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Bruns & Leslie research cybernetic human advancement with New Frontiers Grant

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 21:31:49 +0000

Bruns & Leslie research cybernetic human advancement with New Frontiers Grant Michael Kwolek Tue, 06/17/2025 - 15:31

Michael Kwolek

From implantable devices like pacemakers and brain interfaces to smart wearables, humans are fast becoming more cybernetic than we might realize.

Implanted devices tend to have higher fidelity and functionality than wearables, but require extremely invasive surgery. Smart tech is lower-cost and easy to use, but can be uncomfortable while offering limited functionality.

What if there was a middle ground, a set of technologies that allowed for the best of both worlds? Such solutions could enable people to achieve peak performance in a range of physical and mental activities, simplify ongoing health monitoring, and help those with mobility challenges control the devices that support their daily lives.

Seamless Skin Integration of Brain/Body-Computer Interfaces for Cybernetic Human Advancement

Project: Seamless Skin Integration of Brain/Body-Computer Interfaces for Cybernetic Human Advancement

Planning Phase Award: $50,000

The ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� New Frontiers Grant Program is designed to foster groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research projects with the potential for high impact. “High impact” projects may include the potential for significant advancements in knowledge, problem-solving or innovation that exceeds incremental progress and creates new paradigms of understanding.

With support from the Research & Innovation Office (RIO), the Colleges of Arts & Sciences, Engineering & Applied Science and the School of Education, New Frontiers is open to any eligible ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� faculty member.

A surprising partnership

Researchers at the ATLAS Institute are working on just that through a unique collaboration toward what they call “cybernetic human advancement.”

Carson Bruns, associate professor (ATLAS Institute, Mechanical Engineering), and Grace Leslie, associate professor (ATLAS Institute, College of Music), have partnered to study ways to create the functionality of an implantable device with the ease of a wearable.

The project was kickstarted with funding from ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� New Frontiers Grant Program.

This 12-month Planning Phase Award, funded through the Research & Innovation Office (RIO), supports project planning and initial data collection for two lines of inquiry.

Real life sci-fi

Cybernetic humans may sound like science fiction, but such technology is very much a reality. Bruns explains, “When we hear the word ‘cyborg,’ we think of a cyberpunk half-robot. But there are really common examples of body-integrated technology like cochlear implants for the hearing impaired or lens replacements for vision-impaired people or cardiac pacemakers for people who have heart conditions.”

He elaborates, “We're going to continue to integrate our bodies with technology more and more. And we'd like to contribute our own piece to this movement to ensure that it's done in a safe and ethical way, and also because we think it's exciting and there are tremendous potential benefits. So we decided to call this domain ‘human enhancement’ as opposed to ‘cyborg’ or ‘cybernetic.’”

The skin as interface

It’s possible the next generation of wearables will not look like the watches and rings we currently see in the market.

Bruns says, “One of the things I do in my lab is try to use the skin as the interface for these human enhancements. These technologies that we're going to merge with the body, I think the skin is really the best for that because it's the least invasive place to put a permanent implant. You usually don't even need a doctor or a hospital if it's small enough. You can just tattoo it, and that's something that almost anybody can do safely. So it's very convenient if you're going to permanently implant some technology in your body to make it be a tattoo.”

For example, you wouldn’t want to wear an EKG monitoring cap on your head all day, but if you could get tattooed with conductive materials that connect to a simple device, that could allow for continuous brainwave monitoring without ongoing discomfort.

Seeking key collaborators

The core team seeks a few more key members during this initial research phase. Carson details what expertise they seek:

Ethicist: “There are a lot of serious ethical questions about these types of technologies. We are actively looking for somebody to be a part of this and inform our team and do their own research on the ethics of this space.”

Circuits expert: “We would [also] like a circuits expert. They might be an electrical engineer—somebody who really knows how to optimize this kind of hardware. I have the expertise to make a special kind of conductive material to build the device and once you have the signals, Grace is really good at doing stuff with those. But in between those two, we need that person who can take the material and construct the exact circuit we want to get the best signal.”

