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A lifetime of dance started on a skateboard

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 23:02:17 +0000

A lifetime of dance started on a skateboard Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/17/2026 - 17:02

When hip-hop icon and legendary choreographer Rennie Harris joins “The Ampersand” podcast, expect to learn the difference between the backslide and the moonwalk

Listen to The Ampersand

Late last year, New York Times arts critic Brian Seibert, in discussing Rennie Harris’ piece “American Street Dancer,” wrote that “Harris has done more than any other choreographer to reveal and develop the metaphorical and narrative expressivity of American street dance.”

In the world of dance, he’s a legend—named a “Living Legend” by Dance magazine, in fact—yet he’s also the guy you might occasionally see tooling around the University of Colorado Boulder campus on a skateboard.

Harris has changed the face of concert dance by introducing hip-hop and street styles in innovative ways, and for 10 years he has been a guest artist in ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� dance program.

Rennie Harris has changed the face of concert dance by introducing hip-hop and street styles in innovative ways and for 10 years he has been a guest artist in ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� dance program. (Photo: Osamu Inoue)

He recently joined host Erika Randall, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� dean and vice provost of undergraduate education and professor of dance, on "The Ampersand,” a College of Arts and Sciences podcast. Randall and guests explore stories about ANDing as a “full sensory verb” that describes experience and possibility.

For Harris, that experience and possibility starts with showing up. Hip-hop is a participatory culture, he says, and for those who show up? Well, that’s when the divine happens.

RENNIE HARRIS: My first skateboard was made by a cat, his name is Lewis Bailey. He is part of the younger kids, siblings, of Bill Bailey.

ERIKA RANDALL: Stop it.

HARRIS: Yes, he was my classmate and …

RANDALL: And he built boards? Tell me the story.

HARRIS: We were friends since middle school, parochial school. I went to Roman Catholic, he went to a public school. So, he built boards, and that was how I got my first board.

RANDALL: Did you know who … so, who was Bill Bailey?

HARRIS: Bill Bailey is his father. Bill was a tapper. Pearl Bailey, his aunt. I used to hang out at their house all the time. He's also the first person I saw do the backslide.

We were in recess, and he was gliding across the gravel and everyone stopped. He looked like he was walking, but he was gliding. He was moving backwards, but his feet …

RANDALL: First time you've ever seen it.

HARRIS: Yeah. Knees going foom, like what the heck is that? And he says, oh, my father taught me.

RANDALL: Stop it.

HARRIS: And that's all he said. Later on, we became really close friends.

RANDALL: But he didn't call it moonwalk.

HARRIS: No, no, the original, it's called the backslide. The moonwalk actually goes forward, and it looks like you're walking on the moon.

RANDALL: Yeah, that's moonwalk in hip hop.

HARRIS: That's why it's called the moonwalk in street dance, yeah.

RANDALL: But Earl Snakehips Tucker was doing the backslide …

HARRIS: I saw Bill Bailey in 1933 do it, do the backslide. And he was known for that.

RANDALL: In tap shoes.

HARRIS: So, that's the first time I see it. I meet with—his name was Johnny, Lewis Bailey, but they call him Johnny, Johnny Bailey. Yeah, so he made me a board. And then he started teaching me 360s, spacewalk, walk the dog, helicopter, doing planks …

RANDALL: So, you were breaking on your board.

HARRIS: Yeah, doing handstands and planks on the board. I was like, oh, snap. Yeah, so we should do all that. I said do 360s with two boards.

RANDALL: And you were dancing at the same time

For Rennie Harris, hip-hop is a participatory culture. (Photo: Bob Emmott)

HARRIS: Yeah, all this was happening at the same time.

RANDALL: You were always doing all the things.

HARRIS: Yeah, especially in the summer we would get up and be out of the house by 8 in the morning. We were just out. We were out. And, of course, this is when landlines were …

RANDALL: For people listening at home, that's when there's a phone in the wall and a cord that's attached.

HARRIS: So, at that time we would go out, never went back home until like 11 at night.

RANDALL: So, it wasn't even, ‘It starts to get dark, I want you home, Lorenzo.’

HARRIS: When I was younger, it had to be when the streetlights came on. That was always like 6, 7. You had to be on the block.

RANDALL: Within yelling distance.

HARRIS: ‘I need to be able to see you,’ that kind of thing. And so we would go out 8, 9 in the morning. I'd be across the city three or four times already by the time I got back. We were just walking and doing all kinds of stuff.

RANDALL: And you had a crew.

HARRIS: Yeah. We were skateboard. We played basketball. We'd go to the park. We used to play army man because we all thought we were going to go into the military after high school.

RANDALL: You did?

HARRIS: Oh, that was the plan ...

RANDALL: So, your first performance, can you take us back as a dancer, the first time you made money and when you had the entrepreneurialism, the moxie to say, ‘I'm going to make money on this thing that we've been doing in the community but now I'm going to figure out how to make a living?’

HARRIS: The first time I ever got paid was not performance. I was teaching. And I did this little lecture, Brenda Dixon Gottschild brought me in. I was about 14 or something.

RANDALL: BDG brought you in at 14?

HARRIS: She was at Temple. Yeah.

RANDALL: How did you know her?

HARRIS: I didn't at the time.

RANDALL: How'd she find you?

HARRIS: I have no clue.

RANDALL: That is bizarre. She's one of the greatest dance scholars of all time, and she's bringing in 14-year-old not yet Sir Rennie Harris.

HARRIS: We had become very popular in Philadelphia as a street dance crew. We were poppers, we weren't breakers.

RANDALL: What was your crew's name?

HARRIS: The Scanner Boys. And we became so popular that our name was at city hall. All the programs and all the things, any time there was an event ...

RANDALL: Let's get the Scanner Boys.

HARRIS: They called the Scanner Boys to be the entertainment. You know what I mean.

RANDALL: So, you brought hip hop to the university at 14.

HARRIS: Possibly, yeah.

RANDALL: That's wild.

HARRIS: Because everyone wanted to know what I did.

RANDALL: Yeah, so what did you say? What does 14-year-old Rennie say about popping?

HARRIS: I was just explaining what pop is, we're street dancers, blah blah blah blah.

RANDALL: Did you demo?

HARRIS: Yeah, I demoed. I demoed, I remember that. And I remember sitting in her office at Temple.

RANDALL: She saw a gap, though, in dance studies. She saw that this was not in the books, that this was not in the classroom. This was not in the literature. And you were the first guest then. I'm going to say you were the first.

HARRIS: Yeah, I was a kid.

RANDALL: And you did not have designs yet to be in the Academy or bring hip hop to the …

HARRIS: Oh, no. I will tell you this, because you mentioned something about money earlier. I will tell you this. It was all economics. If you paid me, I'd dance. I was like Tina Turner, your private dancer. That was one of my favorite songs, too.

RANDALL: Oh my God, Tina.

HARRIS: But do you know what I'm saying? So, we would go to different bars, go to lounges, and try to get money from the old people because we knew the old people would be drinking and they would be drunk.

RANDALL: Would you put out a jar or a hat?

HARRIS: We would have a hat, and say we go to the door of the bar and be like, ‘Hey, can we come in and dance?’ And dude was like, ‘Quick, make it quick.’ All right, all right. So, we'll go in and they'll put some music on, and we'll play off the jukebox, play something. And we would dance, and then we'd pass the hat around.

RANDALL: And you would take turns improvising? Or would you run it like a cipher?

HARRIS: It was always an improvisation, and it was always what I would call traditional hip hop busking. We would all stand in a line, do what they call the Soul Clap or the Soul Step, just a two-step to the left. And then we would do a solo, and then sometimes we'd do a routine to break it up. You know what I mean? And really, any kind of choreography was just a means to get to the solo for everyone. And so that's what we did, and then we would put out the hat.

Click play to hear the rest of the conversation!

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When hip-hop icon and legendary choreographer Rennie Harris joins “The Ampersand” podcast, expect to learn the difference between the backslide and the moonwalk.

