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The Fifth International Design Competition and Forum held earlier this year as part of a research initiative between Colorado School of Mines and The Petroleum Institute, of Abu Dhabi, UAE, aimed to develop curriculum and pedagogy for engineering design education across cultures.
The forum, “Preparing Global Engineers: Developing Engineering Design Education Across Cultures,” allowed students in Mines’ EPICS program and the PI’s Strategies in Team-Based Engineering Problem-Solving (STEPS) program to compete in a 24-hour competition during which students developed a project plan, graphics portfolio and poster supporting its conceptual design.
Awards were presented to teams exhibiting outstanding creativity, functionality, and quality:
Colorado School of Mines kicked off Delta Days, a week celebrating and promoting diversity, January 21.
The week began observing Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with a faculty and staff breakfast. At the event, three members of the Mines community were honored for their efforts in enhancing diversity across campus: Maureen Durkin, director of policy and planning; Bruce Goetz, director of undergraduate admissions; and Clifford Sanden, undergraduate student in the Department of Petroleum Engineering.
The recipients of the MLK Day Recognition Award, as it is called, were selected with this criteria:
Dr. Winston Grady-Willis, professor and department chair of African and African American Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver was a guest speaker at the event. Dr. Winston Grady-Willis earned a BA in history from Columbia, an MPS in Africana Studies from Cornell, and a PhD in history from Emory. Prior to coming to MSU Denver he was director of intercultural studies and associate professor of American studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. While at Syracuse University, where he taught and labored in the Department of African American Studies, he received the Meredith Teaching Recognition Award. His book, "Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights," 1960-1977 (Duke), seeks to provide a gendered examination of the contemporary black freedom movement. His articles have appeared in Presence Africaine, The Black Panther Party Reconsidered and Black Prison Movements, USA.
For a full list of Delta Days events, click here.
Read more about Marquez Hall here.
When Kevin Moore was a young associate professor at Idaho State University, he used to wear a tie to off-campus research team meetings. One day a colleague asked, “Kevin, why do you always wear a tie to these meetings?” Someone joked, “That’s because he wants to be a dean someday.”
The prediction came true on January 3, 2012, when Moore was officially named dean of Mines’ College of Engineering and Computational Sciences, a position he had been filling on an interim basis since the college was formed last summer. While Moore’s long-ago colleague might be surprised to learn the accuracy of his prediction, those at Mines who know him well see it as a natural fit.
“I can send an email to Kevin at any time of the day or night, and it is rare not to get a reply—and a follow-up set of questions—within about 5 minutes,” says Provost and Executive Vice President Terry Parker, who describes Moore as a strategic thinker with strong management skills and a broad understanding of academic disciplines.
A member of the former Engineering Division’s Executive Committee, Moore simply says that when the job came up, “I was a logical choice for the interim slot—I had actually been paying attention. It wasn’t until after a few months that I realized, ‘I can do this job.’”
His career certainly includes the requisite experience. Prior to becoming the G.A. Dobelman Distinguished Chair in Engineering at Mines in 2005, he was a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Before that, he was a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Utah State University, where he directed several multidisciplinary teams on autonomous robot development. In the mid-’90s, he spent a year serving as interim associate dean of the College of Engineering at Idaho State University. Along the way, he authored three books, more than three-dozen refereed journal articles, and over 100 peer-reviewed conference papers.
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Exploration geologists can devote entire careers to searching for undiscovered mineral deposits without ever chalking up a find. But for those who do, it’s tremendously rewarding, and many go on to more discoveries.
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| In 2001, graduate student Russell Dow was studying satellite imagery of the known Arizaro deposit in Argentina, when he noticed a corona of white on a hill nearby. Samples he took from Lindero a few months later proved his hunch was well founded. |
Seated atop a glistening, rock-strewn hillside on a remote plateau in southwest Argentina in 2000, Russell Dow MS ’04 lit a cigarette, took in the view and quietly celebrated a moment many in his line of work go their whole lives without experiencing.
