Major gift to SEEC caps decades of service, giving

Bob and Nancy Sievers make generous contribution to new Sustainability, Energy and Environment Complex at CU-Boulder

Following four decades of service in a host of roles and several gifts to the University of Colorado Boulder, Bob and Nancy Sievers have made a major capstone contribution to advance the development of the new laboratory and office complex at Colorado Avenue and Foothills Parkway in Boulder, dedicated to sustainability, energy and environmental research, informally called “SEEC.”

In the last five decades, Sievers has served in many roles: chemistry professor, chair of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, public-health pioneer, lunar-dust scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and, by the way, sculptor.

In the atrium of CU-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), natural light illuminates a marble sculpture called the “Seat of Wisdom.” Sievers carved the sculpture himself and directed CIRES itself for 13 years.

If the university is a seat of wisdom, Sievers personifies the metaphor.

The public might know him as the former CU regent who catalyzed the move of the university’s medical campus to the former Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, as a leading force in transforming the CU-Boulder campus into a hub of environmental research and scholarship, or as an indefatigable crusader in the effort to eradicate measles worldwide with dry, inhalable vaccines.

Now, Bob and Nancy Sievers are investing in another seat of wisdom, the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Complex now being completed on CU Boulder’s East Campus.

But for more than a decade, Sievers has worked to wipe measles off the map. He and his colleagues have spent years working toward that goal, propelled by a $20 million grant that he won competitively from the Gates Foundation to lead an international group of 35 scientists, engineers, physicians and students to create better vaccines and devices for processing and delivering pharmaceuticals.

Sievers has been particularly instrumental in developing and testing a ground-breaking inhalable vaccine that, he and his colleagues believe, could help eliminate measles, which kills approximately 400 children a day worldwide.

The inhalable measles vaccine, which has been covered in The New York Times and on CBS News, eliminates needles along with their waste and danger.

About 60 percent of vaccines that are manufactured are never used. Once a dried measles vaccine is mixed with water for injection, it must be used within hours or discarded.

Developed by Aktiv-Dry, a company Sievers co-founded in 2002, the inhalable measles vaccine addresses those shortcomings. The vaccine is dried in clean conditions, and, without needles, it carries a low risk of infection from contaminants. The vaccine is delivered via a PuffHaler®, the company’s fine particle dry-powder aerosol delivery system.

The inhalable vaccine is also cost-effective. At 27 cents per dose, it costs about the same as the needle-delivered aqueous vaccine.

An independent study commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation compared four different measles-vaccines delivery systems, including the Aktiv-Dry inhalable powder. Over four decades, the study concluded, dry inhalable measles vaccines could save up to $700 million—mostly from eliminating wasted vaccine and avoiding the cost of needle disposal.

Sievers’ team has found that the dry-powder vaccine was comparably effective to the injectable vaccine in cotton rats. In another study, researchers found that the inhalable vaccine fully protected rhesus monkeys against the measles virus.

And a preliminary Phase I clinical trial of 60 adults in India found the inhalable vaccine to be safe, with no adverse events observed. Further clinical trials of Sievers’ inhalable vaccine will depend on finding new investors.

In pursuit of the public good

Sievers is an analytical chemist who worked for the Air Force and led the chemical analysis of moon rocks carried back to Earth by Apollo missions. In 1984, he co-founded Sievers Instruments, a company ultimately acquired by GE; it manufactured highly sensitive instruments to analyze trace organic chemicals.

Sievers has advised 40 doctoral students in analytical chemistry at CU-Boulder. He and his students have written more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters that have been cited by more than 6,000 other research groups.

“Although there are many within the University of Colorado family who have served our institution with honor and distinction, I know of no one who has done so with more effectiveness, enthusiasm and loyalty than Bob Sievers.”

Sievers and his colleagues have been awarded 40 U.S. and foreign patents, with others pending. His list of awards and professional/service activities stretches over a page and a half.

Peter Steinhauer, a retired oral surgeon who graduated from CU-Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences in 1958, served with Sievers on the Board of Regents for a decade.