Performance enhancing tattoos

Leslie is excited about the possibility of applying her expertise in neuroscience to studying wearables to enhance athletic performance. “We want to work with the CU football team to develop this augmented football player concept using control theory to figure out what the best type of feedback would be to get them in the right state. The really quick decision making they have to do for who to pass to and when, and the movements that they take, will all be optimized.”

In lieu of starting right away with permanent tattooing, the team aims to design with an even more common application in mind.

Leslie continues, “We're thinking of this being almost like a temporary tattoo. Printing a whole circuit board onto that sticker and then any components that we need to add. So it becomes this all-in-one [device] on the surface of the skin. It would be a combination of, on Carson's side, the ability to think of a completely different form factor for a circuit that involves the skin—it isn't just some standalone device that we then try to attach to the human. And then from my lab’s side, the idea of how you can provide meaningful stimulus and feedback in a way that doesn't require a screen.”

Getting into the flow

Leslie hopes to apply her background in music and audio to create novel sensory stimuli like sounds and haptic feedback (little vibrations similar to what is used in a mobile phone) in place of a screen to help guide people toward achieving a “flow state” of peak performance in a range of activities.

Leslie says, “Haptic feedback is the educational tool that helps you learn what that feels like to be in that state. The principle of biofeedback [is] that eventually if you've practiced it enough, you can reach it without the feedback and then it creates lasting changes.”

Big ideas from new connections

The initial idea for this project started when ATLAS PhD students Joshua Coffie (in the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab) and Daniel Llamas Maldonado (in the Brain Music Lab) found mutual interest in their respective research areas. Llamas Maldonado explains, “We were in the Research Methods class together, and I thought his research was really cool. We just started talking and thinking we could do something together.”

This spark speaks to the importance of fostering opportunities for cross-pollination on campus that can be supported by RIO grants.

From there, the conversation expanded to Leslie and Bruns, who catalyzed the idea by applying for the New Frontiers Grant program. This spark speaks to the importance of fostering opportunities for cross-pollination on campus that can be supported by RIO grants.

With concurrent lines of research, the key will be to focus the research in this initial phase. Leslie concludes, “It's easy to think of science fiction scenarios, but the hard part is coming up with concrete experiments to run that will be really self-contained and controlled, and that are going to prove the things that we need to prove to build the larger concept. And that is also the fun part.”

Nanomaterials and neuroscience researchers aim to build brain/body interfaces that enhance performance, improve health monitoring and support mobility.

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Image source: Adobe stock

Bruns explores nanotech that turns plastic into fertilizer with RIO seed grant

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 16:27:46 +0000

Bruns explores nanotech that turns plastic into fertilizer with RIO seed grant Michael Kwolek Wed, 06/11/2025 - 10:27

Michael Kwolek

Plastic Fertilizer: Toward Sustainable Waste-Stream Plastics with Low Carbon Content and Cost

PI: Carson J. Bruns, ATLAS Institute + Paul M. Rady Dept. of Mechanical Engineering

Co-PI: Merritt R. Turetsky, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) + Dept. of Ecology

“We must replace the ubiquitous 'forever plastics' with sustainable plastics that (i) degrade fast and harmlessly in the wild and (ii) minimize emissions by combining high recyclability with low carbon content.”

Plastics are a problem. They are made with petroleum, are rarely recycled, and turn into microplastics over time—an increasingly intractable global environmental and health concern.

Current bio-based alternatives have yet to see widespread adoption for a number of reasons. Carson Bruns, associate professor (ATLAS Institute, Mechanical Engineering), aims to change all that with a new line of research in his Emergent Nanotechnology Lab focused on turning agricultural materials into bio-based plastics that can be more easily recycled, composted or even used as fertilizer.

Bruns was recently awarded a 2025 Research & Innovation Seed Grant from ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Research and Innovation Office for this work.

We discussed the thinking behind this research and possible applications (interview lightly edited for clarity):

What are the challenges with bio-based plastics?

