Balaji Sridhar has always liked science, but it was his father’s bad knees that were the impetus for him to study both chemical engineering and medicine.
His father once was a good squash player, but had to give up playing when the cartilage in his knees wore out. With the dual graduate degrees, Sridhar hopes to someday be able to help people like his father who struggle with debilitating joint pain and reduced mobility due to damaged cartilage.
Like many people in the world today, Chern-Hooi Lim would like to do something to stop global warming.
The 26-year-old graduate student is an avid cyclist and a strong supporter of the eGo CarShare program in Boulder. Perhaps even more promising is his decision to pursue a PhD research program focusing on alternative fuels.
Student develops tools to study the effects of magnetic fields on cells
As a yoga instructor, Janet Tsai teaches her students to find equilibrium by feeling it.
It’s a concept that she thinks may work for engineering students as well—and help to transform the culture of engineering so that it appeals to a broader, more diverse range of people.
A variety of public health issues plague the refugees from Burma living on the Thai border, not the least of which is drinking water contaminated by bacteria and pesticides. Yet, few low-cost, sustainable and appropriate treatment technologies are available to people in rural and developing communities to ensure water safety.
CU-Boulder doctoral student Joshua Kearns may have a solution involving a 4,000-year-old technology―filtering water through charcoal―made more robust through intensive research and development.
Sophia B. Liu, whose research focuses on uses of social media in times of crisis and how concepts of history are evolving, is the second student to earn her PhD from the interdisciplinary ATLAS Program in Technology, Media, and Society.
Her dissertation, “Grassroots Heritage: A Multi-Method Investigation of How Social Media Sustain the Living Heritage of Historic Crises,” which she successfully defended in April 2011, investigates the socio-technical practices emerging from the use of social media and how these practices help to sustain the living heritage of historic crises.
Dan Knights is a humble guy, with very little reason to be humble. A short list of his titles includes high school math teacher, computer scientist, and the 2003 Rubik’s Cube World Champion. He has appeared on the Today Show, The Discovery Channel and as an expert on National Public Radio’s “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me.” He also has co-authored 21 journal publications, including two in Science and three in Nature.
Engineering management graduate students are reporting that “capstone” projects are helping them both learn and advance their careers in ways that are tangible and immediately applicable to their organizations. Unlike a thesis or exam that may not apply to real-world situations or use data from an actual company, a capstone project is a mentor-led initiative such as the development of a strategic plan or sustainability plan designed to benefit an organization of the student’s choice.
David Espinoza started collaborating with CU-Boulder remotely in 2007, long before he first enrolled. He had a job at a communications research group in Peru designing wireless networks, when CU-Boulder student Marco Kuhlmann contacted his company about a project to extend wireless coverage into the rain forest.
During his senior year in the aerospace engineering program at CU-Boulder, Lee Jasper was part of a team of students that partnered with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on development of a “mother-daughter” rover concept, a platform for the future exploration of Mars that included a “mother” base ship and two explorer vehicles known as “daughters.”
The student project led to an internship at JPL last summer, during which Lee got to work on the system engineering for a Mars rover planned for launch in late 2011.
Jonah Kisesi wants to be a college professor someday, but first he’d like to work in the aerospace industry and get involved in efforts to help those who are less fortunate in the world. As a PhD student focusing on remote sensing at CU-Boulder, he is taking steps toward all of those goals.
After earning his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, Jonah is now using the space-based global positioning system (GPS) to identify irregularities in the ionosphere, the portion of the Earth’s upper atmosphere that is ionized by solar radiation.
Graduate student Abby Watrous will study in China during the 2009-10 academic year to track a contributing factor in one of the world's worst environmental problems, a research endeavor that is being funded by a prestigious national scholarship.
Watrous, who is working toward her doctoral degree in civil engineering, received a Fulbright Scholarship for an intensive study of the Chinese language and development of hands-on teaching modules in renewable energy for Chinese and American elementary students.
Summer Session
Planning for Summer 2013? Check out the engineering course offerings posted on our website.
Show your CU Engineering Pride!
Wear your status as a CU Engineer wherever you go (or give a gift to a graduating student) with merchandise from the CU Book Store.
CUEngineering magazine
Keep up with the latest news about the college by reading the 2013 issue of CUEngineering magazine online.