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Top photo: Rennie Harris (left) teaching a dance class. (Photo: Patrick Campbell/��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��)

Scholar finds rhythm in rock and rhetoric

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 23:23:30 +0000

Scholar finds rhythm in rock and rhetoric Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/10/2026 - 17:23

“A rhythm is predictable, but what makes rhythms exciting sometimes is the fact that they do change… it’s the balance between the predictability and the spontaneity. That’s what makes life worth living,” says Steve Lamos. (Photo: Jesus Ortiz/@optimisticphoto)

Cody DeBos

As a founding member of influential band American Football, currently on tour, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Steve Lamos blends music and writing in ‘resonant literacy’

Steve Lamos is relaxing at home during a brief pit stop after touring with his band for two weeks. By Friday, he’ll be on a plane to Japan. Somewhere in between, he finds time to lesson plan and grade papers.

This is normal life for Lamos, an associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of English and Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

Every so often, he trades the world of academia for a tour bus as the drummer and trumpet player for American Football, the influential Midwest emo and math-rock band he co-founded in 1997.

Steve Lamos is an associate professor in the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of English and Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

This spring, the band released its fourth studio album, “LP4,” its first in nearly seven years.

Now juggling his teaching career with his band’s busiest touring schedule yet, Lamos calls this summer “both a blessing and a little bit of a, wow, you know, be careful what you wish for.”

Hiatus to homecoming

American Football’s new record almost didn’t happen.

Between 2020 and 2023, Lamos stepped away from the band while serving as interim director of the Program for Writing and Rhetoric, a role he describes as a “24/7 type of job.”

Around the same time, unresolved tension within the band came to a head and Lamos was focused on managing more responsibilities at home after a family member fell ill.

“Stepping away was inevitable,” he says.

But as any musician knows, putting down your instrument often comes with a sense of nostalgia for what once was. So, it was absence that brought Lamos back to American Football—realizing that the weight of missing it was greater than "whatever things were demanding that I step away or more than I was aggravated by those things, that’s when I knew,” he says.

The circumstances surrounding his return are why this album means more to him than the three that came before it, including a genre-defining first record.

Want to see your professor on stage?

American Football will perform tour dates through summer and fall 2026, including Sept. 22 at Boulder Theater and Sept. 23 at Red Rocks Amphitheater.

Learn more

“It represents our ability to get back together and do new things. I’m probably the proudest of it of anything I’ve ever done,” he says.

The rhythm of resonant literacy

Lamos kept his two lives strictly separated for many years, but today he’s quite willing to bring them together.

While teaching an upper-division course called Writing with Music, he’s developed a concept he calls “resonant literacy.”

As Lamos explains, it all starts with rhythm.

Within his framework, resonance is what follows.

“Resonance is when rhythm in one body generates rhythms in one or more other bodies,” Lamos says.

Over time, he’s learned to apply the concept as readily to a drum set as to a well-written sentence or the back-and-forth of a good conversation.

Resonant literacy often manifests in Lamos’ classroom. In Writing with Music, students spend a semester narrating the feel of a favorite song, then write a research paper arguing why that feeling should matter to a specific audience.

“Like, what a useless thing,” Lamos says, only half-joking. “Except, if students are doing it right, I routinely get the best work I’ve ever gotten.”

But really, Lamos says the idea is less about music or writing than about how to live. Understanding the rhythms we both create and are subjected to offers us a richer viewpoint as we navigate life’s ups and downs.

“There are ways in which you can influence those rhythms, or even make yourself better at generating them, and then leaving yourself more and more open to the possibility that they resonate, ideally in some sort of transformational way that makes life more vibrant and exciting,” he explains.

Where two worlds meet

When looking for it, Lamos finds that resonance often shows up in unexpected places, too. That includes relationships formed in the classroom that have blossomed into new creative ventures.

Vidushi Goyal was a science-writing student in Lamos’ class about a decade ago. Years after graduating, and coincidentally at the same time as his hiatus from American Football, Goyal shared some of her music.

“Every piece she sent me, I was like, ‘Oh man, this is good. This is even better than the last one.’ So, I asked if she wanted to play with some live drums, and she was in. We did some stuff together and I still get to play with her as a two-piece now and then,” Lamos says.

More recently, CU music student Max Adams organized a concert collaboration with Lamos this spring, arranging several American Football songs for a live ensemble.

Asked to describe it, Lamos’ face lit up.

“One of the cooler experiences I’ve ever had in my life,” he says.

‘ANDing’

For Lamos, making the most of a life defined by two wholly different paths comes down to a word the College of Arts and Sciences has embraced: “ANDing.”

“It’s this idea that part of what arts and sciences is about is this additive thing… taking two things that might seem disparate or even running at cross-purposes, and seeing what happens when you bring them together,” he says.

The label is fitting for a career built on the instincts of rhythm.

Resonance and “ANDing” are, in a sense, two names for the same idea that has carried Lamos from a grad school garage band to a tenured professorship and an international concert venues.

Whether you call it resonant literacy or borrow CU’s branding, the lesson is the same one Lamos wants to pass on to his own teenagers and to any student wondering whether a writing seminar and a rock band can not just coexist but become more than the sum of their parts.

“Do something practical, do something wholly impractical, and figure it out,” he says. “Figure out a way to bring them together, because you're only going to be happy in your life in the long term if you do.”

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As a founding member of influential band American Football, currently on tour, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Steve Lamos blends music and writing in ‘resonant literacy.’

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Top image: Steve Lamos (left), Mike Kinsella, Nate Kinsella and Steve Holmes of American Football (Photo: Alexa Viscius)

Meredith Betterton awarded Sloan Matter-to-Life grant

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:55:21 +0000

Meredith Betterton awarded Sloan Matter-to-Life grant Rachel Sauer Wed, 08/05/2026 - 14:55

Rachel Sauer

Research aligns with foundation goal to sharpen ‘scientific understanding of the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter’

Meredith Betterton, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of physics and molecular, cellular and developmental biology, has been awarded a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Matter-to-Life program.

The two-year, $594,487 grant will support Betterton’s ongoing research on microtubules, the small, long tubes inside cells that serve several functions and that Betterton’s research suggests may be less fixed and static than previously thought.

The Sloan Matter-to-Life program aims “to sharpen our scientific understanding of the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter, and to explore the conditions under which physical principles and mechanisms guide the complexification of matter towards life.”

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scientist Meredith Betterton has been awarded a two-year, $594,487 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Matter-to-Life program.

Betterton and her research colleagues study microtubules in cells, which help maintain cell structure similar to how beams support a building and also act like highways that move traffic along, she explains.

“Because (microtubules) have this important role as highways that things stick to and then move along, people have thought about them as being kind of fixed,” she says. “You build a microtubule, it’s there to be a highway and then it’s pretty static.

“The thought has been that once they’re there (in the cell), they sit there. Our project has to do with the idea that there might be subtle changes within the (microtubule) structure that act as a signal that sends information—so they act in some ways not as a highway, but like a telephone wire that’s sending signals.”

Building with bricks

Microtubules are built of subunits, called tubulin, that can be compared to bricks, Betterton explains. These tubulin “bricks” are known to make small internal changes to their shape and size; what hasn’t been known is what happens to the rest of the tubulin in the microtubule if one changes. “Imagine packing a lot of bricks together in a wall,” she says. “If you change the shape of one, what happens to the others nearby?”

Several years ago, Betterton and her research group, in collaboration with another team of research colleagues including Radhika Subramanian and Sithara S. Wijeratne at Harvard Medical School, were studying “traffic” along microtubules, which is done by motor proteins. These proteins take “steps” along the microtubule. They also can pile up and cause traffic jams, so Betterton and her colleagues were studying those jams to better understand the motors.

The researchers discovered this phenomenon because the math wasn’t working. “In my group we were working on mathematical modeling of this, and we couldn’t get the model to work,” she says. “We put in measurements, and the equations gave us predictions that were really different from what experiments showed. We found the only way we could get the model to make sense was if something was happening where the motors could talk to each other over really long distances.”

While this action happens on a nanometer scale, “if you scaled it up it would be as if, when you’re driving a car, you could know there’s another car two miles away and how fast it’s driving,” she says. “That really was the initial discovery—this weird, long-range effect that we didn’t know where it was coming from.”