At age 26, just two days into his first field trip for his master’s thesis at Colorado School of Mines, the New Zealand-born exploration geologist had found a virgin deposit that later would be estimated to contain 2 million ounces of easily accessible gold.
“I sat down and thought, ‘Wow. This is it. This might be the one shot in your career where you find something really good,’” recalls Dow. “I relished that moment.”
Such discoveries are exceedingly rare, and getting rarer, as the low-hanging fruit—rich surface deposits easily found—become depleted, requiring intrepid geologists to follow fewer clues deeper below the surface in ever more remote regions. Mines economists estimate it takes 1,000 investigations to generate 100 mineral deposit targets worth drilling. Of those, perhaps one becomes a profitable mine.
This portable fire extinguisher is lightweight, inexpensive, non-toxic, recyclable, uses water more efficiently and is less damaging to structures and electronics than a typical sprinkler system.
“From the outset Mines has been a leader in water mist technology, the basis of this chemical-free fire suppression system,” explained Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the university’s Center for Space Resources. He directed its initial development in collaboration with NASA. In early 2012 the extinguisher passed the System Requirements Review at Johnson Space Center.
From now on, all design and testing work are aimed at delivering a new fire suppression system for the International Space Station (ISS) by the end of 2013. Mines researchers will help with unit design and will conduct testing on campus, as well as on NASA’s zero-gravity airplane, to determine the extinguisher’s optimum configuration to put out an open fire inside an ISS module.
They are working with ADA Technologies, Inc. on product development and with Wyle Integrated Science and Engineering under NASA’s bioastronautics contract to build 13 units that will replace the existing CO₂ extinguishers on the ISS. The new units must fit in the same space as the old ones.
Once the installation on the ISS is complete, the technology can move from spacecraft to commercial applications for a broader market. Possibilities include civil aircraft, passenger ships, military vehicles, subway systems and tunnels, museums and historical sites, health care facilities and computer rooms.
This article appears in the 2012-13 issue of Energy and the Earth magazine.
Historically, Colorado School of Mines has been a leader in energy research and technology development. While that fact holds true, some of today’s researchers are forging new frontiers in areas not usually associated with Mines, including biomedicine.
For example, Physics Professor Jeff Squier holds one of the original patents for femtosecond Lasik eye surgery and continues to further advance that technology with a focus on surgeries requiring a high degree of precision with respect to cuts made close to sensitive membranes.
Across campus Will Fleckenstein, an adjunct professor in the Petroleum Engineering Department, is working on improving hydraulic fracturing technologies to increase productivity of natural gas wells.
“The inventions the technology transfer office receives from faculty and students cover a wide breadth and tend to be more applied than most university inventions, which helps facilitate their movement into the marketplace,” said Will Vaughan, director of Mines’ technology transfer office.
“We’ve been working to open several avenues for the commercialization of the inventions while keeping the academic mission first and foremost. There have been some notable successes and we will continue to enhance the entrepreneurial culture as we move forward,” he said.
Encouraging entrepreneurship
As part of an initiative to encourage entrepreneurship within the Mines research community, a fund aimed at bringing technology to the commercial marketplace was funded by the Colorado School of Mines Foundation under the leadership of the Foundation Board of Directors Chairman David Wagner.
The Colorado School of Mines Proof of Concept Fund — $350,000 over a three-year period — will allow several research projects to head down the commercial pathway. The intent is to license the technologies to private companies or serve as the basis for start-up companies.
Chemistry Professor Kent Voorhees’ project, “Next Generation Point-of-Need Analyte Detection and Identification using Novel Lateral Flow Capillary Concentration and SERS,” is a method for detecting bacteria such as Listeria.
“The original iteration of this technology was patented by Mines and later licensed to Microphage, Inc. for use as a rapid method for detection of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus in hospitals,” Voorhees said.
