Building energy optimization software jointly created by architectural engineering Professor Gregor Henze and the Chicago-based company Clean Urban Energy, is creating large-scale energy and cost savings while introducing demand flexibility into the urban electric grid.
The technology is part of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that manipulates the performance and electric demand of a building’s heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system by harnessing thermal mass (the mass in and of the building, such as structure, furniture, and books).
Once the optimization system has determined how energy is stored and released by the building’s thermal mass, it implements strategies that optimize the building’s HVAC operations as a function of electricity prices, hourly temperatures, humidity, solar radiation, and carbon emissions.
Clean Urban Energy demonstrated the technology in several large commercial buildings in the Chicago area in 2009, and in 2010, used the software to optimize two office buildings in the Chicago Loop totaling 1.94 million square feet. The company recently completed a licensing agreement with CU granting it the exclusive right to commercialize the software algorithm.
The Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) and Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC) conducted a successful helicopter air-drop flight test of a dynamically scaled model of the Dream Chaser spacecraft at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in December.
The college is looking forward to providing a new, state-of-the-art teaching laboratory for chemical engineering students when the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building is completed in one to two years. The new unit operations lab has been made possible through a naming gift by Chevron, thanks in large part to two CU-Boulder alumni who have continued their devotion to CU throughout their careers.
Continuing their work at the intersection of social media technology and emergency communications, graduate student Kate Starbird and her colleagues have monitored social media use in aftermath of the New Zealand earthquake, along with Twitter postings in both English and Arabic coming out of the popular uprisings in the Arab world. 
A graduate fellowship was renamed this fall to honor Andrew Gelston Graham, a 2008 CU-Boulder civil engineering graduate who was tragically killed in November 2009. The fellowship provides support to outstanding MS and PhD students in the department, including tuition and stipends. The Andrew Gelston Graham Graduate Fellowship was endowed by members of the faculty and named to honor the memory of Graham’s outstanding scholarship as well as his enthusiasm for life’s challenges and promise. 
John Schuenemeyer (ApMath’69, MS’71) authored a book, Statistics for Earth and Environmental Scientists, with co-author Lawrence Drew that has been published by John Wiley & Sons. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware and a fellow of the American Statistical Association. >> 
Peter Binney (MS CivEngr’77) has joined Merrick & Company as the firm’s national director of sustainable infrastructure. Headquartered in Aurora, Colorado, Merrick has 12 offices across the U.S. Binney also has held leadership positions at Black & Veatch and CH2M HILL. He previously worked for the city of Aurora, which named its new $660 million water treatment plant in his honor last fall.
Waleed Abdalati (MS AeroEngr’91, PhD Geog’96) was named chief scientist for NASA and will serve as the principal adviser to the NASA administrator on agency science programs, strategic planning, and evaluation of the agency’s current science investments. He has been an associate professor in the geography department and has directed the Earth Science and Observation Center at CU-Boulder since 2008. He plans to continue advising graduate students, returning a few days a month to Boulder from Washington, D.C.
Jason Burdick (PhD ChemEngr’02) was selected to receive the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Kalpana Chawla Outstanding Recent Alumni Award in May. A former member of Kristi Anseth’s research group, he is currently a tenured associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
Spring has sprung in Boulder. The evidence of snow on campus is slowly melting away, and students are taking every opportunity possible to hit the slopes for spring skiing. Of course the welcoming of spring means the internship search is officially in full swing, senior design projects are well underway, and seniors are getting excited about graduation. Here in the Dean’s Office we, too, are excited about several springtime happenings.
