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The National Science Foundation’s CAREER award is among the most prestigious honors supporting junior faculty doing outstanding work integrating research and education toward a meaningful social impact. The CAREER award is highly competitive and is a strong indicator of future research success.

Award criteria focus on intellectual merit and broad impact—the NSF awards academic role models who have a plan to explore a body of significant research in their field. This balance of the desire to educate students within a pursuit of deep inquiry toward a purposeful goal is the signature of CAREER award winners.

At ATLAS Institute, we are proud to have had five faculty members who have received CAREER awards out of the nine so far who have been eligible. This remarkable achievement speaks to the nature of our research community as one that empowers creative engineers to bring their full selves to their work.

• Ben Shapiro, Computer Science (2015):
• Laura Devendorf, Information Science (2020):
• Danielle Szafir, Computer Science (2021):
• Grace Leslie, Music (2022):
• Carson Bruns, Mechanical Engineering (2023):

ATLAS Director Mark D Gross explains faculty hiring: “Rather than saying, ‘We specifically want to hire a brain scientist,’ we say, ‘We just want to hire a really brilliant person.’ We seek applicants who are interesting to us and who are going to do great work. We believe in them.”

The power of the research

The University of Colorado Boulder is one of only 35 U.S. public research institutions in the Association of American Universities (AAU), a group widely recognized as America’s leading research universities. This emphasis on research undergirds everything we do at CU-Boulder overall and at ATLAS specifically. 

ATLAS Institute is housed under the Research & Innovation Office at CU-Boulder, with degree programs in the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS), itself a heavily decorated and high-ranked college. ATLAS contributes to the research rigor CEAS is known for while pushing the community’s perception of where serious inquiry can spring from. 

For example, recent CAREER recipient and ATLAS assistant professor of mechanical engineering, Carson Bruns, studies new ways to apply nanotechnology for improving human health—but through the lens of “smart” tattoos that can change color with UV light exposure or temperature increases. This melding of disparate lines of interest—nanoparticles, smart technology, human health and body art—seeds unique, useful discoveries traditional methods might otherwise overlook.

Why ATLAS?

So what is it exactly about ATLAS that attracts such talent? Gross says, “Those who know what we're doing tell us we have a really interesting group of people, we’re unlike a traditional department, we’re very interdisciplinary, we blend fields, we’re open to change. Those are the kind of things that attract the people we hire.” 

The term “interdisciplinary” refers to work in two distinct academic fields of study. At ATLAS, we push this notion further, to expand boundaries, to cross-pollinate and change how we think about thinking—deep, focused research into highly specialized topics is essential, but equally important is our ability to investigate ideas across a wide range of fields.

ATLAS faculty have a different way of thinking about problems, one that sparks teams to come up with novel solutions. Despite this often unexpected approach, their research is grounded in the real world, in designing tangible things and in creating tools for others to expand on the core idea. Consider the work that Laura Devendorf, assistant professor of information science, undertakes in the Unstable Design Lab—she develops advanced software that opens the craft of weaving up to new possibilities of form and design, empowering artisans to push the medium forward.

We will continue to champion this expansive view of interdisciplinary research at ATLAS as a model for how polymaths can pursue research that would be unlikely to find a home in traditional settings, particularly in the fields of engineering and design. Our success in attracting CAREER-worthy talent proves the power of our approach to radical creativity.

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Assistant Professor Carson Bruns has received a prestigious   for research that investigates how the art of tattooing can incorporate the latest advances in nanotechnology to improve human health.

The National Science Foundation CAREER Award recognizes exemplary faculty in the early stages of their career with awards given out over five consecutive years. Bruns’ award is for $605,000.

A faculty member of the ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, Bruns traces his research back to a realization that ordinary tattoo pigments – which have been implanted in human skin for millennia using the simplest of tools – are essentially nanoparticles. And yet the modern tools of nanotechnology have scarcely been brought to bear on the practice of tattooing.

With this funding, Bruns wants to help make the next generation of tattoos not only beautiful but functional, too.

“Many different nanoscale sensors and devices are now available,” said Bruns, “and the skin offers an optimal site for implanting them, especially when you consider how they might give us the ability to sense and monitor vital health factors.”

Bruns has already begun to develop these “smart” tattoos. One health risk Bruns is tackling in his lab is skin cancer. Despite widespread public education about the risks of UV exposure, cases continue to rise every year in the United States, driving the search for new prevention strategies.

Bruns’ unique contribution to this effort is a tattoo ink that is invisible unless exposed to UV light, when it turns blue. When the ink is used to tattoo a “solar freckle” on, say, an individual’s arm, then its appearance is a signal to reapply sunscreen, making the freckle disappear.

Working through Venture Partners—a CU Boulder office that helps commercialize faculty research and patents—Bruns and his former PhD Jess Butterfield co-founded HYPRSKN, a biotech company that will bring this and similar inventions to market. 

“Bruns brings a degree of playfulness and energy to all of his projects,” Butterfield said. “He leads by example and inspires everyone around him to be a better researcher, scientist and human.”

Another product from HYPRSKN is . “This is exciting for body artists,” said Bruns, “since you can selectively activate which parts of the tattoo to turn on and off, changing the design of it at your will.”

