News/Events

As the fall semester starts at the University of Colorado Boulder, the school’s civil engineering senior students may be eyeballing one of the last classes of their undergraduate career: their capstone design project.

Professor Joseph Ryan’s Oil and Gas Contamination of Jackson County Waters project is one of 33 faculty-led projects selected to receive the CU Boulder Outreach Award for 2019-20. The Outreach Awards were created 20 years ago to fund university research, teaching and creative work that has a direct impact on public needs.

Kyri Baker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering. Her work focuses on how buildings and the grid can work together in order to improve renewable energy integration.

Senior Professional Research Associate Renée Railsback was awarded the National Local Technical Assistance Program Achievement Award at the association’s conference in Vermont this month.

Molenaar’s research revisited a 20-year-old report that compared performance results from projects using “design-build,” “design-bid-build” and “construction manager at risk.” It updated the median performance benchmarks for project delivery systems using a new sample of 212 contemporary projects, comparing them to the results from 351 projects used in the 1998 survey.

The U.S. Department of Energy has named CU Boulder one of 11 finalists in the national Solar Decathlon Build Challenge, which means the team can begin building its renewable energy-powered home.

Four CU Boulder researchers received best paper awards at the American Society for Engineering Education’s 126th Annual Conference and Exposition in Tampa, Florida. Professor Angela Bielefeldt, research associate Daniel Knight, undergraduate David Zhao and PhD student Maddie Polmear were recognized for their hard work on three influential papers.

Professor Srubar’s research got featured on 9 News. Srubar's goal is to create a living hybrid building material that exhibits both structural and biological function. The possibilities for his work are endless and especially interesting in extreme environments and military applications. Bricks could self-heal after natural disasters or enemy fire, or act as alarms by changing color when there are toxins in the air.

"This is not a problem that’s going away," emphasized Paul Chinowsky, a civil engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder. "The impacts are not something that is 10 years away," he added. "It's something that’s happening right now."

ShanghaiRanking Consultancy’s Global Ranking of Academic Subjects has taken notice of the quality of CU Boulder’s programs, ranking environmental science and engineering 26th overall and water resources 15th overall in its 2019 report.