Research & Creative Work 2018-19
The university has again attracted a record amount of research funding, this year drawing an incredible $631 million. This marks the third year in a row the university has attracted more than half a billion dollars in research funding and represents a 23 percent increase over the previous year.
This year’s stories—a cross-section of the trailblazing research, scholarship and creative work taking place across CU Boulder— are as innovative and fascinating as ever. In the following pages, you’ll learn about our contributions to the largest Central Arctic expedition ever, the first U.S. mission to return samples from an asteroid to Earth, and new hope in the battle against antibiotic-resistant “superbugs,” just to name a few.
Main photo credit: LASP/HySICS Team/Joey Espejo.
The Arctic is warming faster than any other region on the planet, with enormous implications for the future of global climate. This year, CU Boulder researchers will play a leading role in a historic expedition to study one of the Earth’s most remote environments firsthand.
Cooking, cleaning and other routine household activities generate significant levels of volatile and particulate chemicals inside the average home, leading to indoor air quality levels on par with a polluted major city, CU Boulder researchers have found.
When CU Boulder Professor Lupita Montoya walked into a nail salon years ago, she was struck by the pungent smell of open chemicals used in gel and acrylic nail applications. The air quality couldn’t be very good in such a confined space with poor ventilation, she suspected, and decided to use her background as a mechanical engineer to investigate further.
With antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” infecting 2 million people per year, and a dearth of new medications in the pipeline to treat them, CU Boulder researchers are taking a novel approach to addressing the looming public health crisis: They’re developing new drugs to make old drugs work better.
With a trophy case overflowing with “most entrepreneurial” and “best in innovation” awards, nearly $2 billion in economic impact from university commercialization efforts, and the recent Innovation and Economic Prosperity University designation from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, the university and community make a convincing case for entrepreneurial students, faculty and community partners who want to turn their ideas into reality.
Researchers from CU Boulder flew drones into severe storms this spring for project TORUS, one of the largest and most ambitious drone-based investigations of meteorological phenomena ever, with students leading much of the work.
On Dec. 4, 2018, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft zipped to within 4.5 miles of the asteroid Bennu. This space rock has an orbit that carries it relatively near to Earth about once every six years.
A large-scale campus collaboration is underway to visually pay homage to the significant contributions CU Boulder has made to space exploration. The SpaceTime Underpass project will be a permanent public art installation inside a key campus pedestrian underpass on Regent Drive.
