Daniel Knight

Five mechanical engineering research projects win PACES awards

alse6588 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:13:12 +0000

Five mechanical engineering research projects win PACES awards alse6588 Tue, 08/11/2026 - 10:13

Alexander Servantez

These awards connect research, creative work, and teaching and learning activities for faculty, staff members and students across campus with partners from Colorado communities and beyond. More than $7 million in funding, benefiting 5.5 million people, has been granted since 1999.

“We are proud of the rigorous, community-engaged work our faculty and staff are doing,” said PACES Assistant Vice Chancellor David Meens. “These public-serving projects highlight �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s powerful service throughout Colorado and beyond.”

According to OCE, this year’s application process was extremely competitive. Across campus, PACES received 31 proposals totaling $571,728 in funding requests.

Of these requests, PACES was able to fund 22 total proposals totaling $400,000. Read below to learn more about the Rady Mechanical Engineering faculty and students whose projects earned PACES funding this year.

Professor Michael Hannigan (left) and Associate Research Professor Daniel Knight (right).

SCENIC26: Environmental Sustainability Through Rural School Wildfire Inquiry (Daniel Knight, Michael Hannigan and Joseph Polman)

Wildfires are becoming an increasingly common part of life across Colorado, but many rural schools have limited access to engineering education and environmental monitoring tools.

That’s why Associate Research Professor Daniel Knight and Professor Michael Hannigan will expand the Colorado Science and Engineering Inquiry Collaborative (SCENIC) by introducing a new wildfire-focused curriculum to high schools across the state.

Students will investigate how wildfires affect local air and soil quality using monitoring technology developed at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, while engineering students will serve as mentors throughout the school year. By combining hands-on research with community partnerships, the project aims to inspire the next generation of engineers while helping students explore environmental challenges affecting their own communities.

Professional Research Assistant Evan Coffey (left) and Teaching Professor Shalom Ruben (right).

Listening to Communities: Co-developing Toolkits to Measure Sound and Air Pollution (Evan Coffey, Ellen Considine and Shalom Ruben)

When residents of Denver's Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods raised concerns about noise and air pollution, they asked researchers for help gathering the data needed to better understand the problem.

Professional Research Assistant Evan Coffey and Teaching Professor Shalom Ruben are striving to provide that help by working alongside community members to develop affordable sensor toolkits capable of measuring both sound and air pollution.

Residents will help determine where sensors are deployed, learn how to interpret the results and use the findings to support future community-led environmental assessments and policy discussions. The project also gives �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder students hands-on experience in community-engaged research and environmental monitoring.

Professor Emerita Shelly Miller.

Pilot Monitoring of Urban Pesticides for Human Health and Biodiversity Protection in Boulder, Colorado (Riley Mulhern, Karen Bailey and Shelly Miller)

Pesticides used in residential neighborhoods can affect both human health and local ecosystems, yet little data exists on how they move through urban environments.

A new PACES project led by Professor Emerita Shelly Miller will partner with the City of Boulder to monitor common residential pesticides using low-cost silicone samplers placed in yards and on dog collars.

The research will pair environmental measurements with biodiversity data and community input to better understand pesticide exposure and develop a blueprint for long-term monitoring that can help guide future public health and environmental policy.

Building Community Infrastructure for Air Quality Monitoring at San Lazaro Mobile Home Park (Enrique Lopez and Shelly Miller)

Residents of San Lazaro Mobile Home Park in Boulder are preparing for a multi-year coal ash excavation at the nearby Valmont Power Plant, raising concerns about potential air quality impacts.

Building on an existing community partnership, the PACES project will support the next phase of the project by training bilingual community health leaders, expanding air quality education and helping residents create their own response plan if pollution levels become concerning.

Rather than simply collecting environmental data, Miller and her team will focus on ensuring families understand what the information means and how to use it to protect their health long after the research concludes.

The Office of Outreach and Community Engagement (OCE) at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder has awarded five Public and Community-Engaged Scholarships (PACES) to faculty and students from the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering. These awards connect research, creative work, and teaching and learning activities for faculty, staff members and students across campus with partners from Colorado communities and beyond.

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ME outreach program brings big engineering dreams to small rural towns

alse6588 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:30:17 +0000

ME outreach program brings big engineering dreams to small rural towns alse6588 Wed, 04/01/2026 - 13:30

Alexander Servantez

For many high school students in rural Colorado, engineering once felt distant—something that happened somewhere else, by someone else.

