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Faculty Spotlight

Greg Rieker:听Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Associate听Professor Greg Rieker joined the University of Colorado Boulder in 2013.听

Prior to CU Boulder, Dr. Rieker spent a year as a National Research Council (NRC) research associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), exploring the use of frequency comb lasers for sensing in practical systems. Before joining NIST, he developed and studied a plasma-based particle accelerator for medical applications, first as a postdoc at Stanford and then through a company that he co-founded. During his PhD, he developed laser-based sensors for a variety of combustion applications, including internal combustion engines, scramjet engines and oil refinery process flames.

From a teaching standpoint, Dr. Rieker has a particular interest in mentoring and developing students into multi-faceted engineers who are not only excellent researchers, but leaders and entrepreneurs with an eye toward creating opportunity for themselves and others.听Together with several researchers from the lab, Rieker founded LongPath Technologies, Inc. to commercialize the methane leak detection work.

He became involved with the CUBit Quantum Initiative听through his collaborations with Jun Ye and Juliet Gopinath, and sees a bright future for quantum research, especially at CU Boulder.听鈥淐U encourages collaboration more than any other university I鈥檝e been involved with.听 Quantum is going to be a challenge best overcome through collaboration.鈥�

Research interests and the Precision Laser Diagnostics Lab

The Precision Laser Diagnostics Lab at CU Boulder is led by Dr. Rieker and staffed by researchers interested in听energy, the environment and lasers/optics. His laboratory has built on a foundation of laser-sensing research to find opportunities everywhere from long-distance methane leak detection around oil and gas operation, to sensing in hypersonic propulsion systems, to fundamental studies related to exoplanets.

Education

Dr. Rieker earned his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Missouri鈥擱olla. He earned his master鈥檚 degree and doctorate鈥攂oth in Mechanical Engineering鈥攆rom Stanford University.听

Quotable and notable

Dr. Rieker co-led a team that just received a coveted CO-LABS 2019 Governor's Award for High-Impact Research, which honors Colorado鈥檚 top scientists and engineers for projects with a 鈥渟ignificant impact on society.鈥� The Dual Comb Spectroscopy Methane Detection project, which included researchers from the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and LongPath Technologies Inc., uses technology based on Nobel Prize-winning research to detect methane emissions as small as听a quarter of a human breath from over a mile away.

鈥淏y working to create collaborations among experts in different fields, and between researchers and industry, the team produced extraordinary results that have resulted in the spinout company LongPath Technologies,鈥� says Terri Fiez, CU Boulder鈥檚 vice chancellor for Research & Innovation. 鈥淭hese creative partnerships helped the team do the unthinkable: leverage Nobel Prize-winning technology into something that the oil and gas industry could use daily to improve its environmental footprint, save lives and save money.鈥