Faculty
Assistant Professor Carson Bruns is leading the charge on an NSF-funded project that he and his team like to call "robochemistry." Their goal is to create robotic sidekicks that can assist chemists with burdensome or unsafe tasks that they may routinely encounter in a wet lab. But that's not all: this unique blend of bots and beakers can also inspire youth interest in science.
Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram, in collaboration with Laura Blumenschein, has received a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to develop a tiny robot super team capable of navigating a complex maze of machinery and squeeze through the tightest of spaces—like the guts of a jet engine—to potentially perform non-destructive evaluation faster, cheaper and better than ever before.
Designed to catalyze new areas of research, scholarship and creative work, the Seed Grant Program awards nearly $1 million annually to Boulder faculty across all disciplines. This event will be held at noon on Nov. 8 via Zoom.
The device at Boulder is made from a 10-by-10 grid of soft robotic “muscles” that can sense outside pressure and pop up to create patterns. It’s precise enough to generate scrolling text and fast enough to shake a chemistry beaker filled with fluid.
Srubar is part of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and the Material Science and Engineering Program at Boulder. His lab conducts major research into biomimetic and living materials that have the potential to drastically reduce environmental pollution caused by construction activities around the globe.
Researchers at Boulder have developed a new membrane water filtration system based around air bubbles that can help address water scarcity issues around the world.
Potentially harmful chemicals generated by the Marshall Fire in late 2021 may have lingered inside some Boulder County homes for weeks after the disaster—hiding in small particles of dust that residents could have mixed back into the air when they vacuumed carpets or turned on fans, according to recent research.
Eight faculty members within the College of Engineering and Applied Science have received CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation in 2023.
Assistant Professor Nick Bottenus of the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering has been awarded a Webb-Waring Biomedical Research Award for research advancing the state of ultrasound molecular imaging.
Researchers from Boulder and NASA have completed a census of hundreds of large asteroids orbiting near Earth—gauging which ones could come precariously close to our planet over the next thousand years.