The biggest challenge that everybody is dealing with in sustainable plastics right now is that the current options for bio-based and compostable plastics are not actually very good. They don't compete with the oil-based plastics in terms of how tough and flexible they are, so people don't like to use them as much because they crack and they're brittle.

And in reality, you cannot throw such plastics onto your backyard compost pile. They need special conditions to properly break down. You need a composting facility that heats the compost up to 60°C and it has all these fans and equipment to circulate it, and even then, it still doesn't work that well. [Note: This is one of the reasons why A1 Organics, Boulder, Colorado’s main composting partner, stopped accepting these biodegradable plastics.]

Bruns and his team have partnered with Merritt R. Turetsky, Director of Arctic Security; Professor, Ecology, for key elements of this research.

How did the collaboration with professor Turetsky come about?

We've been working on sustainable alternative materials to oil-based plastics for almost the whole time I've been at CU. But the collaboration with Professor Turetsky came when we started trying to characterize the biodegradability of the materials we've been making in the lab.

We've worked with a number of different things—rubbery materials, hydrogels, elastomers, and adhesives [as] alternatives to oil-based rubbers and adhesives. If you want to characterize how biodegradable something is, there are different types of experiments you can do. We approached professor Turetsky to get her advice on how we could go about doing that.

Over the last two semesters, we've had an undergraduate student named Roan Gerrald. He did his honors thesis on this work with advice from professor Turetsky and Aseem Visal, my graduate student. He's done our first compostability experiments on some of the plastic alternative materials that we've already made that are not the ones we proposed in this project, but ones that we have in the lab.

Carson Bruns

What materials are you testing to make these new polymers?

The recipe is [a key] innovation. In general, what you do when you're trying to make a sustainable plastic is you buy some very high-purity materials from a chemical supplier and that makes your science easy to do because you know exactly what you have.

Just buying this molecule in a gallon drum is economically not at all competitive with petroleum. So how do we make something that is cost-competitive?

The idea is to try to recover these molecules as starting materials from waste so that they're not so expensive. You're a potato chip or french fry manufacturer, and you have to wash all of your vegetables, or even at intermediate stages you're soaking them in water or washing them with water, and then that water waste goes somewhere. But it has valuable stuff in it like starches and proteins from the vegetables. So we'd like to recover those valuable substances from the wastewater.

You're using these different materials that happen to be fertilizers in themselves.

The problem with using carbon for plastic is that even if it is highly recyclable, even if it is compostable, It's still going to turn into carbon dioxide at the end of its life.

"Agricultural fertilizer doesn't have carbon in it—it has nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and sulfur and things like that. So let's make our plastics out of that stuff, so that we don't have carbon in the air at the end."

We choose elements that plants need so that we avoid the carbon but still maintain compostability or biodegradability. But we can't get rid of the carbon completely—it's more of a carbon minimization than a carbon avoidance or removal in order for it to still behave as a plastic and have that kind of flexibility.

So if we can make a plastic that has not very much carbon, but it has a lot of other stuff that is good for soil, then you can use it as a fertilizer instead of as compost, because agricultural fertilizer doesn't have carbon in it—it has nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and sulfur and things like that. So let's make our plastics out of that stuff, so that we don't have carbon in the air at the end.

What do you hope to accomplish at the end of the initial 18-month grant?

I hope that we have at least one material that has good properties and that we show fertilizes soil. That's a very ambitious goal to have in 18 months, but we're going to try.

What sorts of products might be possible with this plastic alternative?

We want to make packaging plastics, something that you could cover your steak with at the grocery store or something like Styrofoam. But these are soft and flexible, and because of that they're a little bit harder to make from these low-carbon elements.

So I would predict that it will be harder for us to make those things, but if we can make the kind of flexible, more stretchy ones, then we can look to things like packaging, plastic bags, Ziploc bags, Saran Wrap, stuff like that. But if we can [only make] brittle things, then it's gonna be more like forks and cups and plates.

How might this research come to life in the real world?