Other research had explored the conformational transitions, or structural shifts in tubulin, and how motor proteins can stick to microtubules and change their state if they bind in large numbers. Betterton and her research group are exploring whether a change of state can happen when motor proteins bind in small numbers and send signals over long distances.

How cells process information

A key aspect of this research, Betterton says, is it explores a different paradigm for how to think about these particular molecules in cells and aims for broader understanding of the way cells process information.

For example, she says, much is known about how neurons in the brain send electrical signals—a vital process for information transmission in the brain—but that process “can only happen in that one type of cell, whereas microtubules are in every cell,” Betterton says. “They could be sensing something happening in one part of the cell, so we’re studying this new way that cells could be responding.”

She adds that there are various potential applications for this avenue of research, including developing more targeted chemotherapy drugs: “There’s one (tubulin) that seems to be resistant to this subtle expansion and contraction. Recent work shows that makes them not as responsive to chemotherapy drugs. Because microtubules are involved in cell division, some first-line chemotherapy drugs for cancer act against microtubules.

“What has been discovered is that some cancers can resist these chemotherapy drugs by switching to this other type of tubulin that doesn’t change shape as well,” she says, adding that understanding more about tubulin expansion and contraction could possibly lead to more effective drugs.

There also could be potential applications in the physics of materials and using microtubules and motor proteins to make new types of materials that are more tunable to specific functions.

“The Sloan program is interested in this research because this specific program is called Matter-to-Life,” Betterton says. “What that’s trying to say of matter is that it’s some collections of molecules, but what about it becomes different between something that’s inert versus something that could be more alive? That’s a really exciting question.”

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Research aligns with foundation goal to sharpen ‘scientific understanding of the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter.'

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Top image: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Lee Niswander awarded 2026 Edwin G. Conklin Medal

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:31:43 +0000

Lee Niswander awarded 2026 Edwin G. Conklin Medal Rachel Sauer Fri, 07/31/2026 - 10:31

Mikayla Eppert

The award recognizes the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� developmental biologist for extraordinary research contributions being a mentor who helped train the next generation of outstanding scientists

Lee Niswander has been named the 2026 recipient of the Edwin G. Conklin Medal from the Society for Developmental Biology.

A distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the University of Colorado Boulder, Niswander joins a group of researchers recognized for their exceptional contributions to developmental biology and their dedication to training the next generation of scientists.

Named after Edwin G. Conklin, a pioneering developmental biologist and American embryologist, the medal recognizes both scientific impact and mentorship.

Lee Niswander is a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��.

“It is a huge honor to receive the 2026 Edwin G. Conklin Medal from the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB). I thank SDB for nurturing my career and the education and careers of my trainees through the years,” said Niswander. “I am extremely pleased to share in the honor of this award with all of my current and former trainees whose research drove our discoveries and revealed the wonders of the embryo.”

This award follows on the heels of Niswander earlier this year receiving the 2026 Hazel Barnes Prize and being elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Niswander is described by her peers and trainees as a generous mentor, thoughtful leader and a disarmingly humble scientist.

“Lee is fearless,” said Maria Barna, Niswander’s former graduate student who now runs her own lab at Stanford. “[She] has instilled that in me."

Niswander’s work has shaped scientists’ understanding of how the body plan arises in early embryos. Her seminal contributions range from work on FGF signaling in limb development to the role of cell cilia during early organ development, and, more recently, efforts to understand the mechanisms underlying human neural tube defects.

'Wow, this is really cool'

Niswander originally became interested in research as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she first stepped into a lab through a work-study program. “Once I started to do research, I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool,’” she recalled.

That exposure led Niswander to graduate school at Case Western Reserve University, where she joined the developmental biology program. She remembers thinking, “I don’t know anything about development … I’m going to do that,” before joining the lab of Terry Magnuson, PhD.

Her dissertation work used genetic deletions in mice to probe which regions of chromosome 7 are necessary for embryonic development. She spent time in Sweden learning a specialized technique that helped her complete the work.

“There’s no need to reinvent the wheel if somebody else knows how to do it,” she said. “Go learn from an expert.”

After completing her PhD, Niswander joined the lab of Gail Martin, PhD, at the University of California, San Francisco, as a postdoctoral fellow. She began working on limb development, a topic no one else in the lab was pursuing at the time, and trained further at University College London with Cheryll Tickle, PhD, a leading expert in the field.

During this work, she found expression of FGF4 in the apical ectodermal ridge (AER) is sufficient for limb outgrowth—a finding that reflected the technical curiosity and willingness to seek outside expertise that would come to define her approach to science.

On her first day as a principal investigator, Niswander walked into an empty lab at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

“It’s just me … I can’t believe they let me do this,” she remembers thinking. This marked the beginning of her independent research career. Soon after, Niswander began a collaboration with Kathryn Anderson, PhD, launching a large-scale forward genetic screen for developmental mutants in mice.

One major finding to emerge from the screen was in identifying ciliary proteins that help integrate Hedgehog signaling during organogenesis, which Barna describes as, “dogma changing.” The findings reconceptualized cilia from passive “cellular antennas” into active signaling hubs that drive decisions about development. “The cilia is not just a boring antenna that's sticking out of the cell but is like a major signaling center also," Barna noted.

I am extremely pleased to share in the honor of this award with all of my current and former trainees whose research drove our discoveries and revealed the wonders of the embryo.”

Seeking the bigger picture

Niswander later returned to the University of Colorado Boulder, where her work expanded from identifying genes linked to neural tube defects to probing the broader underlying mechanisms. "[Niswander] was looking for a way to plug in some of these basic discoveries into human health even more,” said Barna.

Neural tube defects remain a central focus of her current work, reflecting her broader approach to science: “I’d be bored to tears to study anything at one level. I want to see things in that bigger picture,” she explained.

Niswander continues to teach limb development as a way of sharing what she finds most compelling about developmental biology and modeling the mentorship style she values.

“I still teach limb development because I think it's such an easy system for somebody to say, ‘Oh yeah, why are my fingers here and my shoulder there?’” she said.

Although her research has since expanded beyond questions of limb development, her postdoctoral findings still stand out to her. Remove the AER and limb growth stalls; replace its signal with FGF and the limb continues to grow.

“I still find it astounding,” she said, “that you can take off this whole strip of tissue – the apical ridge – and just put back in FGF, and the limb will continue to grow.”

Across her independent career, Niswander has trained nearly 50 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who have gone on to careers in science and beyond: professors, scientists, journalists and editors.

“I have no preconceived notions that somebody’s going to be like me,” Niswander said. “I give people opportunities all the time to pursue the career path that they want."

For Niswander, what has made it all worthwhile comes without hesitation.

"The people are my legacy,” she said. "None of this would be fun if you didn't have people in your lab. I live vicariously through all the wonderful people that have come through my lab."

Barna saw that approach firsthand.

“She encouraged this kind of bold and free way of doing science in the lab that I try to emulate,” said Barna. “But it’s very difficult to emulate Lee."

Niswander began her work at a single lab bench as an undergraduate, but her career has since evolved into one that has moved across institutions and continents, produced work spanning human disease and developmental biology, and trained dozens of scientists. Yet, Niswander still describes the impact of her work in the same way.

“The research is fun,” she said. “You publish papers and stuff, but to me it’s the people and what they’ve done.”

In recognizing Niswander with the Conklin Medal, the Society for Developmental Biology said Niswander exemplifies the scientific impact and mentorship recognized by the organization through a career defined by curiosity, fearlessness and a deep commitment to training the next generation of scientists.

—Bradley Worrell contributed to this article

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The award recognizes the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� developmental biologist for extraordinary research contributions being a mentor who helped train the next generation of outstanding scientists.

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CU alumna fights to educate girls in the world’s youngest country

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:36:07 +0000

CU alumna fights to educate girls in the world’s youngest country Rachel Sauer Wed, 07/08/2026 - 09:36

Cody DeBos

In South Sudan, change happens when girls pick up books, says Micklina Kenyi

Before a girl opens her eyes in South Sudan or in a refugee camp across the border, her day is likely already spoken for.

There is water to fetch, meals to cook and siblings to care for. In families stretched thin by poverty and regional instability, she may be sent to work in a neighbor’s household, her wages handed directly to her parents until it’s time to marry.

