Education & Outreach

Two University of Colorado Boulder undergraduate student teams have been named among the 11 top winners from a field of 5,636 teams that entered the 2013 international Mathematical Contest in Modeling this spring. Only 375 teams, or 6 percent of those entering the contest, were from the United States. The others were from Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Early next month, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder will begin the painstaking process of interviewing hundreds of undergraduates in an effort to understand why the rates of students switching out of science, technology, engineering and math majors has remained troublingly high over the last couple of decades despite widespread efforts to address the problem.

The University of Colorado Boulder is ranked No. 4 in the nation for graduates serving as Peace Corps volunteers with 93 alumni currently serving around the world, the Peace Corps announced today. Since 2004, CU-Boulder has held a position in the top four among institutions of similar size. CU-Boulder is the fifth highest volunteer-producing university of all time with 2,353 undergraduate alumni having served in the program since it was established in 1961.

Starting in January 2013 it will become easier for students to earn some double degrees on the University of Colorado Boulder campus so that they can complete their academic goals more quickly and with less cost.

Gaping crevasses that penetrate upward from the bottom of the largest remaining ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula make it more susceptible to collapse, according to University of Colorado Boulder researchers who spent the last four Southern Hemisphere summers studying the massive floating sheet of ice that covers an area twice the size of Massachusetts.

Ever wondered who is living in your gut, and what they’re doing? The trillions of microbial partners in and on our bodies outnumber our own cells by as many as 10 to 1 and do all sorts of important jobs, from helping digest the food we eat this Thanksgiving to building up our immune systems.

Analysis of 90 years of observational data has revealed that summer climates in regions across the globe are changing -- mostly, but not always, warming --according to a new study led by a scientist from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences headquartered at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It is the first time that we show on a local scale that there are significant changes in summer temperatures,” said lead author CIRES scientist Irina Mahlstein. “This result shows us that we are experiencing a new summer climate regime in some regions.”

The University of Colorado Boulder enrolled more international students during the 2011-12 academic year and sent more students abroad during the 2010-11 academic year than any other higher education institution in Colorado. The data, released today by the Institute of International Education in its annual Open Doors Report, shows that CU-Boulder was home to 1,681 international students during the 2011-12 school year. CU-Boulder sent 1,316 students overseas during the 2010-11 school year.

University of Colorado Boulder Professor Bernard Amadei has been appointed one of three new Science Envoys who will help strengthen U.S. ties with other countries to address global challenges, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced today. Amadei, who holds the Mortenson Endowed Chair in Global Engineering at CU-Boulder, along with professors Susan Hockfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Barbara Schaal of Washington University in St. Louis, make up the third cohort of Science Envoys since the program’s inception in 2009.

A new startup company that sprang from the University of Colorado Boulder this year is a Grand Challenges Exploration winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Psychology and neurosciences department Associate Professor Don Cooper, co-founder and chief science officer of Mobile Assay Inc. of Boulder who developed the technology in his laboratory at CU’s Institute for Behavioral Genetics, will pursue an innovative global health and development research project titled “A Lab on Mobile Device Platform for Seed Testing.”