But over the past decade, an outreach program in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering has been working to change that reality.

The program, known as the Science and Engineering Inquiry Collaborative (SCENIC), connects �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder students with rural high schools to introduce hands-on engineering experiences into the classroom, turning local questions about air and soil quality into real-world research projects.

Today, the initiative serves 12 schools and nearly 700 high school students across rural Colorado each year. Its origins, however, were far more modest.

The early evolution

Launched in 2012 with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the program began as a research endeavor. At the time, there was only one graduate student working on the project. They were tasked with using an environmental air quality monitor, positioned at Paonia High School, to investigate the impacts of fracking.

A close look at an air quality monitor, otherwise known as a Y-pod, developed in the Hannigan lab.

But it wasn’t long before the monitors proved they could do more than just collect data—they could spark learning.

“One day, a teacher at the high school saw the monitor up on the roof and thought it would make for a good tool in the classroom,” said Daniel Knight, an associate research professor in mechanical engineering and SCENIC co-founder. “It’s a small monitor that could easily fit in the hands of students. We saw the potential and decided to develop a high-school curriculum using the monitor as a way to deliver engineering education.”

By summer 2013, the curriculum was ready and the monitoring device had been redesigned for classroom use. The following year, Knight and his small team were ready to scale the program, expanding their outreach to four rural high schools.

However, the group soon realized that sustaining rapid growth meant recruiting more college students to lead the high school classrooms. That’s when they decided to introduce a new course in mechanical engineering called Project Based Learning (PBL) in Rural Schools.

Developed alongside professor and fellow SCENIC co-founder Michael Hannigan, the year-long class takes a two-pronged approach. During the first semester, college students learn to master the monitoring technology and become confident classroom leaders. In the second semester, they travel to their assigned rural high schools and help teachers implement the engineering curriculum.

“We piloted the course for the first time in the 2015-2016 school year with just eight students and it really worked,” Knight said. “From there, we were fortunate enough to attract more funding, allowing us to add more students and schools. We even brought �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s School of Education onboard to help monitor the program and identify ways we can improve our outreach efforts going forward.”

A broader impact

Now, nearly 30 undergraduate and graduate students enroll in the class each year, guiding rural high schoolers through projects that range from testing indoor air quality to analyzing soil conditions on local farms.

A group of students at Northfork High School in Hotchkiss, Colorado running a soil burning activity to determine the impact of fire on soil quality.

It’s a unique opportunity for rural high school students to turn their own towns into living laboratories. But Knight says it’s also an opportunity for the university to reach students who might otherwise never see themselves in engineering.

“Engineering and science education is very limited in these rural places,” said Knight. “Our goal is to bring a more interesting, project-based approach to their classrooms. That way we can get the word out about engineering and even just about attending college.”

Knight believes that establishing a more robust engineering identity in rural Colorado could benefit local communities, as well.

Rady Mechanical Engineering is already building that pipeline through partnerships with Western Slope universities that help rural students earn engineering degrees. Maybe one day, rural high schoolers inspired by the department’s outreach can return to their hometowns as engineers, bringing new ideas and solutions to their communities.

Or maybe they return to the program, this time as mentors, guiding students at the same rural high school that first sparked their interest in engineering.

“We offer our partnership program students the opportunity to take a remote section of the PBL course, and sometimes students we once mentored in high school come back as college students to take it,” Knight said. “When they are trained and ready to go, we like to send them back to the high schools they came from to mentor the next generation of students. It’s really rewarding to see that full circle moment come to fruition.”

With the program’s NSF award funding set to expire this year, Knight and his team are preparing a new grant proposal to try and keep their outreach alive. But they say maintaining the status quo isn’t enough—they want the program to strengthen and evolve.

“For years, the program has been mainly centered around air and soil science. However, we are also working to add another avenue of inquiry focused on wildfires,” said Knight. “It’s a topic that is extremely important in our state, especially in rural and mountainous areas of Colorado. We hope that adding wildfire questions into our curriculum gives high school students another meaningful way to engage with engineering and real-world problem solving.”

Associate Research Professor Daniel Knight and Professor Michael Hannigan are leading an outreach program that connects �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder students with rural high schools to introduce hands-on engineering experiences in the classroom. The initiative, known as the Science and Engineering Inquiry Collaborative (SCENIC), serves 12 schools and nearly 700 high school students across rural Colorado each year, turning local questions about air and soil quality into real-world research projects.