School, if an option at all, belongs to her brothers.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumna Micklina Kenyi fled the now-South Sudan as a child and built the nonprofit Girls With Books! to support girls there in attaining education.

This is simply the way of life in South Sudan, a fledgling country celebrating 15 years of independence July 9.

Micklina Kenyi grew up in this world and knows it well. Now the University of Colorado Boulder alumna is working to change the outlook on education in South Sudan one girl at a time.

From refugee to advocate

Kenyi fled what is now South Sudan as a young child, spending years crossing borders and running between villages, orphanages and refugee camps before arriving in the United States in 2003 as part of the Lost Girls of Sudan program.

She eventually made her way to Colorado and ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, where she earned dual bachelor’s degrees in political science and women and gender studies.

“I felt these majors would help me understand the politics going on the in U.S. and in South Sudan. I wanted to understand the question: ‘Why are people using women and ignoring women?’” Kenyi says.

She also wanted to research why harmful cultural practices are consistently forced on women and whether women in South Sudan were alone in facing them. Unsurprisingly, they aren’t.

After learning of similar experiences lived out by women across India, China, Eastern Europe, Africa and indigenous communities in America, a conviction took shape.

“It is only going to be women who can liberate themselves, and only women to be advocates for themselves and come up with programs that will elevate the situation of all women. Why? Because we understand what it’s like and what it takes to change things,” Kenyi says.

With this perspective, Kenyi leaned on her education to start building what would eventually become the Boulder-based nonprofit Girls With Books!, where she serves as executive director.

Building Girls With Books!

The organization’s roots trace back along the very pathways through which Kenyi found herself arriving in the United States.

“It was once possible to bring girls to the U.S. the same way that I came, through legal process, so I thought maybe I could do something like that,” she says.

Unfortunately, that pathway closed as the political landscape in Sudan and South Sudan shifted. But rather than giving up, Kenyi and Girls With Books! has developed an approach that brings education to the girls in their own hometowns.

“The mission of Girls With Books! is to educate South Sudanese girls to become peacebuilders and positive change-makers in South Sudan,” says Micklina Kenyi. (Photo: Micklina Kenyi)

“We provide education for South Sudanese girls in Juba and Bor cities, as well as in northern Ugandan refugee camps. Our program covers primary and secondary education, including post-graduation courses like computer skills and entrepreneurship,” Kenyi says.

The program funds tuition and room and board at private schools to address the limitations of government-run public schools. It also provides girls with uniforms, school supplies, toiletries and feminine hygiene products.

“The mission of Girls With Books! is to educate South Sudanese girls to become peacebuilders and positive change-makers in South Sudan,” Kenyi says.

That’s an uphill battle in a country where fewer than 5% of girls graduate high school. However, Kenyi says most girls jump at the chance to go to school when an opportunity becomes available and thrive once there.

For a girl whose day was once consumed by labor and household chores, graduating from school opens new doors. Some go on to university, others start businesses, and even those who marry soon after graduating carry their education forward.

“They carry with them the knowledge and skills learned in school and become moms who are better equipped to raise children who usually have better health and education outcomes than most,” Kenyi says.

For those who want to pursue a future outside the home, jobs are scarce, Kenyi says, which is why Girls With Books! seeks to equip graduates with practical skills in addition to a good education.

“The program includes post-graduate work in computer training and job-readiness skills like interviewing, networking and resume writing. Armed with some of these practical skills, graduates have a greater potential to be hired,” she explains.

In 2025, Girls With Books! supported 116 South Sudanese schoolgirls, a number expected to grow to 150 this year. (Photo: Micklina Kenyi)

Fifteen years and building

This July marks 15 years since South Sudan declared independence. Building a new country from the ground up is arduous work, and there is still much to be done.

“South Sudan has not yet realized its potential as a new independent country,” Kenyi says.

She calls out the endemic corruption that has diverted oil revenue—the country’s main source of income—away from roads, hospitals, schools and civil servants a young nation desperately needs.

Meanwhile, ongoing fighting disrupts students’ routines and complicates operations on the ground for organizations like Kenyi’s.

“Some of the biggest challenges to the work of Girls With Books! are the lack of focus, by the government, on building the country’s infrastructure and investing in the educational system and in civil society,” Kenyi notes.

Yet the girls keep showing up.

“There is, however, surprising resilience among the young students we work with, and their sense of hope often reminds us how important our presence is for their futures,” she adds.

Pitching in

Over time, Kenyi and Girls With Books! have identified a formula that works. In 2025, the organization supported 116 South Sudanese girls, and Kenyi expects to raise that number to 150 this year.

The next challenge is scaling their impact even further.

“Our hope is that we can find enough funding to implement these programs on a national basis, so that young women can begin to impact the directions of the country and to cement the commitment to a peaceful society,” Kenyi says.

Of course, finances aren’t everything. For those interested in contributing beyond a donation, Kenyi says Girls With Books! welcomes volunteers to help with communications, program design and fundraising efforts.

“Also reaching out to students in U.S. schools so students here can better understand the realities of life in countries like South Sudan,” she adds.

Much like its future as a country, the story of South Sudan’s next generation is still being written. Thanks to the work of Kenyi and Girls With Books!, girls in Juba, Bor and the surrounding areas are in class, ensuring they have a fair chance to be the ones who write it.

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In South Sudan, change happens when girls pick up books, says Micklina Kenyi.

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Top image: Girls at school in South Sudan (Photo: Micklina Kenyi)

Recent grad finds purpose among the gibbons

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:20:50 +0000

Recent grad finds purpose among the gibbons Rachel Sauer Wed, 06/24/2026 - 15:20

Cody DeBos

Asian studies alumnus Lucas Lowenfish, soon to become a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar, experienced ‘a big trajectory change’ during Primates of Vietnam study abroad program

Before the sun rises in Cát Tiên National Park in Vietnam, the forest is wide awake. Lucas Lowenfish recalls slipping into the humid darkness with a few friends from his study abroad group to hike toward a tree they’d been told about.

This particular tree hosts a family of gibbons that congregates every morning to sing just as light begins to filter through the canopy.

“They start jumping and dancing around and doing their songs. It’s a coordinated singing that sounds unlike anything I’ve heard before,” says Lowenfish, a recent University of Colorado Boulder graduate in Asian studies.

Recent Asian studies graduate Lucas Lowenfish pivoted his career path after participating in the Primates of Vietnam study abroad program.

Later that morning, Lowenfish and a friend wandered deeper into the forest. Upon rounding a bend in the trail, they found themselves just feet from two gibbons mid-call. Close enough that, as Lowenfish puts it, “You can feel it in your head.”

That morning in the forest, and others exploring Cát Tiên and the jungles of Vietnam, gave Lowenfish a new direction for his career.

An unlikely primatologist

Lowenfish grew up in Washington, D.C., asking his parents for more time at the primate exhibit every time his family visited the zoo. He arrived at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� as an Asian studies major after taking Chinese classes in high school.

A career in primatology had never crossed his mind.

Then came a study abroad program led by ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� anthropology professors Jonathan O’Brien and Herbert “Bert” Covert. The duo takes students through an immersive tour of the biodiversity of Vietnam, visiting national parks, conservation NGOs, research centers and wildlife rehabilitation facilities.

For Lowenfish, the trip was an eye-opener.

“I’d never really thought about how studying monkeys could be a job, you know? But then my professors are in the field and we’re meeting people who are doing this full-time. Now that I was seeing that this is a thing, I knew I totally wanted to do it, too,” he says.

He calls the trip a “big trajectory change” for his career goals.

The “Primates of Vietnam” program runs each summer and draws a small cohort of eight to 15 undergraduates for a three-week adventure. Lowenfish says the experience rewards a certain kind of student.

“You definitely have to be adventurous and willing to step pretty far out of your comfort zone. But if you can do that, it’s like the greatest trip ever.”

What’s killing the gibbons?

After completing the study abroad trip, Lowenfish returned to Boulder and began writing a senior thesis on gibbon conservation across Southeast Asia.

Gibbons, natives of not just Vietnam but also Myanmar, India and Bangladesh, are among the most endangered primates on Earth. The threats driving their decline are consistent across borders.