Steinhauer emphasizes the importance of CU’s acquiring the Fitzsimons Army Hospital and its transformation into the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.  “As chair of the Board of Regents at the time, Bob was the leader of this remarkable undertaking to what is today one of the greatest health sciences centers in the world,” Steinhauer says.

Finding those who contribute in as many ways as Sievers has is rare, Steinhauer adds. “The children of India, the citizens of Colorado and the University of Colorado are among the recipients of his generosity and expertise.”

“Although there are many within the University of Colorado family who have served our institution with honor and distinction, I know of no one who has done so with more effectiveness, enthusiasm and loyalty than Bob Sievers.”

Barrie Hartman, former executive editor of the Boulder Daily Camera and, like Steinhauer and Sievers, a member of the Boulder Rotary Club concurs.

“To me, Bob Sievers has always stood as one of our community’s true giants. His spectacular track record as a scholar and scientist has made the university and Boulder proud for years,” Hartman says.

“I have always referred to him with his wonderfully inventive mind as the Benjamin Franklin of today. Ole’ Ben is just plain lucky that Bob didn’t show up on the scene first. He would have been the one to discover electricity and a whole lot more.”

For his part, Bob Sievers gives special recognition to Nancy. “I couldn’t have accomplished anywhere near what I think I have without Nancy’s unfailing support.”

Nancy earned a master’s degree at the University of Northern Colorado in Special Education and taught children with special-learning needs in the Boulder Valley School District; in recent years she has been a volunteer for CU’s Director Club, and in numerous Boulder community activities.

The college sweethearts at the University of Illinois have been married since 1961. They have a son, Eric Sievers, the chief medical officer of Trillium Therapeutics Inc., in Canada, and a daughter, Christie Spencer, who is the CEO of Colorado Can LLC in Boulder, and a graduate of CU-Boulder.

One of their grand-children, Kelsey Spencer, is a graduate of CU’s Leeds School of Business and works in marketing a line of natural cleaning and laundry products at Boulder Clean Corp, while also serving as the new head coach of the Fairview High School Volleyball Team.

STEM education and collaborative research

The Sievers have focused much of their earlier philanthropic efforts on STEM education for women. (STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.) They have funded a STEM scholarship for women. For the last four years, that scholarship has gone to Lexy Kresl, who was a basketball standout at CU-Boulder and gradated in May with her B.A. in integrative physiology.

Sievers recalled an incident that helped mobilize the couple to support STEM education for women. In a Boulder junior high school, “which will remain nameless”, Sievers’ daughter told a counselor that she’d like to take math the following year.

The counselor asked why. “Women don’t need math,” the counselor said.

“We were just infuriated,” Bob Sievers says, adding that the incident occurred three decades ago.

And while CU has made strides in gender equity, Sievers emphasizes that it is also a leader in interdisciplinary research, which he says is necessary to surmount the world’s biggest problems.

Today’s staggering challenges include public-health issues such as preventable causes of mass mortality, including measles. Do these things ever become discouraging?

“Occasionally, but as long as I see people like Bill and Melinda Gates doing what they’re doing with their wealth … trying to persuade people that where you were born and how wealthy your parents are shouldn’t determine what kind of health care you’re going to get, that gives me hope,” he says.

“It makes it possible when I fail to get a grant that I’d hoped to get to say, ‘OK, we’ve got to suck it up and go try again.’”

That spirit and the university’s emphasis on interdisciplinary research illustrate why SEEC is “so important,” Sievers says. “SEEC lets us bring under the same roof a lot of people who will have coffee together and will think of things to (research) together that they would have never have thought of had they been strung out across campus.”

When the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Complex is complete, it, too, will feature a marble seat of wisdom, also carved and donated by Sievers. Like the west campus and other outstanding research centers, SEEC promises to be a hub of research and scholarship, a place for the best and brightest to let their light shine.

For more information on CU-Boulder’s Sustainability, Energy and Environment Complex, click here.

Clint Talbott is director of communications and external relations for the College of Arts and Sciences and editor of the College of Arts and Sciences Magazine.