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Michael Hannigan and Daniel Knight earn Outreach Award for K-12 soil quality education

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 19:26:16 +0000

Michael Hannigan and Daniel Knight earn Outreach Award for K-12 soil quality education Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/18/2022 - 13:26

Rachel Leuthauser

Professor Michael Hannigan and Research Associate Daniel Knight.

Department of Mechanical Engineering faculty have received another �鶹��Ѱ�� Outreach Award for their work with rural K-12 schools in Colorado.

Department Chair Michael Hannigan and Research Associate Daniel Knight will be using the $24,000 grant to expand their outreach program that educates K-12 students about air quality and emissions. They are conducting the work with Professor Joseph Polman, the Associate Dean for Research in the School of Education.

The Soil Quality InQuiry (SQIQ) project will allow students from five Western Colorado schools in the Delta County, Mesa Country Valley 51 and Lone Star districts to conduct their own soil quality research. �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder will provide the curriculum, soil quality monitors, and student mentors from College of Engineering and Applied Science to support the K-12 classes.

SQIQ will begin in fall 2022, when �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder mentors enroll in the program. Then in November, the soil quality monitors will be delivered to the five high schools.

Mentors will help the students with their soil quality projects during monthly visits in spring 2023. SQIQ will culminate with the high schoolers presenting their projects with scientific posters at school symposiums in March or April.

The goal of SQIQ is to enrich STEM education opportunities in underserved rural K-12 schools. Hannigan and Knight explained that many of these rural areas struggle to attract science teachers and have little engineering education available to students.

SQIQ also provides opportunities to connect with community members in these rural areas such as farmers, ranchers, coal miners and local businesses – each of whom are stakeholders in the push for cleaner air.

Hannigan and Knight also plan to connect with government agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, environmental organizations like the Western Slope Conservation Center, and student development organizations such as Contigo that supports immigrant families.

Other partners on this project include faculty and students from Western Colorado University and Colorado Mesa University, since both partner universities are closer to the targeted school districts.

SQIQ is an expansion of the group’s ongoing outreach projects titled “Air Quality Inquiry Program” (AQ-IQ) and “Science-Engineering Inquiry Collaborative in Rural Colorado” (SCENIC), which both aim to create pathways for STEM education in rural Colorado. AQ-IQ based projects have received an Outreach Award every year since 2018.

On top of being awarded another grant this year, Knight will also be the speaker at the Office for Outreach and Engagement’s annual awards banquet in April 2022.

Department Chair Michael Hannigan and Research Associate Daniel Knight will be using the $24,000 grant to expand their outreach program that engages K-12 students to conduct their own soil quality research.

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Air Quality Inquiry project extends from rural Colorado into Mongolia

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 16:54:18 +0000

Air Quality Inquiry project extends from rural Colorado into Mongolia Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/21/2020 - 10:54

Oksana Schuppan

For the past three years, Air Quality Inquiry (AQIQ) has been reaching K-12 students across rural Colorado, teaching them to conduct their own air quality research with affordable sensors developed by Professor Michael Hannigan. This year, AQIQ Education Director Daniel Knight decided to mix things up. He and his team extended the program across the globe to reach Public Lab Mongolia, a nonprofit whose mission is to make data available to the Mongolian public.

Above: Mechanical engineering graduate student Evan Coffey teaches partners in Mongolia about the AQIQ Pods during his trip to Mongolia in November 2019. Photo credit: Enkhtungalag (Tunga) Chuluunbaatar.
Top: View of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in November 2019. Photo credit: Evan Coffey.

When Public Lab Mongolia learned of AQIQ, they were determined to adopt a similar model so that high school students in Mongolia affected by poor air quality from burning coal to heat households could learn more about the science behind it. In spring 2020, they traveled to �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and signed a partnership agreement with �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Provost Russell Moore. They agreed to form a new chapter of AQIQ at the National University of Mongolia.

Knight said he is excited to see the impact of their newest partnership in Mongolia in addition to continued work with five rural high schools on Colorado's Western Slope and three rural high schools on the High Plains in Northeastern Colorado.

As part of the program, a mechanical engineering course at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, Project-Based Learning in Rural Schools was developed to equip college students with the skills needed for working with high school students to develop an air quality project of their own. A similar model will be implemented at the National University of Mongolia. College students will learn to use Pods in their first semester, and their second semester will give them an opportunity to teach and mentor younger students who will be designing their own air quality experiments.