Maybe in the future if it worked really well, there could be a reuse or recycling stream where you put it in your mixed-stream recycling and then they sort it and send it to somebody who is going to turn it into fertilizer.

But the other option is that you throw it in your at-home compost and it can degrade there and that would be great, too.

The Emergent Nanotechnology Lab team has begun research to develop new bioplastics made to be used as fertilizer at end-of-life.

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ATLAS students pair design and engineering to improve access to nature

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:46:24 +0000

ATLAS students pair design and engineering to improve access to nature Michael Kwolek Tue, 06/10/2025 - 09:46

Creative Technology & Design master's students developed a system to help birdwatchers with mobility challenges continue to participate in this popular pastime.

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The Tank supports artists, and a small community of a couple thousand residents

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:47:37 +0000

The Tank supports artists, and a small community of a couple thousand residents Michael Kwolek Mon, 06/09/2025 - 10:47

The B2 partnership with The Tank continues despite NEA funding cuts. This creative collaboration supports rural communities and experimental artists.

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Robots and chemistry isn’t just a fun combo - Bruns says it’s the future

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:34:59 +0000

Robots and chemistry isn’t just a fun combo - Bruns says it’s the future Michael Kwolek Mon, 06/09/2025 - 10:34

Carson Bruns and his team are developing robots that collaborate with humans in lab settings to reduce work burdens and improve safety.

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Devendorf weaves computer science and craft to explore new possibilities for textile design

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 27 May 2025 16:11:51 +0000

Devendorf weaves computer science and craft to explore new possibilities for textile design Michael Kwolek Tue, 05/27/2025 - 10:11

Michael Kwolek

Unstable Design Lab resources

ATLAS lab page

Unstable Design Lab website

Experimental Weaving Talk series

Instagram: @unstabledesignlab

When we think about engineering and computer science, textiles may not come to mind first. Yet woven forms can be extremely complex and are useful in many scientific applications in addition to being aesthetically engaging.

Laura Devendorf, associate professor and director of the Unstable Design Lab, blends computer science and materials research through the lens of weaving and textiles.

She has nearly completed her 5-year NSF CAREER award, which has supported her work in advancing e-textiles research while building a community of artists, artisans, engineers and designers dedicated to exploring new realms of textile technology.

In that time, Devendorf has created experimental woven forms that can record and replay sensory data, that behave in novel and useful ways, and that can even be programmed.

If e-textiles are to become part of our everyday lives, she believes they need to be more playful and soothing than typical smart devices generally feel—closer to a favorite sweater than a sleek smartphone.

Devendorf aims to change our minds about the importance of craft and expand where we consider solutions for challenges in everything from space suits to stents to treat coronary disease. She says, “It's not just a hobby for a lot of people. These practices of creativity have a lot of value professionally if you're an artist or if you're working in textiles or aeronautics.”

Software supporting soft goods

A key facet of Devendorf’s work has been the development of AdaCAD, “an experimental workspace that applies parametric design to the domain of weave drafting. It supports algorithmic and playful approaches to developing woven structures and cloth, for shaft, dobby and jacquard looms.”

As the only open-source software for many hobbyist and professional weavers, AdaCAD supports a growing community of craftspeople, engineers and designers—a group Devendorf has dubbed “experimental weavers.”

She explains that AdaCAD is designed to give “a new representation for” the incredibly complex designs many weavers create. “That representation affords different points of connection, relationships and possibilities. It's not figuring anything out for you, but it's representing what you're doing in a more flexible format.”

Transforming an image into a woven textile with AdaCAD

CHI retrospective

Laura Devendorf and colleagues at CHI 2025

Devendorf had a substantial presence at ACM SIGCHI 2025 conference (Special Interest Group On Computer-Human Interaction) in Yokohama, Japan. The centerpiece was a demo booth where she created a sort of “lab in a box” showcasing over 7 years of research she and her colleagues conducted at the Unstable Design Lab.

