Faculty

Rajagopalan Balaji elected fellow of ASCE

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 18:53:30 +0000

Rajagopalan Balaji elected fellow of ASCE Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/13/2023 - 11:53

Susan Glairon

Rajagopalan Balaji, a professor of civil engineering, has been named a fellow by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Board of Direction. This prestigious recognition, awarded to only three percent of ASCE members, is "for celebrated contributions and developing creative solutions that change lives around the world."

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Bernard Amadei inducted to ASEE Hall of Fame

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 20:51:46 +0000

Bernard Amadei inducted to ASEE Hall of Fame Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/15/2023 - 13:51

Susan Glairon

Distinguished Professor Bernard Amadei was inducted into the American Society for Engineering Education Hall of Fame. The prestigious designation recognizes outstanding individuals in engineering and engineering technology education whose contributions have left a significant impact.

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Palo elected an AIAA fellow

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 20:09:19 +0000

Palo elected an AIAA fellow Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/16/2023 - 13:09

Jeff Zehnder

Professor Scott Palo has been elected a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

Palo is the Charles Victor Schelke Endowed Professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and a former associate dean for research in the College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Palo has a multifaceted research portfolio with foci on the design, construction, and deployment of small satellites; the development of meteor radar systems to study the upper atmosphere; and understanding large-scale atmospheric dynamics in the near earth space environment.

Much of his scientific work has focused on the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and he has earned the United States Antarctic Service Medal for his work meteor radar work in Antarctica over the past 20 years..

Palo has been a member of the aerospace faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder since 2001.

In addition to his work at the university, Palo has served on the board of directors of the Colorado Space Business Roundtable and has consulted for Blue Canyon Technologies, which designs, builds, tests, launches and operates small satellites. These experiences led Palo to found Blue Cubed Communications LLC which is developing small satellite laser communication systems.

Palo has a strong reputation for his work in ground-based observing networks, remote sensing, and meteor radar design. His efforts have advanced small satellites as a viable means to expand our understanding of near-Earth space and beyond.

He earned his undergraduate degree in electrical and computer engineering at Clarkson University and completed his master’s and PhD in electrical engineering at CU Boulder.

Palo will be officially inducted as an AIAA Fellow at a special association dinner on Wednesday, May 17, in Arlington, Virginia.

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$20M ESIIL center aims to foster a “revolution” in environmental data science

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 18:56:51 +0000

$20M ESIIL center aims to foster a “revolution” in environmental data science Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/11/2022 - 12:56

Computer Science Associate Professor Claire Monteleoni is the AI/Machine Learning Lead for a new $20M NSF Center at CU Boulder, housed in CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. The new center is a major new data science and diversity effort including partners from multiple institutions around the world.

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Keith Molenaar to become CU Boulder’s dean of engineering

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 18:15:14 +0000

Keith Molenaar to become CU Boulder’s dean of engineering Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/30/2022 - 12:15

University of Colorado Boulder Provost Russell Moore today named Keith Molenaar dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science, effective July 1.

Moore said that in his interviews with the finalists, Molenaar’s approach impressed him on multiple levels.

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CU Boulder researcher earns major award to study water quality challenges in rural Canadian communities

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 16:47:17 +0000

CU Boulder researcher earns major award to study water quality challenges in rural Canadian communities Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/10/2022 - 10:47

Jeff Zehnder

Karl Linden has landed a major fellowship to research solutions to water pollution in rural and First Nations communities in Canada.

Linden, the Mortenson Professor in Sustainable Development in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been selected as a 2022 Fulbright Scholar.

The prestigious U.S. State Department program offers scholars the chance to teach and conduct research around the world to expand American partnerships and share knowledge. Linden will spend the fall 2022 semester at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a particular focus on water quality issues in Canadian First Nations Communities.

“The solutions engineers typically bring to small communities haven’t been working,” Linden said. “We have these intractable problems of water quality and treatment. We aren’t making the improvements in public health you’d expect to see. Somehow we’re missing something.”

Many First Nations communities in Canada are small and in remote areas, and some do not have safe running water or conventional sanitation.

“I want to help transform how we do engineering by incorporating more diverse solutions,” Linden said. “If we can build on engineering fundamentals but listen to and incorporate indigenous knowledge and values including the centuries of resilience embedded in these communities, we may find a whole new solution set of ideas and designs. It has to start with listening, rather than coming in with pre-conceived answers, which is how we engineers commonly approach problems. I am looking forward to taking the time to meet with communities and understand what kind of problems they want to solve, and then see what it takes to co-create solutions that work in the geographies and with the diverse cultures represented.”