The system is now being distributed internationally as the first phage-based bacterial detection device for clinical MRSA screening and is the only FDA-approved MRSA detection device. It is currently being adopted by some of the largest hospitals in the U.S.
Voorhees said his team has continued to refine the technology and has applied the improvements to detection of various pathogens and bacterial agents of biowarfare including plague, anthrax and food borne E-coli. It also has the potential to target viruses, fungi, hormones and cancer markers.
Hongun Liang, an assistant professor in the George S. Ansell Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, also received funding for his project “Development of Artificial ‘Cells’ for Anti-Cancer Drug Delivery,” a method for delivering a variety of anti-cancer drugs.
Also funded was Adele Tamboli, research assistant professor in the Department of Physics, for her project “Electrochemical Extraction of Sodium from Silicon Clathrates,” which examines modifications of structures to store hydrogen and other atoms.
The material, silicon in the clathrate crystal structure, is an exciting topic with the potential for a lot of renewable energy applications. Researchers at Mines are among only a few groups synthesizing this material.
“This project is a patentable component of the research that could enable a number of renewable energy applications, such as hydrogen storage materials and photovoltaics, that could form the basis of start-up companies,” said Tamboli.
Entrepreneurial experience for undergrads
Entrepreneurship at Mines extends beyond the faculty research corridors. Graduate courses focused on the subject have been offered for several years through the Division of Economics and Business Engineering and Technology Management Program, but as of fall semester 2011, undergraduate students also are learning what is involved in taking an idea to the marketplace.
“What better place than Mines?” Joy Godesiabois, a teaching associate professor in the Division of Economics and Business, remembered thinking when setting out to teach the university’s first undergraduate class focused on entrepreneurship.
Godesiabois taught a similar course at another Colorado university, where students brainstormed ideas for T-shirt stores, heli-skiing businesses and bars — but at Mines, students were talking about developing different tools to detect blood sugar levels for diabetics and selling used oil drilling equipment to third world countries.
“I was blown away,” she said. “These students are so creative; they get such amazing training in their individual areas here at Mines. They come into entrepreneurship class with ideas that can be game changers.”
The entrepreneurship class gives students a different viewpoint, a different way to look at a problem. Not only are students learning leadership skills and gaining self-confidence, they are forced to face a problem that doesn’t have one correct answer — there is no formula.
“When comparing the students on the first day of class with the last day of class, you can see the changes in how they are thinking about things,” she said.
They learn management skills, how to work independently, how to work and function within a group and how to develop a financial plan. Going into the business world after graduation versed in risk and profitability gives engineering students an edge in talking with management in business terms, Godesiabois said.
Students were so enthusiastic about the class, they started an Entrepreneurship Club. The club works as a networking tool for the students as well as a practice vehicle for what they are learning in class.
This article appears in the 2012-13 issue of Energy and the Earth magazine.
October 2011 was an exciting month, not only for Mines, the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and the state of Colorado, but for solar energy in general. Coming off the purchase of Colorado-based PrimeStar Solar, Inc., General Electric (GE) announced it would build a $300 million photovoltaic (PV) production plant in Aurora, Colo. — the largest of its kind in the U.S.
It was a mix of institutions, knowledge and bright people that brought GE into the solar industry with such an investment. The backstory begins in 1996 with a Mines graduate student named Joe Beach, who is now a Mines research professor.
“The reason I came to Mines was because I was looking for ways to get into renewable energy,” said Beach. “At that time Mines was one of the few places that actually talked about it.”
In the early 1990s, the Department of Physics at Mines formed a research program in Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) technology, which is now considered one of the most cost effective thin film PV technologies available. The research began with Dr. John Trefny, who later became head of the Department of Physics and then president of the university. That research was funded by the Thin Film Photovoltaic Partnership Program, which was managed by NREL. By the time Beach started work on the program, shortly after earning his PhD, leadership had been handed off to Associate Professor Tim Ohno. It was in working with Ohno that Beach met graduate student Fred Seymour.