Lowenfish says the main contributors are habitat loss from logging, industrial agriculture and expanding construction projects in the old-growth forests gibbons need to survive. Poaching is also a factor, with gibbon hunting feeding both the traditional medicine trade and the illegal pet market.

Lowenfish’s thesis draws on a study in which researchers examined dozens of established and potential gibbon habitats across several southeast Asian countries.

“The finding is pretty straightforward. These areas need immediate protected status, and that kind of systemic mapping needs to happen across all southeast Asia,” Lowenfish says.

But the tension between conservation and rapid economic development makes that work harder. Lowenfish watched this play out firsthand in Da Nang, where a critically endangered primate called the red-shanked douc lives on a coastal peninsula.

“These development companies, mostly doing hotels and resorts, because they’re right on the beach in Da Nang, have been able to lobby to get more and more of the land. They’ve been able to get it unprotected and develop on it,” Lowenfish says.

“They’re just building more hotels and there’s already like 50 hotels there. Half of them don’t even make money, but they just keep building them, and it’s ruining the habitat.”

Lucas Lowenfish and other participants in the Primates of Vietnam study abroad program walk through the forest (left); sunset on the Dong Nai River in Vietnam. (Photos: Lucas Lowenfish)

A cooperative solution

Lowenfish is careful not to let the scale of the problem crowd out the solutions. His thesis makes the case that meaningful conservation is happening.

Formal protected areas are the most effective intervention for gibbon populations. In Indonesia, a Wildlife Crimes Unit assembled a large ranger force in one national park and produced measurable population gains. Lowenfish says this model has since expanded to other countries in the region.

But the interventions he finds most compelling are the ones that work with local communities rather than ignoring their economic realities. He describes a project he learned about in Vietnam, in which an outside organizer partnered with slash-and-burn farming communities to offer a better solution.

“They taught these guys how to grow their own coffee more sustainably, package it and sell it,” Lowenfish says.

The same logic supports an eco-hostel project on an island critical to sea turtle nesting.

“The operators hired local rangers to patrol the shoreline and act as guides for the tourists. And these are the same guys who were hunting the turtles before,” says Lowenfish.

By creating new sources of income for local communities, these initiatives and others like them offer an alternative to clearing forest habitats for development or hunting endangered animals to sell to black-market buyers.

“You can’t just go in and tell someone to stop doing something and just expect them to do that for the good of the gibbons, especially when it’s their livelihood. You have to find ways to work together so everyone can benefit,” Lowenfish says.

Next stop, Madagascar

This fall, Lowenfish heads to Madagascar as a Peace Corps volunteer. While most of his time will be spent teaching English, Madagascar is home to lemurs, a primate lineage found nowhere else on Earth—and one that struggles with the same conservation challenges Lowenfish has been writing about.

He’s already picturing how to spend his free time.

“I’m hoping I can volunteer with a research center or something like that. Hopefully I can get into some real primatology stuff there, but even just getting to hang out with some lemurs would be pretty cool.”

It’s a fitting next chapter, but gibbons are still his focus right now. When asked to make the case for gibbon conservation, Lowenfish had an immediate answer.

“They are some of the most unique and beautiful creatures on Earth. They’re the only species with that particular combination of song and choreography.”

But there’s a practical argument, too.

“Gibbons are the premier seed dispersers in Asian forests. They eat fruit and distribute the seeds across huge territories,” Lowenfish says.

“Once we lose them, the entire forest suffers.”

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Asian studies alumnus Lucas Lowenfish, soon to become a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar, experienced ‘a big trajectory change’ during Primates of Vietnam study abroad program.

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� graduate student wins DOE award, joins NASA-DARES

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:53:07 +0000

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� graduate student wins DOE award, joins NASA-DARES Rachel Sauer Tue, 06/16/2026 - 09:53

Kayleigh Wood

Earth science PhD candidate Catherine Fontana will pursue cyanobacterial biofilm research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Catherine Fontana, a geobiology PhD candidate in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Earth Science and the Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology Program, was recently selected for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) award for her research on cyanobacterial biofilms.

The highly competitive program offers PhD candidates in various STEM fields the opportunity to advance their thesis research at one of DOE’s research facilities alongside a DOE national laboratory scientist. Additionally, awardees are eligible to receive a stipend for general living expenses and inbound and outbound transportation.

“The DOE SCGSR program allows me to study microbial processes using cutting-edge analytical techniques and world-class facilities that are a hallmark of the Department of Energy national laboratories,” Fontana says.

PhD candidate Catherine Fontana was recently selected for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Research (SCGSR) award for her research on cyanobacterial biofilms.

In the Department of Earth Science, Fontana is co-advised by stable isotope geochemist Boswell Wing and microbial physiologist Sebastian Kopf. Her research on cyanobacterial biofilms seeks to understand the connections between microbial physiology, mineral precipitation and stromatolite (a layered, rock-like formation built by microbial communities) formation using stable isotope geochemistry and experimental evolution.

From October 2026 to April 2027, Fontana’s SCGSR award will support her study at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where she will work closely with Rhona Stuart, who leads the DOE’s MicroBiospheres Scientific Focus Area. The DOE laboratory offers Fontana the opportunity to leverage a stable isotope technique called NanoSIMS to track variation in stable isotope composition at the micron-scale level.

The project, “Tracking Carbon Flow in Cyanobacteria Biofilms and Their Mineral Byproduct,” explores “how carbon moves through cyanobacterial biofilms and the extent to which this carbon contributes to minerals they make, like carbonate, that eventually turns them into rocks, like stromatolites,” she explains, adding that her work is especially meaningful in the context of developing next-generation biotechnologies in which cyanobacteria and their biofilms may be an innovative foundation for bioeconomy products.

Charting the future of NASA astrobiology

Additionally, after a highly competitive open-call application, Fontana was selected as one of nine early-career scientists to serve on the 49-member NASA-DARES Task Force 2. Composed of members of the astrobiology community, NASA-DARES, or NASA’s Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy, will serve as a roadmap for the organization’s future astrobiology research, which aims to understand life’s origins, evolution and distribution across the universe.

Since January, NASA-DARES Task Force 2 has been building on the nine major focus areas—which include comparative planetology to understand habitability and astrobiology in society, among others—identified by Task Force 1 by gathering community input through virtual webinars and public discussions. Task Force 2 is currently synthesizing community perspectives into a document outlining contemporary astrobiological interests, available opportunities and the diverse scientific approaches and disciplines in motion across NASA Science.

As the executive secretary of Focus Area 8, Early Career and Workforce Development, Fontana has worked with her team to solicit and synthesize community input regarding how NASA can best support early-career astrobiologists and develop the field over the next decade.

“As an early career researcher passionate about the future of astrobiology, I am profoundly honored to be part of NASA-DARES,” says Fontana. “As the only early-career member of the ‘Early Career and Workforce Development’ focus area, I feel a strong responsibility to represent early-career voices and perspectives. This role provides me with a unique opportunity to help shape the chapter’s findings and contribute to pivotal conversations about the future of astrobiology.”

NASA-DARES is still soliciting feedback: The public comment period for NASA-DARES is open this month and close July 2. The final NASA-DARES document will be shared at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in December.

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Earth science PhD candidate Catherine Fontana will pursue cyanobacterial biofilm research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

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How does it feel to be alive? Art has answers

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:29:25 +0000

How does it feel to be alive? Art has answers Rachel Sauer Mon, 06/15/2026 - 16:29

Clint Talbott

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Megan O'Grady's book fuses memoir and art criticism in ‘unusual and risky’ work that’s drawing fans and kudos

When it comes to art, your heart is as important as your brain. This is what Megan O’Grady feels.

She should know. O’Grady, assistant professor in art and art history at the University of Colorado Boulder, is the author of How it Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, published this year.

A former art critic at The New York Times, O’Grady calls the book “unusual and risky,” but the gamble seems to have paid off. The New Yorker chose it as one of the best books of 2026 thus far, and it has received a starred Kirkus review. Art and literary publications, from Hyperallergic to The Yale Review, have covered it, and a wide range of readers have found her approach to art “resonant in their own lives.”