Linden has focused his career on water quality and treatment efforts. He has made major contributions to the advancement of ultraviolet light systems for disinfection, which are now used by many municipal water systems.

“I’ve been working on UV solutions for decades, and it’s really exciting to see your research move into everyday use,” Linden said. “UV technology is now used for everything from single households up to disinfection for New York City, which has the largest water system in the world.”

A particular focus for Linden in Canada will be water quality issues due to algal blooms and heavy metals like mercury and arsenic from industrial mine tailings. These are topics in which his collaborators at St. Mary’s University have regional expertise.

“These metals and algal toxins impact the natural water quality, and the downstream users of these watersheds, including First Nations communities, are bearing the burden of this pollution, which needs to be treated to create safe and potable water,” Linden said.

He hopes to help communities improve their water quality and to broaden his own perspective through the fellowship.

“It’s a short time, just a few months, but I want to meet with community partners, local water utilities, and shadow researchers,” Linden said. “There are a lot of overlaps with water issues we have in rural areas of Colorado and in Native American communities in the southwest, and this is a chance to broaden my perspectives and bring ideas back to Boulder as well.”

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CU Boulder mathematician earns nation’s highest early-career award for COVID research

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 17:19:23 +0000

CU Boulder mathematician earns nation’s highest early-career award for COVID research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/25/2022 - 11:19

Lisa Marshall

Computer science professor Dan Larremore has won the Alan T. Waterman Award for his instrumental research on COVID-19 vaccine distribution and rapid testing. The prestigious award is the National Science Foundation’s highest honor for early-career scientists.

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Former dean Corotis retiring from CU Boulder

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 21:57:22 +0000

Former dean Corotis retiring from CU Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/08/2022 - 14:57

Jeff Zehnder

After five decades as a leading researcher, professor, and college dean, Ross Corotis is retiring.

His career includes stretches at Northwestern and Johns Hopkins universities, but he has spent the last 28 years in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Department faculty recently voted to honor him as a professor emeritus.

“I love what I do. I love the teaching especially and I love research, but this is my 51^st year as a professor,” Corotis said. “When I started my career as an assistant professor at Northwestern, the official retirement age was 67 and I thought, ‘Wow, that sounds old.’ Now I’m 77, and I thought I should let others take over. It’s better to leave when you’re still excited.”

As a child, Corotis always knew he wanted to be an engineer. As early as age three, he remembers enjoying tinkering, putting things together and taking them apart to see how they worked. In high school, he decided on a future in civil engineering and applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Coming from the east coast, my first choice was MIT,” Corotis said. “I was put on the waiting list, but eventually was accepted and graduated No. 1 in the department. I’m still very proud of that because they don’t put the top prospects on the waiting list.”

He would go on to earn his master’s and PhD from MIT, all in civil engineering. His research then and now was focused in mathematical probability and structural reliability. He has made significant contributions to the field and was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2002, in part for his work on new methods of reliability assessment and optimization of structures.

“When I started out, building codes didn’t use probabilities at all,” Corotis said. “Engineers didn’t want to know about failure. They petitioned against using probability. Now people accept it. They understand there are tradeoffs in society, and we have to evaluate those risks and decide how much money to put in to ameliorate them.”

Corotis spent nine years at Northwestern before being offered a position at Johns Hopkins University to create a department of civil engineering.

“They needed civil engineering, and how often do you get to go to a great university and form a department?” he said.

Within 10 years, civil engineering at Johns Hopkins was the second-highest-ranked engineering program at the university, behind only their famed biomedical engineering program.

In 1994, Corotis received a phone call from CU Boulder.

“I had no thought of moving, but they said they were looking for a new dean and I was recommended, and they asked if I would come out for an interview,” Corotis said.

He was unsure. He enjoyed his work at Johns Hopkins and had a daughter in high school and a son in college. But his daughter encouraged him to apply, telling him, “Go for it, Dad,” and he was offered the position. At that point, her stance shifted.

“She was disappointed and I said, ‘Remember you told me to go for it,’ And she responded, ‘Yes dad, but I never thought you’d get it’,” Corotis said.

She eventually came around, and the Corotis family relocated to Colorado.

He joined the university as dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science and led the college from 1994-2001. During that time, he pushed through changes to give faculty more time for research.

