Inside Dragan Mejic’s shop: where students grow and ideas take shape
Dragan Mejic stands in his machine shop in front of a large milling machine.
In February, Dragan Mejic received a 2026 Chancellor’s Employee of the Year Award. Nominated by his colleagues, this distinguished annual award celebrates staff for their outstanding contributions to CU Boulder, going above and beyond their defined job duties to make a meaningful difference.
Step inside Dragan Mejic’s machine shop, and the past and present blurs. Workhorse machines built in the 1950s are still used to cut metal. Raw materials labeled with long-retired professors’ names haunt his shelves.
This is Mejic’s 25th year as the instrument shop supervisor for CU Boulder’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.
“Yeah, a long time,” he says.
His work includes decades of designing and crafting hardware for PhD students, some of whom have gone on to become CEOs and founders of top companies.
When he started his position at CU Boulder, the machine shop, then housed in the Engineering Center, seemed more like a museum, he says. Over the years, Mejic added modern equipment, such as a computerized milling machine, which cuts metal with a rotating tool, and automated lathes for cutting large chunks of stainless steel. Twelve years into his tenure, the shop moved to the basement of the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building, where it remains today.
Everything he does—fittings, lines, connections, custom pieces—involves high-precision work.
“You're talking plus or minus a couple thousandths of an inch, half of a human hair,” he says. “Everything needs to be exact to seal at high pressure and fit together.”
Dragan Mejic and Allan Lewandowski stand beside a solar device used for the Sol-Char sanitation project in 2012. The system uses solar energy to convert human waste into biochar, a carbon-rich material that can improve soil.
Beginnings
Mejic receives his Chancellor's Employee of the Year award.
When faculty receive research grants, they often need specialized mechanical systems to make their experiments possible.
That's where Mejic comes in. Over the years, he has designed and built a wide range of systems, from filtration units that pump saltwater through membranes, to bioreactors for mechanically stimulating tissue grown outside the human body, to ultra-high temperature reactors that drive chemical reactions to produce hydrogen. He’s also engineered advanced materials that combine the properties of base materials with fine powder coatings.
“We’ve maintained a very high success rate,” Mejic says. “Even when something doesn’t work, there’s still value in what you learn. What matters most is generating valid experimental data. Sometimes an unforeseen anomaly can lead to new discoveries.”
Over the years, he’s seen the pace pick up, the research grants becoming more demanding. When Mejic started, sponsors gave researchers two years to report their final results. Now, it’s a conference call each month.
“They want to know what'd you do yesterday? What'd you do today? What are you going to do tomorrow?”
He often works closely with PhD students whose faculty mentors have tasked them with helping develop the platforms for their experiments.
“Some students come to me stressed out,” he says. “Sometimes they cry.”
Figuring it out
Although the graduate students typically have backgrounds in chemical engineering, sometimes their only exposure to mechanical systems was a half-semester senior undergraduate lab.
Dragan Mejic works at a bench in his machine shop.
“You can't build a system if you don't know what you're going to do with it. So it's a back and forth process, with a lot of questions,” Mejic says. “The professors can’t hold everybody’s hands; some groups have 16, 20 people. So they give the students rudimentary instructions: this is what I want you to do; this is the amount of time to do it.”
After determining what they need, Mejic uses computer aided design (CAD) software to create the initial design. He then sends screenshots to the students. “How does this look? Will this fit in your space? What does your work area look like?”
Once Mejic built a system that was so tall it could only be utilized at an off-site partnering company. Other systems are tiny, like the cell he made to test water filtration membranes for the International Space Station. The students now want a larger version made from high-strength plastic.
Mejic constantly juggles projects, shifting between design, drawings, materials, machining and delivery. It can be chaotic and demanding.
“Students usually want stuff within a week,” he says. “I'm pretty fast, but sometimes I can't deliver it when they want it. We have to scale expectations back, but we do our best to make sure they have something to show the sponsor when they have their ‘go/no-go’ meetings.”
Sometimes students wander in the shop. They lost or stripped a bolt, or something’s stuck, and they're unsure how to fix it. Mejic will take 15 minutes to help them. But he’s always thinking about the bottom line, the billable projects.
“This is a cost-recovery operation,” he says. “We bill people per hour, which goes into the shop account.”
Natural talent
Despite time constraints and the pressures of funding, Mejic has a natural talent for working with students and helping them build important confidence and technical skills.