Megan O'Grady, assistant professor of art and art history at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, is the author of How it Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, published this year. (Photo: Thorsten Trimpop)

The book focuses on five works of art, which frame, reflect or distill chapters in her own life. She quotes the artist Barbara Kruger, who defined art as “the ability, through visual, verbal, gestural and musical means, to objectify one’s experience of the world: to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.”

O’Grady concurs, saying: “I have often been bludgeoned by art’s beauty, energized or pulverized by its emotional content, vacuum-sealed within its force-field. I’ve looked at it and thought, This is exactly what it feels like to remember someone I lost, or, This is what love is, a tenderness toward existence.”

Additionally, she contends, art “provokes unanswerable questions about how to live in a fragmenting society. It enacts transfers of energy, joy and defiance. It suggests new forms of connection and belonging.”

O’Grady is a critic and essayist and has also written for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and Vogue.

Recently, she answered questions from Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine. Her responses follows:

Question: How can a regular person have greater appreciation for art? Are there steps one could take?

O’Grady: In my view, your appreciation of art is no more or less refined as mine or anyone else’s. My book directly challenges the idea that one must be an expert to enjoy art, and I’m skeptical of approaches to art that feel precious or exclusionary. Part of being human is to look for meaning in life—and art is one mode of seeking.

How It Feels to Be Alive models a mode of looking at art as an intimate encounter, one that deploys—in my experience, anyway—not instantaneously, but over time, in different seasons of life: as teenager trying to figure out who I was, or in moments of loss—after the end of a long relationship, or after losing my home and everything I owned in a freak accident.

Art helped me think through becoming a parent, and the awareness that I had deeply implicated myself in our broken world. It changed the way I think about the natural world and the invisible histories written into the landscape. It made me look very clearly at people with very different experiences of American life than my own, and it challenged me to deal with some of my own unresolved feelings about all sorts of things: creating a home, the unconscious shame I had about my body, about materialism and guilt.

I’ve always been interested in art’s capacity to make us feel things, to challenge the way we see ourselves understand the world around us. This, to me, is why we need art—in any form, be it visual art, music, literature—and why we come to it seeking answers or solace or self-recognition or things we can't put into words.

Nan Goldin, Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston, 1973, cibachrome print. (Courtesy of Nan Goldin and Gagosian)

We live in an era that both fears and devalues art, that often treats it as a commodity, an artifact to categorize by medium and period, or to instrumentalize in displays of political dominance. I’m especially concerned by characterizations of art as elitist, decorative or superfluous, and we can already see the result of our educational systems’ deprioritizing of the arts and humanities in declining creative and critical-thinking skills.

We look at art with the same eyes we do everything else. What are you attracted to and why? Is there more to be learned from other works by a particular artist, or about the artists and the times they were responding to? Art is entirely subjective: It hits us all differently depending on where we’re at in life, our experiences and interests.

I encourage readers to seek out the art in their midst—this is what I try to do, anyway. Build it into your life; get on mailing lists. For those interested in visual art who live in the Boulder area, the MFA show at CU Art Museum is a great place to see emerging artists addressing the issues of our time. There are exceptional art institutions as well as alternative art spaces across the country.

Question: Your book has elements of a memoir and elements of art criticism. In taking this approach, you share portions of your life that range from joy and pain and points in between. Can you talk about how such open introspection might help the reader understand art better—or feel it more fully?

O’Grady: Art is private in origin and public in expression—this is essential to its power. As an art critic for The New York Times, I found myself listening to artists’ stories, many of them intensely personal, and reflecting on everything that had led up to the creation of these charged objects we see in museums and galleries. The artists had risked a lot to make the work they did, and their trust in me was humbling. I began to think of the other side of the equation—what impact art had had in my own life, and what I was risking in my work as a critic.

Things were heating up in the world—a global pandemic, a turn toward fascist politics, race and gender-based violence—and I began thinking more about why we should care about things like art in times that often feel chaotic and cruel. Because I did care, even though so many things about our culture leads us to cultivate cynicism and self-interest. Being honest about these things is a risk; truth-telling is a risk. Because art both exposes and asserts cultural values, it can really upset people.

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963, gold leaf and gesso on canvas, 6 ft. 3 in. × 6 ft. 3 in. (190.5 × 190.5 cm). Gift of Celeste and Armand P. Bartos. (© Agnes Martin Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY)

These are the tensions that inspired me to write the book and that guided its structure. Honestly, we should all be taking risks right now.

Question: If a student asked you to list five works of art that conveyed how it feels to be alive, how would you answer?

O’Grady: We all have to find the answer to this for themselves. How It Feels to Be Alive tackles recurring themes in my life and in the lives of some of the artists I’ve known.

In the chapter on Agnes Martin, I’m thinking about connection and isolation, and the impact our friends have on us. A chapter that begins with Carrie Mae Weems’ “Kitchen Table Series” leads me consider the complexity of seeing oneself clearly when we’re so busy being seen. Kruger’s “Untitled (Your Body),” which kicks off chapter 3, was one of the first works of art that led me to understand what it meant to have a critical perspective on the world, and later, as a parent to a daughter, to confront my own internalized misogyny.

The great performance artist Pope.L, with whom I traveled to Flint, Michigan, to do a project involving the tainted water—we bottled and sold it as a Pope.L-branded art object to raise money for the people of Flint—challenged my uneasy feelings about home as troubling national or personal identity, the subject of chapter 4. The last chapter is about environmental artists and how they reframe our position on Earth, anchored by the largely overlooked land artist and monumental sculptor Beverly Pepper.

These are the major themes, but within each chapter, they become more complex, involving other artists and works. And they are certainly not the only themes in life—the book doesn’t try to be comprehensive. That would be impossible. Rather, it seeks to model a way of looking at art, encouraging others to seek out their own works of art in any form that are meaningful to them.

Question: You mentioned that you love your students, who are “less interested in making a mark than in leaving no trace,” a great line. Your writing (and good writing generally) is also a form of art. Do your students appreciate that, particularly in the TikTok era? Do you have a sense of this?

O’Grady: They all see reading and writing as essential to their creative process. My graduate students, MFA candidates in arts practices who are learning where they fit into larger conversations about representation and politics, use writing to refine the conceptual elements of their visual practice—that is, to better grasp and articulate a strong point of view, which involves a great deal of reflection and critique. We’re all asking ourselves what’s important in this moment in time in which our attention is fragmented and monetized and so much of what used to connect us feels broken.

Most of the artists I teach and write about in the book—Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, Arthur Jafa, Trevor Paglen, Robert Adams, Imani Jaqueline Brown and Carrie Mae Weems, just to name a few—use text or narrative extensively in their art and/or have a writing practice complementary to their visual work.

Question: Beverly Pepper’s art, which forms the basis of a chapter in your book, was criticized with sexist tropes, but it reflects (or punctuates) the monumental scale of the landscape and the cosmos. Perhaps this question is outside the realm of how it feels to be alive, but your recounting of this episode spurs a question about how it feels to be a female artist in a male-dominated world. Or, more generally, how it feels to create art that is the “deeply rooted understory.”

O’Grady: Part of what thrills me about being a critic is looking at a single work of art over time and thinking about how it can reveal tremendous cultural shifts, and personal ones.

Art is private in origin and public in expression—this is essential to its power.

Pepper’s story, for me, is very much about how it felt to be alive as a discredited or overlooked artist—one who was making work that was by any measure groundbreaking and radical. It is dehumanizing not to be recognized for one’s work because of the body one is born into.

In the last chapter, I play with the idea of the anomaly—in art history, but also in the cosmos. Humans always center themselves, but what if, as Pepper and other artists have done, we centered the land instead, reframing our perspective? What if we are the anomalies? This is what art and art criticism does best: reframe and challenge our assumptions.

Pepper’s anomalousness is but one example of the many people left out of art’s dominant narratives. Art history is a set of stories that are continually being rewritten, in part because so many people were left out of previous drafts, or because considerations of their work were so essentializing. In the book, I argue that it is impossible to make art or behold it separately from the conditions of its making and beholding.

Question: In the chapter “Forces of Nature,” you ruminate on the landscape of Colorado, suggesting that remarking on its humbling effect is “cliché.” Can an observation or feeling that might be called a cliché be expressed in a way that is not cliché?

