Engineering

Lucas Portelli, a doctoral student in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, wanted to know how electromagnetic fields affect living things.

To find the answer, he went about building experiments. He tried to test the impact of the fields on E. coli, on cancer cells, on fruit flies and even on mice. But he quickly ran into a problem: The magnetic fields in the biological incubators he was using weren’t consistent. In fact, they weren’t even close.

A frigid brine, isolated from the outside world for about three millennia underneath a thick layer of ice in an Antarctic lake, harbors life, according to a research team that includes scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder.
 
The finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a hint to how life might be able to thrive in extreme, icy conditions elsewhere in our solar system, such as those found on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, Jupiter’s moon Europa or on Mars.
 

One CU-Boulder professor’s idea of how to help students learn more grew into such a successful program that it is now a model for schools throughout the nation.

Through the Colorado Learning Assistant Program, more than 1,500 learning assistant positions have been filled at CU-Boulder, helping to improve introductory courses in 10 departments and to positively impact more than 10,000 CU students each year.