“I had an interest in moving laboratory research into commercial work and it turns out Fred Seymour did too,” said Beach.
Seymour and Beach collaborated to form a small business called PV Technologies, receiving two SBIR grants from the National Science Foundation and beginning work in Mines laboratories. However, they lacked manufacturing experience, and for that they turned to Russell Black and his company called Ziyax, which had expertise in large-scale deposition of thin films of semiconductors and metals on glass. They named this new venture PrimeStar Solar and began hunting for investors.
“The thing that people were just starting to realize at that time is that to have a successful PV company it takes between $500 million and $1 billion in investment,” said Beach.
GE was interested in investing in the solar market, having shopped for opportunities at other institutions in Colorado. Ultimately, however, GE approached PrimeStar and became the largest investor before purchasing the company in April 2011 and announcing its plans to ramp up production with the construction of the largest PV manufacturing plant in the U.S. PrimeStar Solar is now part of GE, and Fred Seymour is general manager of Solar Technology for GE Energy – Renewables.
“The big thing that the research here at Mines did for PrimeStar is it produced people with excellent technical skills,” said Beach, who added that the company licensed its patents from NREL, which has been active in CdTe research since the early 1980s. “You’ve got to have the right combination of engineering expertise, science expertise, entrepreneurial interest and willingness to just doggedly pursue a problem. It will make or break the transition from a laboratory technology to something that is viable commercially.”
In isolation this is a success story, yet much of the U.S. solar industry is struggling. First Solar reported its first losing quarter at the end of 2011, while Abound Solar halted production of its first-generation panel and cut roughly 180 jobs at its Loveland, Colo., facilities. California-based Solyndra filed for bankruptcy and shut its doors after receiving more than $500 million in federal government loans.
At the macro level, however, there are economic challenges at play.
“The overall PV industry problems are due to a 50 percent overcapacity right now,” said Beach. “There really isn’t a barrier to entry in the market.”
Debate continues on whether China presents unfair competition. Chinese manufacturers get extremely cheap loans and do not pay income taxes. This gives them a significant cost advantage without requiring any technology advantage, and has caused resentment and charges of dumping by some other PV manufacturers. Taking cues from the history of foreign car manufacturers in the U.S., Chinese PV companies began building assembly plants in their sales markets. This reduces shipping and working capitol costs and creates manufacturing jobs in the sales markets.
Further increasing the complexity of the issue, struggling American photovoltaic start-up companies, such as Ascent Solar (another Colorado company with ties to Mines), have been supported financially by investment from Chinese firms.
Much is to be determined in the photovoltaic energy game and, as it has in the past, Mines will play a leadership role moving forward.
"We are clearly at a challenging time in the PV world,” said John Poate, vice president for research and technology transfer at Mines. “The modern PV cell was invented at Bell Labs in 1954. CdTe is another pioneering U.S. technology. It is essential that we compete successfully in this industry, which we invented. To do this we will need a coherent national strategy to stay ahead of the game.”
This article appears in the 2012-13 issue of Energy and the Earth magazine.
He may have co-authored a textbook titled "The Art of Being a Scientist," but for Mines Geophysics Professor Roel Snieder, there is art in community service as well.
Snieder, who is the W.M. Keck Distinguished Professor of Basic Exploration Science at Mines and co-director of the Ethics Across Campus program, has been named the chief of Genesee Fire Rescue.
“It is an honor to serve my community by being a leader in providing professional emergency services. This is a completely different activity than my day job at Mines; this diversity of my roles personally enriches me,” Snieder said.
Effective July 1, Snieder will assume the two-year term overseeing the fire rescue staff of the residential mountain community west of Golden. Forty volunteer firefighters and two paid full-time firefighters serve a 10-square-mile area that includes 1,500 homes, 28 commercial structures and 3,000 acres of urban-interface and wildland open space.