“The campus rule was faculty had to teach four courses a year, but we looked at leading engineering schools around the country, and it was clear to me if we were going to move up to where we belonged, to really be a Tier 1 research institution, we needed to allow faculty more time for research,” Corotis said.

He reduced faculty teaching loads to three courses per year, which still stands today.

He also led the effort to construct the Gallogly Discovery Learning Center, rallying campus officials, private donors, and the Colorado Legislature to fund the building.

“It was based on the idea that when students come to a research university, they should be able to benefit from the research of the faculty, not just from classroom teaching,” Corotis said. “The concept of learning by discovery is a special opportunity at a great research university. When we went to the legislature, they were so excited that they appropriated money for the program plan and for construction in one vote. They hadn’t done that in modern history. Typically it would take two years.”

In 2001, Corotis stepped down as dean and resumed his civil engineering teaching and research. Since that time, he has presented 65 conference papers, published 41 journal articles, and led six research grants, graduating 12 master’s students and five PhD students.

In 2006, he received the Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching and Pedagogy award for his work in teaching and mentoring students, and in 2019 he earned the American Society of Civil Engineers OPAL Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Education.

Keith Molenaar, acting dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at CU Boulder, praised Corotis’ work as an educator and engineer.

“Ross Corotis has been a leader throughout his career, not only for the University of Colorado Boulder, but for our profession and our nation,” Molenaar said. “His research has advanced concepts of structural safety and reliability and our understanding of probabilistic concepts and decision perceptions for societal tradeoffs for hazards and the built infrastructure. Ross has been an inspiration to our college and our profession.”

Although Corotis is stepping back from the university, he is still is engaged with engineering. In addition to continuing advising duties with a doctoral student, he is leading a review of the National Institute of Standards and Technology capital facilities and is serving as chair of a congressionally chartered committee that evaluates building failures.

“The committee just started on the Champlain Towers condominium collapse in Florida,” he said. “After 9/11, Congress created the National Construction Safety Team Act to investigate major structural failures to determine what went wrong and what we can do better.”

Corotis is also eager to spend more time traveling with his wife, to visit family and explore new places.

“We love to travel,” he said. “I’ve always been envious of people who could go on vacation in September. It’s after the summer rush, and before it gets cold. COVID has interfered, but we’ll see.”

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McKnight named a CU Distinguished Professor

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 18:07:33 +0000

McKnight named a CU Distinguished Professor Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/03/2021 - 11:07

Diane McKnight is being recognized with the highest honor bestowed upon faculty in the University of Colorado system: Distinguished Professor, which is awarded to faculty for exemplary performance in research, teaching, and service.

A professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering; the Environmental Engineering Program; and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, McKnight has spent her career studying ecological, biogeochemical and hydrologic processes in lakes, streams and watersheds, primarily in polar and mountain regions.

“I’ve been interested in hydrology and ecology since I was in college in the ’70s,” McKnight said. “It’s fascinating work and directly impacts our understanding of water quality and the influence of climate and hydrology.”

Her research has dramatically expanded knowledge about the relationship between natural organic matter and heavy metals in streams and lakes and led to her election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2012.

Much of her field work has been in extreme environments, especially polar regions – she has been to Antarctica more than two dozen times.

“The lessons that we learn in Antarctica get plugged in more broadly. The algae growing in streams there are very similar to algae growing in Colorado, but we can understand more clearly what’s happening there because there is no signal coming in from plants in the meadow or in the forest because there aren’t any meadows or forests,” she said. “They’re like naked streams. We can learn about fundamental processes.”

McKnight is one of the founding principal investigators of the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research Program in Antarctica, and she serves as chair of the National Science Foundation’s LTER Science Council.

“As we think about green engineering for green infrastructure, people are putting more value on sustaining rivers to help deal with floods in cities and various pollution issues. These ecosystem concepts are also very relevant to dealing with hazardous algal blooms,” she said. “There’s a realization that some of the water challenges can’t just be addressed by treating drinking water at the utility plant. We need a more holistic approach, a bigger view.”

McKnight earned her PhD in environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979 and spent 17 years at the U.S. Geologic Survey, conducting field and laboratory research, before joining CU Boulder in 1996.

“I was at the USGS and had grad students working in my lab from CU Boulder, Colorado State, and the School of Mines. I really wanted to teach stream ecology. It’s an exciting field and the students are excited, too,” she said.

She was one of the founding faculty members of CU Boulder’s Environmental Engineering Program when it began in 1998 and has been part of its growth as an important discipline in the College of Engineering and Applied Science.

