Humanities & Design


Gracie Cole '20 tells us about her Capstone Design project—converting her 1979 VW bus from gas to electric.
Re-Volt’s goal was to retain the van’s road trip and car camping capabilities while aiming for a 250-mile range and comfortable highway cruising speed of 70 mph.
The coronavirus pandemic prevented the world from holding its annual meeting to continue moving the Paris Agreement forward this fall, but Mines students pressed ahead in their place. In an end-of
Mines’ newest cohort of University Innovation Fellows have an ambitious agenda to promote positive change on campus – including plans to establish a dedicated creative space where students could unwind and collaborate on artistic endeavors.
The six Mines students will serve as program ambassadors for humanitarian engineering and will seek out new opportunities for collaboration with faculty, alumni, corporations and non-governmental organizations.
“A growing number of engineers and scientists want to understand how their work can contribute to broad social and environmental goals," program director Jessica Smith said.
McNeil Hall was named in honor of alumnus and trustee Charles “Charlie” McNeil ’71 and his wife, Judy McNeil, who recently made a $5 million gift to Mines to support entrepreneurship and innovation programming.
Mines students used WhatsApp and Zoom to connect with small-scale gold miners in Colombia this summer and collaboratively design solutions for the issues most important to their rural mining communities.
The U.S. Department of Energy competition challenged student teams from across the U.S. to design and model optimized energy systems for multi-building districts.
PhD student Kyle Blount and HASS assistant professor Adrianne Kroepsch focused on collaborative problem-solving to protect water resources in the aftermath of wildfires upstream of Fort Collins, Colorado.