Before travel restrictions came about as a result of COVID-19, the full AQIQ team had planned an in-person training that would take place during the summer with Public Lab Mongolia and the National University of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar. Since prior plans were no longer an option, alumni of the Project-Based Learning in Rural Schools course at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder stepped up and taught the AQIQ curriculum remotely despite the 15-hour time difference. Public Lab Mongolia was able to use the Pods they had taken home following their visit to �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder earlier in the year. As part of their training, they gained experience by completing an AQIQ research project studying automobiles and public transportation in Ulaanbaatar.

Civil engineering graduate student Britta Bergstrom.

One of the �鶹��Ѱ��student mentors who helped with their training was Britta Bergstrom, an MS student studying civil engineering and pursuing a teacher’s licensure through the School of Education’s Post-Bac Licensure Program. Bergstrom taught partners at Public Lab Mongolia a module which explored how to design an AQIQ research project. Bergstrom's involvement with AQIQ is captured in her responses to the questions below.

Why did you get involved with AQIQ?

I saw the AQIQ program would allow me to combine my passion for teaching, engineering, and travel, and I quickly emailed Dr. Knight to discuss enrollment. What made me want to stay involved was a combination of a variety of things including the welcoming and easy-going faculty, an opportunity to travel, a lighter workload and most importantly, the opportunity to get into a classroom and teach.

Describe the AQIQ course, Project-Based Learning in Rural Schools.

In the fall, we spend each week simulating what we will be teaching in the spring, and by the end of the fall semester, we go to our assigned schools once for a chance to meet and engage with our K-12 students through an ice breaker game. Then, in the spring, mentor-teacher pairs visit their schools a handful of times to teach four different themes: an introduction to air quality, an exploration of combustion, how to design a research project, and how to interpret and present data. The lessons end with a poster symposium, which allows the students to present their air quality research and the data they collected. These projects explore everything from the difference in volatile organic compound amounts in cologne versus perfume to how much carbon dioxide an old truck outputs versus a new hybrid car.

How has AQIQ inspired interdisciplinary collaboration?

AQIQ's partners in Mongolia conduct an experiment using an AQIQ Pod to study automobiles and public transportation in Ulaanbaatar as part of their summer training. Photo credit: Enkhtungalag (Tunga) Chuluunbaatar.

I am pursuing an MS in civil engineering and a teacher’s licensure through the School of Education’s Post-Bac Licensure Program. This course was the perfect intersection between my areas of study. When I joined the class, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my classmates represented a variety of educational backgrounds. This course is appealing to students with a variety of passions, including teaching, environmental issues, research and study design and global engineering. This ultimately creates a very enriching culture within the class, because despite students taking the class for different reasons, there must be collaboration between students with different interests in order to teach the younger students.

Looking ahead, what excites you about AQIQ?

This coming year we are broadening the diversity of educational backgrounds of students involved by reaching out to non-engineering programs such as the School of Education and the Environmental Sciences Program. Students in this class do not need to have background knowledge in air quality, but they do need to have a basic understanding of how research projects are conducted and be excited to work with middle or high school students. As this program moves forward, I’m personally most excited to see the course continue to connect departments across the �鶹��Ѱ��, as well as a way to connect universities and schools across the world. We’re seeing this already with our Public Lab Mongolia partnership, and I think there is high potential to work with other non-governmental organizations and schools globally in the future.

What did you learn from your experience training Public Lab Mongolia this summer?

Working with Public Lab Mongolia this summer gave me my first opportunity to practice remote training, which is closely tied to remote teaching and is already proving helpful in my teaching courses this fall. Specifically, I was able to practice presenting a powerpoint and giving explanations over Zoom, as well as how to effectively brainstorm remotely as a group. I was also able to increase my global mindset and experience by learning about Mongolia! During our first meeting, we learned about the air quality and environmental challenges in Mongolia and got to experience the language as all of the materials were translated into Mongolian. Then, partway through the summer, one of the lead mentors, Tunga, gave us an impromptu lesson on Mongolian culture where we learned about traditional Mongolian wrestling, festivals and food. I love learning about different cultures around the globe, so this was a very meaningful experience for me.

For three years, Air Quality Inquiry has been reaching K-12 students across rural Colorado. This year, Daniel Knight and his team extended the program across the globe to reach Public Lab Mongolia, a nonprofit whose mission is to make data available to the Mongolian public.

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