O’Grady: I certainly hope so! Art/literature/music show us this time and again—that the things others have experienced before us have the capacity to compel us anew via the human imagination. Life, at the end of the day, is a cliché. Behind human is a cliché. It has all been felt before—this is part of what makes art capable of transcending time and place—and yet there will always be more to think, to see, to say.

Question: You offer an extended meditation on Agnes Martin’s Friendship, particularly by the suggestion to approach her work “as you would cross an empty beach to look at an ocean.” That seems to suggest that we should have an emotional and intellectual receptivity?

O’Grady: Those are Martin’s words, not mine. She articulated this as an ideal—an ambition for her work. She was reaching the peak of her powers just as conceptual art, with its theories and manifestos, was beginning to dominate the conversation. Martin, who found solace in Christian and Buddhist thinkers, wanted something less intellectual from her work: to induce a particular feeling of infinitude, humility, wonderment and vastness in spectators.

In my book, I return a few times to Martin’s image of crossing the beach to look over the ocean. In her life, Martin had the experience more than once of coming metaphorically to the edge of the shore, or precipice, in her life—as, perhaps, we all have, in our own ways, when we’re at loose ends. It is both exhilarating and terrifying to look into the great beyond, and she confronted this to a degree that perhaps no artist has before or since.

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Megan O'Grady's book fuses memoir and art criticism in ‘unusual and risky’ work that’s drawing fans and kudos.

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Claes Oldenburg, American, born in Sweden (1929–2022); Coosje van Bruggen, American, born in the Netherlands (1942–2009). Shuttlecocks, 1994, aluminum, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, paint, 230 9/16 × 191 7/8 in. (585.6 × 487.4 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. (© Estate of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Image courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Digital Production & Preservation)

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Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Shuttlecocks, 1994, aluminum, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, paint. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.

Undergraduate Isabella Perrin named 2026 Cech Fellow

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:12:39 +0000

Undergraduate Isabella Perrin named 2026 Cech Fellow Rachel Sauer Wed, 06/03/2026 - 17:12

The newly established fellowship, named in honor of ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Thomas Cech, gives students opportunities for research, professional mentorship and career exploration

Isabella Perrin, a University of Colorado Boulder undergraduate student studying molecular, cellular and developmental biology and public health, has been selected as one of 176 inaugural Cech Fellows by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

The fellowship, awarded to an inaugural cohort of undergraduates from 109 institutions in 36 states and territories, is named in honor of Nobel laureate Thomas Cech, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� distinguished professor of biochemistry, former HHMI president and current HHMI investigator.

The Cech Fellows will spend nine weeks this summer conducting hands-on research with HHMI scientists at universities and research institutions across the country, as well as at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus in Virginia. They will contribute to research while receiving professional mentorship and exploring potential careers in biological and biomedical research.

"I’ve always believed that getting students into real research environments early is one of the most powerful things we can do for them and for science,” said Cech. “I’m deeply honored that this program carries my name, and I look forward to seeing what this first cohort of Fellows will go on to achieve.”

Leslie Vosshall, HHMI vice president and chief scientific officer, noted that a single summer in the right lab can kickstart a scientific career: “By asking real questions alongside scientists at the top of their fields, this year’s Cech Fellows will have the opportunity to see what a life in science actually looks like.”

Perrin, who is working with researchers at the University of California Berkeley this summer on immunology research about the pathways and mechanisms that relate to autoimmune and inflammatory disorders, has previously conducted RNA research with Robin Dowell, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and Mary Ann Allen, a research associate professor with the BioFrontiers Institute.

“As a Cech Fellow, I’m honored and excited to join a diverse community with engaging and curiosity-filled science research,” Perrin said. “I value this opportunity not only to learn from mentors and peers about how to conduct meaningful research but also to engage in research that, at its core, is based in bettering individuals’ quality of life.

“I hope to learn and use new skills to contribute to the field in a rigorous manner, and to use a creative mindset to approach challenging questions. I love learning about the capabilities and quirks of the immune system and am thrilled to be a part of a lab that focuses on applying this work to human health conditions.”

Summer research experiences are “often where undergraduates discover their passion for scientific inquiry,” said Joshua Hall, HHMI lead senior director and scientific program officer at HHMI. “The Cech Fellows Program gives talented students direct access to some of the most exciting science happening anywhere in the country, and we’re thrilled to welcome this inaugural cohort.”

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The newly established fellowship, named in honor of ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Thomas Cech, gives students opportunities for research, professional mentorship and career exploration.

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Live from the Octagon with Michel Jarjour

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:48:54 +0000

Live from the Octagon with Michel Jarjour Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/26/2026 - 12:48

Kayleigh Wood

Undergraduate student balances passion for high-risk combat sports with neuroscience studies, aiming to make mixed martial arts safer for all fighters

Michel Jarjour knows what it’s like to love something that could hurt him. Even after years of avid mixed martial arts (MMA) fandom, the third-year undergraduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder still finds the UFC scary. “You look at these fights, and they’re getting kicked and punched to the head. It’s terrifying.”

Though an active participant himself in both Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Muay Thai at the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Rec Center, Jarjour insists that a career in professional fighting is off the table. “You’re putting your body through hell and back. You’re taking so much damage,” says Jarjour. “I’m not willing to give my life to that… My brain is a little important [to me].”

A junior on the pre-health track, Jarjour is pursuing a degree in neuroscience with minors in Spanish, sports media and biochemistry. He balances his studies and involvement in the Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program with his passion for high-risk combat sports, which he shares with listeners in a live monthly radio show on Radio 1190, Join the Octagon. “There is something so beautiful, something so adrenaline-based about the live commentary that I absolutely love,” he says.

Michel Jarjour is a rising senior on the pre-health track, pursuing a degree in neuroscience with minors in Spanish, sports media and biochemistry. (Photo: Michel Jarjour)

Beyond the octagon

Since Fall 2024, Jarjour’s radio show has covered main card, pay-per-view UFC events that occur roughly once a month. In January, the UFC removed traditional pay-per-view events and ended its partnership with ESPN, relocating its live broadcasts to the streaming service Paramount+. Jarjour shares that these changes have led to scheduling disruptions that have put Join the Octagon on a temporary pause. “It’s unfortunate,” he says, “and it’s also made me recognize that I want to do more with the Join the Octagon brand.”

Jarjour credits the leadership skills he has gained as director of CU GOLD with helping him guide Join the Octagon in new, expanded directions. CU GOLD, which stands for “Gaining Opportunities through Leadership Development,” is a free leadership development program that is open to all CU students. Beyond events and conferences, the program provides both introductory and advanced leadership courses.

After leading a group of over fifteen people at CU GOLD, Jarjour says he is confident that he can effectively manage a team and delegate tasks. With a recently assembled team of like-minded volunteers tackling everything from marketing to betting analysis to social media, an official Join the Octagon website is now under construction, and plans for a research-backed podcast are in the works.

With the new, extended platform, Jarjour strives explore UFC events through the lens of his others passions: “I would love to combine my love for neuroscience with my love for UFC and MMA, and the best way I’m going to that is either by have a conversation [and] putting it into the show, the podcast, the radio show, social media, whatever, and [then], by becoming a sports neurologist.”

'I want to become a sports neurologist'

The UFC, which was founded in 1993, is still a relatively new organization. For MMA fighters, medical practitioners and combat sports enthusiasts alike, growing fears parallel the growing awareness of the long-term effects of brain damage.

Jarjour, who has been tuned into the UFC for years, addresses the difficulty of watching a former MMA fighter’s health deteriorate in real time: “You can just tell [something is wrong by] the way they’re talking and acting, and it’s scary… UFC fans are seeing [the] news and are generally worried.”

As a sports neurologist, Jarjour says he hopes to help UFC fighters recover from persistent symptoms associated with traumatic brain injuries. While some medical doctors for the UFC serve ringside, making calls on whether a fighter is stable enough to compete and continue a fight, Jarjour stresses that his pursuits transcend octagon-side intervention.

“It’s not just a split-[second] decision that I want to make. It’s an ‘I want to be able to be in your life and help you out and make sure that you’re living a long and healthy life’ [kind of thing].”

