Spotlight on Research - Winter 2010

When we decided to publish this quarterly newsletter I had two major concerns: (i) that I would be unable to keep up and get it done every quarter, and (ii) that we would have enough new information to warrant a quarterly report. The first is still very much a concern; however, the college is so incredibly active that the second was completely unfounded. In fact, there is so much exciting news that unfortunately I have to leave a lot out! 

This quarter the long-awaited National Research Council (NRC) Data-Based Assessment of Research Doctorate Programs in the U.S. was released. The NRC reports on an unprecedented collection of data from programs across the country including information on faculty research productivity, institutional support for students, diversity of faculty and students, and other characteristics. Although there is confusion and debate nationwide about the report and the associated program rankings, the overall results are extremely positive for our PhD programs, with many of them showing considerable improvement since the last report in 1995. Furthermore, our programs are among the strongest on the CU-Boulder campus. The ranking system is complex, with two different statistically-significant ranges of rankings reported. From this, perhaps the most positive way to view them is in terms of the highest ranking received out of the number of ranked programs in the discipline:

• Aerospace Engineering: 2 out of 31
• Chemical Engineering: 8 out of 106
• Civil Engineering: 7 out of 130
• Computer Science: 40 out of 126
• Electrical Engineering: 32 out of 136
• Mechanical Engineering: 6 out of 127

Visit the CU News Center for more details.

In addition to the success of our existing PhD programs, an innovative new one in Interdisciplinary Telecommunications received final approval from the Colorado Board of Regents. In the new PhD program offered by the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program (Tim Brown (ECEE), Director) students will take advanced courses in internet protocol (IP) networking, network security, wireless networks and smart grids, and will research new concepts in telecommunications at the intersection of technology, policy and business. For more information, please visit here.

- Marty Dunn

• Stein Sture (CEAE) named an ASCE Distinguished Member
• Michael Lightner (ECEE) elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering
• Rich Noble (ChBE), above, received the AIChE’s Institute Award for Excellence in Industrial Gases Technology
• Timothy Killeen (ASEN) awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from University College London
• Juliet Gopinath (ECEE) received a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to study phase and frequency control of laser arrays for pulse synthesis
• Daven Henze (MCEN) received a NASA New Investigator Program award to support linking radiative forcing of fine-mode aerosols and tropospheric ozone to precursor emissions
• Stephanie Bryant (ChBE) awarded the 2011 B&B Daniel I.C. Wang Award for her commitment to Biotechnology & Bioengineering
• Christine Hrenya (ChBE), above, received the Best Paper Award by the AIChE Particle Technology Forum at the AIChE Annual Meeting
• Rafael Piestun (ECEE) named a Fellow of the Optical Society of America for contributions to three-dimensional optical systems, nano-manufacturing, and computational imaging and for fundamental studies of multidimensional fields and structures

• Harihar Rajaram (CEAE) – Collaborated with Thomas Phillips and Konrad Steffen at CIRES to find that melt water flowing through ice sheets can greatly accelerate thermal response to climate change; their results were published in Nature.
• Kristine Larson (ASEN) – Collaborated with Eric Small of Geology and John Braun of COSMIC/UCAR on new ways to use GPS satellite signals to measure soil moisture, snow depth, and vegetation growth; their results were published in EarthScope.
• Karl Linden and Fernando Rosario-Ortiz (CEAE) – Used Twitter to make innovative Broader Impacts on their NSF-supported project to study the photochemical fate of a dispersant used in this year’s Gulf oil spill cleanup effort, as reported in Chemical & Engineering News.
• Sea levels are rising in parts of the Indian Ocean, according to a new study by a research group including Balaji Rajagopalan (CEAE), above, that appeared in Nature Geoscience.
• Ronggui Yang (MCEN) and his colleagues in Physics observed and quantitatively measured for the first time the transition from diffusive to ballistic thermal transport from a nanoscale hotspot.  Their research, published in Nature Materials, found as much as a threefold decrease in energy transport away from the nanoscale heat source as compared with conventional predictions from Fourier’s law.
• Will Medlin and Dan Schwartz (ChBE) and their students and colleagues developed highly selective Pd catalysts involving the deposition of self-assembled monolayer (SAM) coatings that improve the selectivity of one part of a bi-functional molecule from 11 to 94 percent. Their research, published in Nature Materials, overcomes a fundamental challenge in heterogeneous catalysis and for many processes including the conversion of biomass-derived intermediates.
• Christine Hrenya and Rob Davis (ChBE) and their students and colleagues created a three-sphere system similar to a Newton’s cradle and coated the spheres with oil in order to study collisions in liquid.  Their results, published in Physical Review Letters and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, were featured in Nature. Fluid bridges between the spheres caused them to stick together after they collided, hindering the transfer of momentum and eliminating the cradle behavior. Guided by their theoretical models, they found that by controlling the volume of the fluid bridge they could restore the cradle action. Their findings are potentially applicable to complex systems involving wet particles, such as mixing during pharmaceutical processing.