building and only once in its lifetime is it going to have a full-on hit from a wildfire,” de Gouw said. “So just about everyone in that building turned on their instruments.”
One possibility was that the acid would only be prevalent in the immediate vicinity of a fire, de Gouw said. “But that didn’t happen,” he said. “We were miles away and it was still there.”
The researchers didn’t constrain their measurements to wildfires. They also used their equipment to find the levels of isocyanic acid in the urban environment of Los Angeles. “In LA we find even when there are no fires there is a little of this acid,” de Gouw said. “So smoke may not be the only source of it in the atmosphere.”
Since more isocyanic acid was measured in the atmosphere during the day, sunlight could be sparking the chemical reactions that make it, de Gouw said. Another potential source in urban air could be emissions from diesel engines outfitted with the latest generation of pollution control equipment that is now being introduced in California and Europe, he said.
“We know so little about isocyanic acid’s behavior in the atmosphere that we want to do a number of follow-up studies, “ de Gouw said. “We have some data in our paper but that is just the beginning and we need to do a lot more work.”
Other authors on the PNAS paper included Jim Roberts, Patrick Veres, Anthony Cochran, Carsten Warneke, Ian Burling, Robert Yokelson, Brian Lerner, Jessica Gilman, William Kuster and Ray Fall.