Michel Jarjour rappels down the side of a skyscraper. (Photo: Michel Jarjour)

In addition to his interest in sports neurology, Jarjour is minoring in Spanish, with the hope of connecting with more of his patients on a deeper level: “I would love to be a Spanish-speaking doctor who can help not only English-speaking patients, but also immigrants from Hispanic countries and Latino countries, to be able to make them feel more comfortable throughout the entire medical process.”

While Jarjour says his interest in the medical field in general began in middle school, the choice to pursue higher education was solidified in the summer after his senior year of high school. In the middle of the night, he recounts waking up to a knock at the door and the sight of his distressed neighbor. “[I’d] never interacted with her in my life,” he says, “but she’s clearly in a state of panic, and she’s like, help. Please, help. My husband is on the ground, I have no idea what to do… so I go over to the house, call 911, make sure that he’s comforted, okay and breathing and all that.”

Around twelve hours after the paramedics arrived to take Jarjour’s neighbor to the hospital for treatment, Jarjour and his mom went to check in. He recounts that moment in the hospital: “I sit down with him and talk with him for a while, and I hear about his life story and the experience and all that. And then a few weeks later, I go to his house, and I find out that he's been consistently going to the hospital ever since that moment, and [he] told me that he trusted me more than the doctors that he's been going and talking to. And I told him, well, you still need to trust your doctors. I'm not a doctor. Don't listen to me entirely. Go listen to the medical professionals.

“But at the same time, there was something about that. He basically said that I'm taking the time to listen to him and connect with him and understand what he's going through, and the fact that he said that– [it] was the last, final pillar that I needed to reassure myself, especially before going into university, a big, pivotal moment of my life, it was the last pillar that reassured me that medicine was for me.”

A surge of adrenaline

In high school, Jarjour spent two years on the Arapaho Rescue Patrol, a team of volunteer high-school students that responds to emergency calls in the Front Range. While Jarjour says the patrol teaches very basic medical knowledge, on that night when his neighbor was in need, it was more than helpful.

“I found myself realizing consistently that the medical component of the patrol was one of, if not my favorite, part of the patrol,” says Jarjour. “I love the rescuing; I love the searching. I love the hiking and camping and all that. But the medical component was always what drew me in.”

Beyond helping others through medical intervention, he admits that he loves the adrenaline rush. “I think I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie… Any time that [search and rescue] alarm goes off, you are just pumped with adrenaline, and it’s something I’ve always appreciated.”

Michel Jarjour (front, black cap) with colleagues recording a program for Radio 1190. (Photo: Michel Jarjour)

That ability to respond to pressure at a moment’s notice has been essential for his duties as an RA. In his experience, Jarjour has found that “a lot of people don’t like the ‘responding to incidents’ component of the position because it’s stressful, it’s tiring. You know, it could be the middle of the night, and you don’t want to be doing that.” Yet Jarjour says he appreciates the call to action: “I love [getting] the phone call… there’s something going on, please respond. I do appreciate that adrenaline rush. And, obviously, I want to make sure everyone’s safe. I’m not wishing for anyone’s downfall… I do like helping people out. It’s a very fundamental value of mine, just helping people out. And so, that’s what I’ve loved about the RA position–I’ve been able to do that.

“I’ve responded to poop on the floor, I’ve responded to residents vomiting, I’ve responded to people dead in the mountains. Especially since I want to be a doctor, I’m probably going to see the worst of the worst issues.”

'My love, my life, my hobby'

A key to navigating his very full calendar and the high-intensity situations to which he is drawn has been an awareness of and care for his mental health. “One thing that I tell people when they ask me (how I do it) is, find your Thing.” For Jarjour, the one activity that makes it all work for him is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. “I’ve been doing it for 11 years of my life, and it is [the Thing]. It’s never going to end. I tell myself all the time,” says Jarjour, “Jiu-Jitsu is the one thing that I will do until the day I die. It’s my love, it’s my life, it’s my hobby.”

A hobby with risks…

At the age of 11, during a practice with the adult class, Jarjour learned how risky. “Someone rolled me, placed my hand on the mat, just [acting on] instincts, and crack, crack, crack.”

The aftermath was four broken fingers on his right hand, which he recalls were “floppy” and extremely painful. Yet, after about four months of healing, Jarjour was back in the gym with his parents’ full support: “I’ve just been a very athletic and energetic kid my entire life… [my parents] never really told me, like, hey, you’re not going back. They loved the community; they loved the gym.”

With support from his parents, Jarjour continued to immerse himself in Jiu-Jitsu: “The beauty of Jiu-Jitsu,” says Jarjour, “is that you think you learn it, you know a technique, and you know all there is behind one position and then boom, there’s about 700 million other techniques just for that one position alone. And then you find out there’s hundreds of positions that you can be in.” He likens the sport to a game of chess: “You have to be able to move your piece, know what each move could do, and at the same time, predict what your opponent’s going to do.”

These mental gymnastics happen every moment throughout a fight. Yet, within the confines of the controlled, regulated gym space, Jarjour finds the high-intensity sport relieving: “I’ve gone back through my middle school and high school years, [and] all that stress would have really put a toll on my mental health, as well as the fact that I’ve gone through traumatic events, tough moments with the patrols, for example, all of these super high-stress, impacting events. And the reason why I am able to sit in front of you right now, and [say], I’m more than okay and I’m happy in life is because I found my Thing.”

He adds that it may be the sport, it may be the community, it may be a blend between the two, “but I know for a fact that I will never leave that sport because of how much it’s impacted my life. I’ve walked into the gym, and I felt terrible. I’ve walked in saying I don’t want to go. I’ve walked in with tears in my eyes. I’ve walked in having experienced–I’ll get real with you for a second–a school shooting, and I’ve come out every time from those experiences feeling so much better.”

How does he do it?

In his own words, Michel Jarjour’s “system is systeming.” From hosting a radio show to directing CU GOLD to peer mentoring for both the Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program (MASP) and the math department, not to mention responding to incidents around the clock as an RA and much, much more, it is fair to wonder if Jarjour sleeps at all. Here are just a few of the things that work for him:

Giving yourself grace

Jarjour stresses that comparison is unproductive: “Don’t compare yourself to me, and the reason I say that is because we all have different limitations. We all have our limits. We all have our aspirations, goals, values, etc., and that is a huge determinant on what you should be doing and how much you should be doing.”

Google Calendar

“People look at my Google Calendar and have a heart attack,” says Jarjour, and, yes, his Google Calendar is an explosion of overlapping color at seemingly all available hours of every single day, but it’s a system, it’s reliable and it works for him.

“It’s even like, if I literally just need to shoot [someone] an email, I will put it in my Google Calendar. [If] I need to call someone, put it in my Google Calendar… I have every single thing that I can possibly need to know in that Google Calendar, so that way, I’m always on top of it.”

ANDing

“ANDing is something that ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� actually taught me,” says Jarjour. “The whole concept of ANDing is that you literally take two things, or a couple of things that you’re passionate about, and you bridge the gap between those two. So, for me, that’s neuroscience slash medicine and sports, and that’s why I ANDed them together.”

Jarjour says that many people are already ANDing subconsciously, but finds “when you make it a known thing, you can actually go and seek it a little bit more. . . . Now I know that I can go do these things on a more consistent basis, and it’s allowed me to combine so many of my fields of study, my interests [and] my hobbies.”

Finding your “Thing,” finding a community

For Jarjour, training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is the key to managing his busy lifestyle. He urges others to find the “Thing” that makes it all worth it, one that is tailored to each individual’s personal interests. With so many ways to get involved, Jarjour says it would be impossible for him to champion a single program above the rest. Regardless, whether it’s all things media, music and entertainment at Radio 1190, or what he describes as “the most amazing, tight-knit community I’ve ever been a part of in CU GOLD,” Jarjour remains adamant that mental health flourishes when individuals actively engage with their own communities, pursue personal interests and, as he puts it, find their Thing.

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Undergraduate student balances passion for high-risk combat sports with neuroscience studies, aiming to make mixed martial arts safer for all fighters.

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Top photo: Michel Jarjour leads a CU GOLD activity. (Photo: Michel Jarjour)

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