College of Arts & Sciences

Major Change: Five Fresh Degrees

Anna Tolette — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:43:34 +0000

Major Change: Five Fresh Degrees Anna Tolette Tue, 11/12/2024 - 13:43

Kelsey Yandura

Did Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film boost Birkenstock sales? Does a high-fat diet increase anxiousness? How are business leaders addressing “Zoom fatigue” among employees? Can a jellyfish-inspired robot track climate change?

The questions facing industry professionals today can range from complex to straight out of a science fiction novel. To keep up with and prepare students for the ever-evolving times, academic institutions need to constantly reevaluate course content and degree offerings.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s leadership strategically approaches the challenges of continuous modernization in higher education by examining both what and how students learn. This allows the university to remain on the leading edge of education while empowering students to navigate a fast-changing world.

“Our degrees don’t focus on a finite set of competencies, but on teaching students how to learn and lead,” said Katherine Eggert, vice chancellor for academic planning and assessment at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. “What our graduates learn today may be outdated by tomorrow. They’ll need to acquire new skills quickly from the moment they start their careers.”

The university’s academic strategy is centered on equipping students with adaptable, real-world skills in programs that embrace multidisciplinary approaches, foster collaboration and generate creative solutions to complex problems.

Here are five of the latest undergraduate and graduate degree paths �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder has unveiled over the past four years.

Corporate Communication (MA)

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Online

When Kiana Junior (MCorpComm’25) graduated from the University of Wyoming in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in nutrition, job prospects in her field of study were dire.

“I took the first job I could, which happened to be in the real estate industry,” said Junior. Three years later, she’s bounding ahead on a totally new path: working as a brand communicator and pursuing her master’s in corporate communication at CU, a fully online degree program introduced in 2020.

In the field of corporate communication, professionals study the way companies and organizations communicate with internal and external audiences to share information and manage brand perception.

“It’s the practice and art of distilling information with integrity and consistency,” said Junior. “Consumers and employees expect transparency and social responsibility from corporations, now more than ever — especially when it comes to social responsibility, environmental compliance and diversity.”

The curriculum is designed to be student-centric. “The students learn from a mix of university faculty and current and distinguished practitioners who are working in the field,” said Tobias Hopp, director of the program. “It’s a dynamic educational experience.”

The results speak for themselves.

“I could read something in class one day and take it to work the next day,” said Junior. “It’s directly applicable every single week.”

Business Analytics (BS)

Leeds School of Business

Businesses have access to more data than ever — but it’s what they do with this data that provides value. Streaming site subscriptions, airline loyalty memberships, coffee shop sales and nail salon customer reviews — each of these datasets can provide a wealth of information for the respective businesses.

That’s where business analytics comes in: using data to glean insights, inform strategic decisions and recommend meaningful changes within a business. This fast-growing field of study became a new undergraduate focus within the Leeds School of Business in 2022.

“It’s about critical thinking with data,” said Kai R. Larsen, professor of information systems at Leeds. “Datasets are only getting bigger. We tried to imagine what a major would look like so that students could really understand the story behind the numbers.”

Business analytics students learn how to translate and distill hard numbers into helpful information. It is designed to be paired with another area of emphasis within the business school, such as marketing, finance or accounting.

“The beauty comes from how to put all these parts together,” said Larsen. “Not only understand the problem, but be able to analyze and also distill the information into something that’s valuable.”

Public Health (BA)

College of Arts and Sciences

After wildfires in California in 2008, Colleen Reid, an associate professor of geography at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, began studies to understand how wildfire smoke affects population health. Recently, she has been collecting data to understand how wildfire smoke gets into homes and schools and may affect children’s health in the Denver metro area. Reid hopes school districts can use the findings from her work to protect children from future high air pollution events, such as wildfires. Her work demonstrates the importance of careers in public health.

Starting in the fall of 2025, �鶹��Ѱ��students will have the opportunity to pursue similar lines of work through the new public health major (BA) — a discipline focused on protecting and improving the health and well-being of communities and people. The field examines the underlying determinants of health within populations. For this new major at CU, students will learn about public health through courses within many different disciplines, including biology, statistics, geography, physiology, sociology, psychology and more.

“Public health goes beyond just individual bodies,” said Reid. “Seat belts are public health. Parks are public health. Climate change policy is public health. Food safety inspections at restaurants are public health.”

CU’s public health program plans to equip students with the tools to address the needs of today’s world — making strides to not only solve health problems, but also prevent them.

Biomedical Engineering (BS, MS, PhD)

College of Engineering and Applied Science

Earlier this year, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder-led team made strides in the quest to develop naturalistic materials that can repair and replace human tissue. Their breakthrough focused on creating a “Band-Aid for the heart,” and the process consisted of 3D printing adhesive, elastic materials that are strong enough to support tissue mechanically.