Bruns is also working on a “thermometer” tattoo that uses temperature-sensitive inks. If tattooed somewhere on the body not affected by external temperature fluctuations, such as the inside lip, a scale of colored bars could indicate whether one is running a fever. 

Although tattooing has been used safely for millennia, a major barrier to ushering in the next generation of “smart tattoos” is a lack of knowledge about their biocompatibility, which Bruns aims to change. “I want to lay the groundwork for scientists, so they can awaken to the benefits of nanoengineered skin implants,” he said.

With support from his NSF CAREER award, Bruns plans to create a library of nanoparticles with systematic variations in size, composition, surface chemistry, density and stiffness. He then plans to test how those variations impact factors like immunogenicity, toxicity and the tendency of the nanoparticles to migrate in the human body.

“For example, we want to see if larger, denser particles minimize migration,” said Bruns, “and if softer particles will be less pro-inflammatory by mimicking the mechanics of native tissue.”

Drawing from this store of knowledge, Bruns hopes to establish general guidelines that will ensure safety of both ordinary tattoo pigments and the next generation of “smart” tattoos.

Bruns also recognizes that his art-meets-science approach to research could help attract people who otherwise might not be interested in STEM fields. He plans to integrate research and teaching activities by offering a hands-on workshop called “Tattoo-a-Fruit,” which leads participants on an experiential journey from body art to biomedical research.

Bruns is one of six faculty members from the College of Engineering and Applied Science received NSF CAREER Awards in 2023.

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The work of chemists permeates almost every aspect of modern life, from engineering life-saving vaccines and medicines to supporting industry, agriculture, material science and the energy sector.

Given the importance of their work, it’s a little surprising that in an age of automation, some of the most time-consuming tasks chemists perform are accomplished much as they were a century ago: Lab processes are often manual and repetitive, and they frequently require a great deal of low-level task monitoring. Efforts to change this have been limited, primarily because chemistry labs are such high-risk environments—toxic chemical exposure, fires and explosions lead to tens of thousands of injuries each year.     

However, a team of researchers at CU Boulder was recently awarded $1.8 million by the National Science Foundation for a project, titled "Human-Robot Collaboration for the Future of Organic Synthesis," to help change this. Led by Carson Bruns, assistant professor of mechanical engineering with the ATLAS Institute, the team aims to shift some of the most time-consuming tasks to robots by developing new, open-source robot software and innovative hardware designs. 

“Our goal is to develop technology that can be the hands of the chemists,” says Bruns, “freeing them up so they can do the hard cognitive work that only people can do.” Advances in robotic chemistry assistants could help transform synthetic chemistry worldwide, accelerating progress in critical fields like biomedicine, material science, and energy production and storage.

Divided over four years, the award falls under the Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier, an NSF initiative focused on augmenting human performance by developing more sophisticated human-technology partnerships. Bruns’ principal CU-based collaborator is Alessandro Roncone, assistant professor of computer science at CU Boulder. A third partner on the project is Dan Szafir. A colleague of Bruns’ at the ATLAS Institute until Spring 2021, Szafir is now an assistant professor of computer science with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where his work will be supported with $600,000 of the total award amount.

This isn’t Bruns’s first foray into chemistry-related automation. For the last three years, a PhD candidate he advises, Kailey Shara, has been developing a lab robot that automates repetitive chemical reactions. Her latest prototype is able to heat, cool and stir precise quantities of wet and dry reagents—technology she's commercializing with the launch of a private company, Chembotix, which won awards from CU Boulder’s New Venture Challenge (first place) and, in November 2022, Lab Venture Challenge.

Alessandro Roncone works with a student in his lab, the Human Interaction and Robotics Group.

Complementing Bruns’ knowledge in chemistry automation, Roncone brings critical skills to the project with expertise in human-robot interaction. Director of the Human Interaction and Robotics [HIRO] Group in the Department of Computer Science, Roncone specializes in developing robotic technologies that facilitate close, natural and extended cooperation with people. 
 

However, designing a robot that can operate alongside people in cluttered and crowded spaces where dangerous chemicals are present, is no small challenge. Most mobile robots currently rely on visual cues for navigation, but when objects or people obscure lines of sight, visual information has limitations. To address this issue, Roncone plans to incorporate a flexible artificial skin on the robot that is equipped with accelerometers, along with proximity and pressure sensors. “For a robot to be effective in this context, its actions must build confidence and trust,” says Roncone. “It’s not enough that it never collides with anything or anyone; people must also feel comfortable and safe working alongside it.” 

They will be adapting a sophisticated commercial robot that was purchased in 2019 with funds from a joint proposal submitted by Szafir and Bruns. While still at ATLAS, Szafir used the robot for several studies aimed at developing software to facilitate robot-human collaboration: One focused on improving a robot’s ability to select specific objects in a cluttered space based on verbal cues from a human. Another was aimed at helping robots recognize active group conversations that should not be interrupted. Szafir’s role will be to continue this work, shaping software to achieve the team’s objectives. 

Final confirmation for the award came through from the NSF in September. It was a moment to celebrate to be sure, and also the moment when aspirations become a concrete challenge. 

The team begins with a deep well of relevant experience and knowledge, and their work has the potential to accelerate chemistry research in many different fields. It will also have wide-ranging impacts on similar development in other fields—a robot that is able to move around a crowded chemistry lab, performing useful tasks while safely handling dangerous chemicals will be capable of many less challenging tasks. 

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