“We have as many students in a single environmental engineering class now as we had in the whole program when it started. It’s to CU Boulder’s great credit that this program has been supported and evolved,” she said. “I am glad to be part of how we deliver this curriculum and train our students. I am so indebted to my colleagues at INSTAAR and in environmental engineering who have been very supportive.”

Although McKnight is in the middle of a semester-long sabbatical, conducting remediation research on the hydrology of the Florida Everglades, she is eager to be back on campus for the spring 2022 semester.

“It’s a great privilege to teach a class and to advise and mentor students. You’re providing scope, being open to their ideas and also helping them stay focused and to take setbacks in stride,” she said. “They are so motivated and unafraid. It’s inspiring.”

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How the new $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill will help Colorado brace for the next disaster

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 17:17:02 +0000

How the new $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill will help Colorado brace for the next disaster Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 11/18/2021 - 10:17

On Monday, President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into law—targeting roughly $1.2 trillion to shore up the nation’s aging, sagging and crumbling roads, bridges and other infrastructure. According to estimates from the White House, Colorado alone could receive $3.7 billion to improve its roads, $917 million for public transportation and more.

Keith Porter is an adjunct professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at CU Boulder. He led a 2019 report called Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves. In it, Porter and his colleagues argued that spending money now could save the nation trillions of dollars in coming decades—through reducing the costs for repairs, preventing deadly disasters like bridge collapses, keeping commercial trucks on the move and more.

Porter sat down with CU Boulder Today to talk about the new infrastructure bill and why living with aging roads and bridges is like living with credit card debt.

A lot of critics of this bill have expressed sticker shock. But you’ve made the case that it will cost us a lot more money in the long term not to invest in infrastructure.

Keith Porter

It’s a false economy to skimp on our utility and transportation infrastructure. We all rely on it. Society doesn’t work without roads, bridges and water systems.

What will this bill mean for Colorado?

If Colorado is like the rest of the nation, this bill is going to partially close our investment gap in infrastructure, but it’s not going to close it completely. Nationwide, the $1.2 trillion investment is about half of what the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) says we need to spend over the next 10 years just to have adequate infrastructure. And the number keeps climbing because we under-invest.

So you see this as just a start?

It’s like paying only half your credit card bill. We can’t live off that credit indefinitely.

When you look at Colorado, what are some of the biggest challenges facing our infrastructure?

We’ve got hail and tornados, and we’ve got flooding, just like our neighboring states. We’ve got fire in the wildland-urban interface. To some extent, we have earthquakes, less than California, but we also build weaker. We have all of the natural disasters that cost the country big bucks, except for coastal flooding and hurricanes, obviously.

How much money do we stand to save by making our infrastructure more resilient to those kinds of hazards?

We estimate, for example, that the money that gets spent on making our roads and bridges more resilient to flooding will save $8 for every dollar spent. You either pay for it now, or you pay for it a whole lot more later.

Flooding is clearly a big issue in Colorado—something we learned in 2013 and again this summer when a mudslide shut down I-70 around Glenwood Canyon for weeks. Can investment in infrastructure prevent that kind of disaster in the future?

The climate is getting hotter, and we’re going to have more and more wildfires. They’re going to be followed by more severe rains, and we’re going to get mudslides. It’s going to be really hard to make that road mudslide proof.

But most of our roads are the stuff you drive on to get to the 7-Eleven or your child's school. What you do is build the road higher and the storm sewer system better so that the water can run off into a storm sewer rather than sweeping you and your kid away.

This week’s wildfire near Estes Park also drove home just how vulnerable the state is to fire. What can we do to reduce those risks?

We have guidance called the International Wildland-Urban Interface Code. If we adopt that for areas where cities grow into wildlands, it could save $3 dollars for every dollar spent and maybe more.

What kind of actions does that code recommend?

It says you can’t build the sidings of buildings out of vinyl—use cement board or stucco, instead, something that can’t ignite. It requires that you do things like put a noncombustible skirt around the house so there aren’t trees and bushes right up against it. Just having that gravel skirt makes a huge difference.

Now that this bill has been signed, what do you think the biggest priorities are for improving infrastructure around the country? Roads? Bridges? Power grids?

If you look at the America’s Infrastructure Report Card from the ASCE, there are Cs and Ds across the board. We have to do it all. It’s too late to say, ‘yes this, but not that.’ That’s how we got here in the first place—by economizing on things you just don’t economize on.

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