This work, which can lead to revolutionary uses such as internal bandages and cartilage patches, demonstrates the innovative possibilities in biomedical engineering. By connecting engineering principles to the fields of medicine and biology, professionals in this discipline create enhancements to health care.

“A biomedical engineer on a team can form a crucial bridge between the clinicians and the engineers,” said Jessica McLaughlin, a teaching assistant professor in CU’s biomedical engineering (BME) department. “It’s critical to have someone at the table who can speak both languages.”

Since 2020, students at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder have had this professional pathway open to them through undergraduate and graduate biomedical engineering degrees. The multidisciplinary major teaches students how to create technology to address complex health problems.

“Anyone who cares about human health should be interested in this,” said Corey Nue, a biomedical professor at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. “As engineers, we’re really uniquely positioned to impact the field through new devices, diagnostics and therapeutics.”

Robotics (MA, PhD)

College of Engineering and Applied Science

Perhaps the most futuristic major on the list is CU’s new graduate program in robotics, which kicked off in the fall of 2023. The program combines coursework and research from a variety of engineering fields, bridging the gaps between science, engineering and artificial intelligence.

“Robotics takes everything from computer science to mechanical engineering to electrical engineering,” said Sean Humbert, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Robotics Program at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. “These are the types of students we want to be getting — folks that want this multidisciplinary background to solve all sorts of problems.”

From agriculture and health care to security and defense, the applications of a robotics degree are endless. Students enrolled in the program can choose from more than 40 different courses taught by experts in areas like field robotics, reasoning and assurance, smart materials, human-centered robotics and biomedical robotics.

When leading the charge to bring the robotics program to life, Humbert envisioned a department built on flexibility and an eye for developing trends.

“It’s a rapidly changing field, and our terrific faculty span all of these different bins of research,” said Humbert. “We’ll be able to educate students and develop new classes as the new tools appear. It’s really exciting.”

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Illustrations by Israel Vargas

Take a peek at five new undergraduate and graduate degree paths �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder has unveiled over the past four years.

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Muriel Sibell-Wolle: Artist, Professor, Ghost Town Guide

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Muriel Sibell-Wolle: Artist, Professor, Ghost Town Guide Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/16/2024 - 00:00

Kelsey Yandura

1942

When Muriel Sibell-Wolle traded the East Coast for the foothills of Boulder in 1926, she was immediately spellbound by the region’s rich natural beauty, declaring she planned to stay "until they kick me out." She began teaching fine art at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and went on to lead the department for nearly 20 years.

One of the first and most prolific ghost town guidebook writers in the nation, Sibell-Wolle visited and sketched over a thousand mining towns in the American West. Here, Sibell-Wolle is pictured with her lithograph “Gladstone, Colorado,” which is now part of the �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum collection.

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Photo courtesy Floyd Walters Colection, �鶹��Ѱ��Heritage Center

�鶹��Ѱ��fine arts professor Muriel Sibell-Wolle visited and sketched over a thousand mining towns in the American West. She is now known as one of the first and most prolific ghost town guidebook writers in the nation.

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�鶹��Ѱ��Wizards Bring Magic to the Science Classroom

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

�鶹��Ѱ��Wizards Bring Magic to the Science Classroom Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/16/2024 - 00:00

Jessica Winter

One Saturday per month throughout the academic year, children and their families gather at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder to witness the magic of science — hosted by the university’s very own “wizards.”

The �鶹��Ѱ��Wizards program, a free science-education experience for children, unofficially began in the late 1970s and early 1980s when �鶹��Ѱ��physics professor John Taylor, the original “Mr. Wizard,” started presenting two to three children’s science shows each year on campus. Eventually, he began traveling to Colorado schools and presenting his science shows up to 20 times per year.

In 1987, after years of sharing his passion for science with others, Taylor handed the torch to �鶹��Ѱ��professor David Nesbitt, a Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) fellow and current director of �鶹��Ѱ��Wizards. Since that time, the program has expanded in funding, frequency and faculty. The monthly show typically boasts over 400 attendees and has been attended by more than 100,000 children and family members over the past 37 years.

“The shows have a different sort of energy than a kids-only class because parents also participate,” said the program’s coordinator Candice Brown in an article she penned for NIST on �鶹��Ѱ��Wizards. “It’s the perfect combination — an enthusiastic young audience plus the [adults] who get the chance to be kids again — all eager, curious and interested in learning.”

While the program has grown and flourished under the leadership of Nesbitt, the “Chief Wizard,” it is still centered on Taylor’s philosophy of science education: we cannot have science without joy.

“Joy and curiosity are the fundamental reasons each of us studies science,” said Nesbitt. “Kids are naturally curious and excited about learning new things. �鶹��Ѱ��Wizards is a perfect venue for professors and their graduate students to expose young scientific minds to their own joy and delight in science.”

