In 2020 the U.S. saw record wildfires and hurricanes. it as one of the hottest years in recorded history.

As a public research institution, CU is called to address global challenges. The Coloradan aims to examine and celebrate how the university is influencing the world and shaping a better future.

To align with this vision, each issue moving forward will feature stories that examine a topic affecting our world and highlight how CU is creating impact through its collective work and research.

This spring, the topic is climate change.

To further engage readers, the new Coloradan Conversations series will expand on the magazine topics, gathering thought leaders to discuss the most pressing issues of our day.

If the topic and the stories pique your interest, join the next Coloradan Conversation for a larger climate change dialogue with other readers. For more information, visit: colorado.edu/coloradan/conversations

— Maria Kuntz

Contact the editor at editor@colorado.edu 

Off

In 1963, Boulderites started thinking about improving Pearl Street with a pedestrian mall.

But just why did Pearl Street need attention? Boulder, which banned alcohol sales in 1907, was still dry in the early 1960s. Unfortunately, this meant all of the post-World War II commercial growth took place outside city limits.

Then, the Crossroads Shopping Center opened in 1962, sucking business from downtown Boulder like a black hole.

Years passed, and city council members began to wonder if the historic streets of downtown still held interest for the community. In 1976, ten years after the original idea, the City Council agreed to the walkway. I had just joined the council and was able to cast a vote in favor of building the mall.

On a glorious morning in June of 1976, a friend and I cruised Pearl Street in an old VW van. Following us was a public works crew that closed each block — the last car to drive down Pearl Street— as we rode past.

Today, that stretch is graced by Beat Book Store, the County Courthouse and the Avanti indoor food court.

Within days, crews began digging up the street’s decades-old water, sewer and gas lines before the city spent millions paving over new infrastructure with the now-famous red brick.

On Halloween 1976, several hundred costumed pedestrians ventured downtown to inspect the work and strut their stuff. This was the impetus of a now long-standing annual tradition; today, a trip to Pearl Street Mall on Oct. 31 is sure to delight even plain clothes tourists or locals.

The final brick was laid in the spring of 1977. In early August, we had a formal ribbon-cutting, but Boulder residents and CU students were already flocking to it by the thousands.

The next few years were sheer magic as Pearl Street came to life.

New restaurants and businesses opened. The Häagen-Dazs ice cream shop replaced the venerable Valentine’s Hardware store on the southwest corner of Pearl and Broadway —but not before the sheriff carried a box of crystallized dynamite out of Valentine’s basement.

So many musicians wanted to perform on the mall, the city created a two-musician-per-block limit. Boulder discovered it had not just improved Pearl Street — it had built a sprawling village square that redefined the look, feel and character of the town.

In retrospect, I think it did something else: The Pearl Street Mall drew Boulderites and the university community closer together.

Off

Leeds + Techstars Elevate

A new partnership created in November 2020 between the Leeds School of Business and Techstars, a startup accelerator, offers CU students and graduates thousands of job opportunities with companies in the Techstars Portfolio, like the email platform SendGrid and the fitness subscription platform ClassPass. The program also offers students the chance to become associates of Techstars’ accelerator teams around the world. Sharon Matusik, dean of the business school, described the program as a “game-changer” for both students and alumni.

Honoring Inclusive Excellence

In February, the CU Board of Regents approved a resolution to rename two buildings honoring alumni who embody inclusive excellence. The education building will be renamed for Lucile Berkeley Buchanan (Ger1918) in recognition of her lifelong career in education teaching students in the South during the Jim Crow era and in Chicago public schools. Temporary Building 1 will be renamed “Albert and Vera Ramírez Temporary Building 1” to honor the academic and community engagement contributions of Professor Emeritus Albert Ramírez and his late wife, Vera.

Electronic Skin— the New FitBit? 

CU chemistry and mechan-ical engineering researchers have developed an “electronic-skin” made from screen-printed wires and self-healing material that could potentially replace wearable fitness devices. According to the research, led by CU mechanical engineering associate professor Jianliang Xiao and CU chemistry professor Wei Zhang, this electronic skin can help quell electronic waste, which is projected to pass 55 million tons by 2021. “We want a device that is easy to recycle,” said Xiao.

Heard Around Campus:

“The US is responsible for about 25% of historic CO2 emissions and needs to take leadership in addressing climate change. We have already experienced severe impacts, including extreme storms, extensive droughts and record wildfires.”  — Professor Charles Kutscher Dec. 16, 2020 in an interview with CU Boulder Today.

Off

CU Boulder’s College of Music celebrated its 100th birthday in style last year with a stunning 64,000-square-foot, $57 million expansion funded by numerous private donors and a university matching capital grant.

The Imig Music Building expansion was a long time coming. �鶹��Ժ struggled to find enough practice rooms, and rehearsal and concert spaces were too tight.

The expansion includes brand-new rehearsal and recital facilities, an upgraded chamber hall, a rehearsal-performance space with retractable seating, a state-of-the-art recording studio and a dance studio.                        

Innovation was at the forefront of this project, with spaces specifically devoted to exciting new arms of the department: Entrepreneurship, wellness, music technology and interdisciplinary collaboration.                        

Showing off CU Boulder’s trademark sandstone brick, limestone trim and red clay roof tile, the new building offers beautiful gathering places for students, faculty and music lovers complete with sweeping views of the iconic Flatirons. 