“I see them from the beginning when they know nothing,” Mejic says. “We had an issue yesterday with a leaking heat cartridge. It wasn't something I made; it was something I integrated to the cell. I'm like, ‘Let me think about it. I'm not really sure how we're gonna handle this.’ Then the student and her lab partner came up with a solution.
“She wouldn't have been able to do that four years ago,” he continues. “It’s from being with us and building so many things. The students pick things up quickly, and they want to learn. When I explain something to them, they take it to heart, and it sticks.”
Many students return after finishing their projects to thank him. “A lot of them will come by and say, ‘Hey, I never would have gotten where I needed to go without the stuff you made for me.’ Sometimes they’ll bring a box of chocolates. It’s sweet.”
When he first started, Mejic was close in age to the graduate students. “They’d say, ‘Let's go cycling after work,’ and we’d ride to Lyons and back. Or, ‘Let's watch a movie and have a couple beers.’ It's funny working here. You watch yourself age, and the grad students always stay the same age.”
He still keeps in touch with some of those former students.
“Now the hiring engineers are CU graduates,” he says. “There’s a deep connection with companies built on technology developed here.
“It’s been a long journey."
A half dozen companies have emerged from technology developed in Dragan Mejic’s machine shop. For example, during his PhD, Paul Lichty (MechEngr BS‘06, ChemEngr PhD ’11) worked with Mejic to develop an 1,800° C water-cooled reactor, which was tested at the high-flux solar furnace in Golden operated by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, (now National Laboratory of the Rockies).
Today, Lichty is the CEO of Forge Nano, which recently announced plans to go public. Mejic also built some of the original systems for Big Blue Technologies and VitraVax.
It looks like you played a large part in starting these companies.
Some came in knowing exactly what they wanted me to build, while others had only rough ideas. We built the equipment they used to prove their technology. Once they begin scaling up to the size of a van or larger, they typically move on to other manufacturers. But it can be difficult to find companies willing to build small prototypes while also providing design input at those early stages. That’s the role we filled.
Most manufacturers focus either on very large systems or high-volume production. They’re not interested in making just a few units. We fill that gap. R&D manufacturing is a niche space, and even among those who do it, few offer the kind of design collaboration we provide.
Do you only work with the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering?
I work with anyone who has a speedtype. I’ve built equipment for civil engineering to test the breaking point of concrete, manufactured components for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) supporting Mars missions and the International Space Station and created behavioral mouse cages for the Department of Integrative Physiology. Just about everything, for everyone. We also have private companies that rent space in the building, and I’ve built equipment for them as well.
As you look back, do you have a favorite project?
The Sol-Char team sits together by the solar panels used for the Sol-Char sanitation project.
One project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, focused on developing a sanitation system that used little to no water for use in less developed countries. About two dozen university teams competed at a composting toilet fair in India, and we made it to the finals. Our design for the Sol-Char Sanitation Project used concentrated solar energy to burn waste at ultra-high temperatures. We didn’t use real waste in testing; we used “NASA Number 2,” a synthetic substitute made from cotton, peanut butter, yeast and other ingredients. When we ran it, it smelled like roasting peanuts.
Finding the right components can be a challenge. At one point, we needed a fiber optic cable that could handle 200 kilowatts of concentrated solar energy without melting. We finally found a company that could provide one. Once everything came together, the system performed exactly as intended. The final unit was shipped overseas in an ocean freight container.
In the end, we didn’t make the final cut. Our system was too expensive, too complex and too vulnerable to theft and vandalism. It was, in many ways, too technical a solution for a very basic problem.
Another project that really sticks with me flew twice on a “vomit comet,” a plane used to simulate zero gravity.
The device launched small steel spheres at an oil-coated quartz plate, capturing the collisions and rebounds on video. The interaction between the liquid and solid surfaces has applications in medical coatings. The graduate student who led the work went on to a high-level role at Intel.
It was an especially challenging mechanical system because it could only function in zero gravity. You couldn’t fully test it in a normal lab setting. We did the best we could on the ground, and fortunately, it worked. The footage looked like the wildest pinball machine you’ve ever seen, with spheres ricocheting in every direction. I still have photos of the students floating above the setup in zero gravity.
What does it mean to you to receive this award?
It's nice so many people nominated me and thought highly of my contribution. It's a very big campus. People are scattered across it, and not everyone's aware of everything going on.