And the program does more than entertain — it’s also helping children to view themselves as scientists. In a 2022 survey of 120 adults and children who have attended presentations, 84 percent responded that �鶹��Ѱ��Wizards allowed children to better identify with scientists.

Nesbitt describes the program as “running on a special kind of magic: the goodwill of a fantastic community.” From the professors who volunteer time to prepare the presentations, to the staff, postdocs and students, �鶹��Ѱ��Wizards involves a whole community dedicated to sharing the magic of science.

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Photos courtesy �鶹��Ѱ��Wizards

For over three decades, �鶹��Ѱ��Wizards has engaged and informed children about the wonders of science.

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Miniature Dictionary: Tiny Book, Trove of Knowledge

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Miniature Dictionary: Tiny Book, Trove of Knowledge Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/16/2024 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

In 2003, nearly a decade after the death of Jacob Van Ek, former �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder political science professor and College of Arts and Sciences dean, the �鶹��Ѱ��Heritage Center received an anonymous donation of his desk items — including a miniature English-Dutch dictionary, which stands two inches high and less than 1.5 inches wide.

Mini books, according to auction service Britannic Auctions, were popular throughout history as they allowed the reader to conveniently and discreetly carry knowledge. Van Ek and his wife may have used the dictionary on their global travels, said Mona Lambrecht, Heritage Center interim director and curator of its history and collections.

After winning a year-long travel fellowship in 1928, Van Ek and his wife, Eve Drewelowe, traveled around the world to familiarize themselves with different peoples, countries and civilizations. During this time, they spent time in the Netherlands, where Van Ek’s parents were born.

The couple returned from their travels in 1929, and Van Ek assumed his role as Arts and Sciences dean, a position he held at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder for 30 years before teaching full time for several more years.

The experience left him with a broad worldview.

According to the Jacob Van Ek collection housed in the Norlin Library, “When the ‘Red Scare’ gripped college campuses in the late 1940s and the 1950s, Dr. Van Ek won the respect and gratitude of his faculty and student body when he acted as a steadfast defender of freedom of expression.”

Facts about the dictionary:

Title: English-Dutch 12000 Words Liliput Dictionary 77
Published by Schmidt & Günther
Printed by F. E. Haag in Leipzig, Germany
Published circa 1925
635 pages
Dimensions: 1⅜ inches wide by 2 inches high by 3/8 inches deep
Text 1/16 inches high
Red linen fabric cover
All the dictionaries published by Schmidt & Günther in this series have a number connected to them. The English-Dutch is number 77.

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Photos courtesy Mona Lambrecht, �鶹��Ѱ��Heritage Center

Zoom in on a twentieth-century miniature English-Dutch dictionary in CU's Heritage Collection.

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Leslie Leinwand & The Science of Getting Things Done

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Leslie Leinwand & The Science of Getting Things Done Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/16/2024 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

Some might say the cards were stacked against Leslie Leinwand.

At age five, the precocious kindergartner was plucked from her Manhattan home and transplanted to the one-stoplight town of York, South Carolina, after the sudden death of her father, an internal medicine doctor. Her mother remarried a man who told young Leinwand repeatedly that, “girls didn’t need to go to college.” Then, when she was 13, tragedy took her mother and she was sent to live with extended family.

Leinwand persisted, landing at a small college in North Carolina where an astute professor noticed her interest in science and insisted she take a summer organic chemistry course at Cornell University.

“That’s when my somewhat sad story changed,” she recalls, now seated in her spacious office at the glistening, $210-million biotech facility she helped bring to life. “All because I had this fantastic professor.”

Today, Leinwand is a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology and the chief scientific officer of the BioFrontiers Institute at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. She has achieved what many scientists only dream about: turning a seed of scientific inquiry into a multibillion-dollar company that saves lives — more than once.

Leinwand stayed at Cornell and helped pay her way through by working as a fraternity house waitress. She later earned her PhD in genetics from Yale and served on the faculty at Albert Einstein College of Medicine for 15 years before landing in Boulder in 1995.

Throughout this time, one fundamental question drove her research: What genes and proteins are responsible for making the heart function properly, and what causes this complex machine to break down in some people?

“She is very special. When she discovers things in her lab, she doesn’t stop there,” said Nobel laureate and Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry Tom Cech, who has known Leinwand for three decades. “She works tirelessly, doing whatever it takes, to make something happen that will impact patients.”

Healing a big, sick heart

Much of Leinwand’s work has centered on hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), which she describes simply as a “big, sick heart.”

It is the most common genetic heart disease in the United States, impacting roughly one in 500 people, as well as the most common cause of sudden death among athletes — who often don’t know they have it and push their hearts too hard, with lethal results.

HCM first made headlines in 1990 when Hank Gathers, an all-American college basketball star, collapsed and died while on the court during a game at the age of 23. Since then, a long list has followed, including Reggie Lewis of the Boston Celtics, who died on a basketball court shortly after Gathers in 1993.