Construction broke ground in early 2019 and wrapped just in time for students to cross the new sandstone entrance on 18th Street to start the Fall 2020 semester.

Photos by Skylar Miller

Off

While in quarantine,  CU Boulder professor of piano David Korevaar performed and recorded all of Beethoven’s sonatas on his living room piano.

21

Years on faculty at CU Boulder

3.23.20

First sonata posted to YouTube

6

Weeks to complete the sonatas

32

Sonatas performed

17,621

YouTube views as of Oct. 8

2020

250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth

Cannabis and Pregnancy

Marijuana use during pregnancy has been linked to childhood sleep problems for up to a decade, according to a CU Boulder study, which is the first to suggest marijuana use can impact children’s sleep long term. As legalization spreads, roughly 7% of pregnant women in the U.S. are using marijuana to help curb morning sickness. Lead author John Hewitt, director of CU’s Institute for Behavioral Genetics, said, “This study is one more example of why pregnant women are advised to avoid substance use, including cannabis.”

Teensy, Fast and Strong

Inspired by cockroaches, mechanical engineering assistant professor Kaushik Jayaram created one of the world’s smallest, fastest robots, HAMR-Jr. Weighing less than a paperclip, the four-legged robot is roughly the size of a penny. It is able to carry 10 times its body weight and moves about one foot per second. According to Jayaram, there are a lot of potential applications with HAMR-Jr.,  such as airplane engine inspections or human surgeries. "I want to build robots that can get out of the lab and run around like bugs,” Jayaram said.

New Center to Advance Quantum Science and Engineering 

With a $25 million National Science Foundation award, CU Boulder is launching a new quantum science and engineering research center, led by physicist and JILA fellow Jun Ye. The center will partner with 11 other research organizations in the U.S. and abroad — including Harvard, Stanford and MIT — to create new technologies using advancements in areas related to quantum entanglement, quantum sensing and more. 
“We’re asking how we can take advantage of recent advances in quantum physics to actually solve useful problems for society,” said Ye. 

Everything...connects back to wanting to make sure that Black women in particular — [and] Black people in general — get to pursue [their] dreams in the daytime, not just when everyone else is asleep.”

-Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, during a virtual panel for CU students, faculty and staff on Sept. 16.

Related Articles

Humans do a lot of things with their hands: We squeeze avocados at the grocery store, scratch our dogs behind the ears and hold each others’ hands. These are things that many people who have lost limbs can’t do.

CU Boulder’s Jacob Segil is working to bring back feeling to amputees' fingertips, including veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The biomedical engineer is an instructor in the Engineering Plus program and a research healthcare scientist at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). 

“In my field, we have a gold standard, which is the physiological hand,” Segil said. “We’re trying to re-create it, and we’re still so far off.”

Far off, but closer than you might think. Segil is a participant in a long-running research effort led by Dustin Tyler at Case Western Reserve University and the VA. The team has used a unique neural interface and a series of electronic sensors to recreate a sense of touch for a small number of amputees who are missing their hands. 

In a study published in April 2020 in the journal Scientific Reports, the group demonstrated just how effective this sensory restoration technology can be — helping one amputee experience his hand adopting a series of postures, such as a gesture resembling the thumbs-up sign. 

For Segil, who recently received a $1 million Career Development Award from the VA to continue his work in Colorado, the project is a chance to use his engineering skills to help people.

“As a VA researcher, your work can help people who have served our country,” Segil said. “It’s a powerful motivator.” 

Photo courtesy Jacob Segil

Off

Digits: Safecracking at CU

ONE

Safecracking class offered by the ATLAS Institute

4

Safecracking robots designed by 11 students

33

Minutes robots needed to open a safe (avg.)

7,457

Possible combinations robots tried (avg.)

69

Minutes needed to try all possible combinations

271.3

Pounds of steel robots rendered useless

THREE

Motors burned out

Tech Tattoos for Tracking Health

In the future, tattoos may be more than just a way to express yourself.

Scientists in CU Boulder’s Emergent Nanomaterials Lab are creating “tech tattoos” made up of tiny particles that change color in response to stimuli like heat or sunlight.

The special inks in these tattoos can alert wearers to health risks. One prototype tattoo, for example, only appears in UV light, warning of the potential for sunburn. When sunscreen is applied, the ink disappears. Someday, these tech tattoos could serve many other functions, like revealing blood sugar levels, telling you how much you’ve had to drink and storing heat to keep you warm.

Heard Around Campus

"I believe I will see people on the surface of Mars before I die."

— Allie Anderson, CU Boulder assistant professor of bioastronautics, during a discussion at a campus screening of National Geographic's TV series Mars.

Congressional Papers (and Tweets)

Former Boulder-area Congressman Jared Polis — now Colorado’s governor — has donated his congressional papers to CU Boulder for archiving in the University Libraries.

The social media and web portion of Polis’ records are already available in the library system’s special collections unit. They document his use of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram during a 10-year U.S. House of Representatives career that began in 2009. Polis became governor in January.

Additional congressional records — including Polis’ briefings, speeches and constituent correspondence — become available in 2050.

CU also holds the papers of former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart and other Colorado politicians.

For more details, click here.

Off