In patients with HCM, their hearts — the walls thickened by disease — squeeze too hard and don’t fully relax, which burns through energy, leaves them breathless, causes the heart to race and depletes their energy.

HCM gets worse over time — and, until recently, there was no medication to treat it.

Leinwand’s interest in the disease dates back to 1985, when she first began studying a protein called myosin, which converts chemical energy into mechanical energy to move muscles, including the heart. Early on, she suspected that glitches in this ubiquitous protein might contribute to heart troubles and that studying them could ultimately lead to new therapies.

“It was an idea before its time,” she recalls. “We didn’t have the technology back then that we did later.”

First, she and her students had to develop a way to manufacture myosin in the lab so they could study it. That alone took years.

In 1996, Leinwand and other �鶹��Ѱ��colleagues took what they had learned about myosin and founded Myogen, a startup that developed two novel drugs for treating hypertension, which sold to pharma giant Gilead Sciences for $2.6 billion in 2006.

Ultimately, Leinwand’s team determined that faulty myosin was a key culprit in HCM.

In 2012, she joined Harvard’s Christine and Jonathan Seidman, who study the genetic mechanisms of heart disease, and Stanford biochemist James Spudich, who studies how muscles contract, to create the biomedical company MyoKardia.

MyoKardia developed a drug that attaches to the faulty protein, effectively cranking down the heart’s overactive motor. The drug was tested in clinical trials and mavacamten (brand name Camzyos) was born.

Bristol Myers Squibb bought MyoKardia for $13 billion in 2020 and, in April of 2022, the Food and Drug Administration approved mavacamten as the first and only cardiac myosin inhibitor approved in the United States for treating HCM.

“We had hoped that the best outcome could be that the disease progression was slowed, but what cardiologists are telling us is that they are actually seeing a reversal in some patients,” says Leinwand.

Leinwand is not one to get emotional in public. But she can’t help but choke up a bit when asked how this makes her feel.

“It has been the most amazing thing to hear patients say things like, ‘I can now walk up a flight of steps again. I am no longer bedridden. I can get out of my house.’ It feels great.”

Paying it forward

Leinwand has no plans to retire anytime soon. The BioFrontiers Institute, which she and her colleagues dreamed up in the early 2000s, is now a thriving intellectual melting pot, bringing hundreds of physicists, engineers, biologists, chemists, geneticists and computer scientists from around the world together under one roof to improve human health.

Today, her Python Project, another way-outside-the-box idea she came up with in 2006, persists, enabling undergraduate researchers to study Burmese pythons as a means of better understanding what healthy versus unhealthy heart growth looks like.

Pythons can go 6–12 months without eating and then swallow animals as big as they are in one bite, prompting their heart to balloon 40 percent in just 48 hours. In the python’s case, this growth is healthy, much like a well-trained athlete’s heart that grows larger with conditioning.

By understanding how pythons can grow and reverse a larger healthy heart so quickly, Leinwand and her team hope to someday develop therapies that could help people strengthen or shrink their heart muscle, according to need.

Dedicated to her research, she was undeterred when told that the reptile breeder in Oklahoma City could not ship live pythons to Colorado due to interstate shipping guidelines. Instead, every year, her students drive 20 hours roundtrip to buy them and bring them to her lab on campus.

Leinwand continues to mentor students and travel the country giving lectures on leadership, paying forward the gift she got from the professor in North Carolina who encouraged her pursuit of science. She prioritizes her own health too, carving out time to pedal 12 miles each night on her indoor recumbent bicycle while watching cooking shows to inspire the gourmet meals she prepares for friends.

When asked how she gets it all done (a question she hears a lot), she offers this singular piece of advice:

“Pick your battles, and don’t pick battles you cannot win,” says Leinwand. “I know how to get stuff done,” she adds with a modest shrug. “I’m happiest when I’m doing five things at once.”

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Illustration by Sol Cotti

CU’s Leslie Leinwand helped develop the first drug for an incurable heart disease, sold two companies for billions and founded a thriving biotech institute. She’s just getting started.

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College of Arts & Sciences

Major Change: Five Fresh Degrees

Corporate Communication (MA)

Business Analytics (BS)

Public Health (BA)

Biomedical Engineering (BS, MS, PhD)

Robotics (MA, PhD)

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Muriel Sibell-Wolle: Artist, Professor, Ghost Town Guide

1942

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�鶹��Ѱ�����Wizards Bring Magic to the Science Classroom

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Miniature Dictionary: Tiny Book, Trove of Knowledge

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Leslie Leinwand & The Science of Getting Things Done

Healing a big, sick heart

Paying it forward

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�鶹��Ѱ��Wizards Bring Magic to the Science Classroom