Within the context of this engineering and science-focused audience, Devendorf notes the idea was to “promote weaving and weavers as an approach to doing interactive technology. We're highlighting our residency programs and we're highlighting some interactive demos that have emerged from these programs” including conductive yarns and textiles that enhance interactivity, along with resources designed for community building.

This bridging of seemingly disparate worlds—computer science and craft, lab research and community building—exemplifies Devendorf’s work. Creating visibility between craft and engineering is key for both worlds.

Devendorf observes, “If we're getting so jazzed up about 3D printing and fabrication, here's a fabrication method that has history, that has culture, that evolved in different spaces, that's multi-material.”

“Then that's where the residency programs and some of the resources come in to make complex textile design, not less hard, but to equip you with the right resources to navigate that difficulty so you can take advantage of the full potential of weaving looms and materials.”

“Your material range is huge and your ability to tune it is huge, so this idea of if we need to solve problems in the world and we're not using every available approach, we can't be getting the best solution. You have all these established materials and tools.” We don’t always need to invent a new polymer when we have textiles with centuries of history that could be adapted to the same properties.

While in Japan, she collaborated with master craftspeople who use historic Nishijin looms to make extremely complex and delicate silk kimonos. Together they are exploring ways to adapt AdaCAD software to support this craft steeped in centuries of tradition. She also toured a traditional indigo dyeing plant and other textiles facilities to further explore the interplay between legacies of craft and modern tools.

Devendorf and colleagues tour a weaving facility in Yokohama, Japan

Traditional indigo dyeing in Japan

Creating space

Building a community that bridges craft and engineering spaces means bringing new people into the lab setting.

“The people who gravitate to the research in my lab are not the same composition as the people who come to it through engineering and computer science. There's certainly overlap, but on a statistical level, people who would not typically pursue engineering and science are showing up for weaving and having their expertise validated as already worthwhile rather than having to prove that they matter—I think that's an important moment.”

She elaborates, “I could have made AdaCAD and not talked to anyone, and that wouldn’t have been unusual. It could have gotten published. But I think community-building was implicitly a goal the whole time. Also, even the lab itself, I want it to be a pleasant space. I don't want it to be a factory. I think it has a warmth to it, and it has people who care. And so it's well on its way” to becoming a community space.

Traditional machines, future possibilities

Weaving outside the context of craft is often misunderstood as an idle hobby that is prone to imperfection and unpredictability. Devendorf notes, “People have no idea that this is relevant to the extent I have to spend time in the grant explaining what weaving even is, how it works, and showing several examples that clearly demonstrate how useful it can be within engineering spaces.”

She concludes, “There's so much to explore in these machines, and I think the people who are the most capable of exploring it all are craftspeople. So there's a slightly propaganda piece of: I think these looms can give us better solutions than modeling something on a computer and printing.”

Devendorf presented a retrospective of her work at CHI 2025 including:

The Unstable Design Lab's demo booth at CHI 2025

Demo: Experimental Weaving at the Unstable Design Lab

This demo showcased "experimental weaving" as it has been explored by researchers and experimental weavers in residence at the Unstable Design Lab. The demo featured interactive woven textiles, software to support complex woven structure design and instructional resources for visitors to explore in their research.

Workshop: How do design stories work? Exploring narrative forms of knowledge in HCI

This workshop covered how stories are built, what narrative traditions they draw from, how they co-constitute research processes and what kind of knowledge can emerge from them. They explored the role of storytelling in HCI; the craft of writing stories; relations between fiction, truth and knowledge; and the risks, tensions and limitations of writing stories.

Workshop: Gathering Textiles at CHI: Convening a Meeting to Share, Make, and Speculate

This workshop created a meeting place for CHI researchers engaging textiles in any capacity through a day of skill sharing and collective speculating grounded in the textiles techniques and histories of Japan.

Panel: Regenerative Material Ecologies in HCI

This panel brought together a diverse group of design researchers working hands-on with materials ranging from biological to algorithmic to discuss regenerative thinking, shifting the focus from merely mitigating environmental harm to actively fostering cohabitation within more-than-human ecosystems.

As a computer scientist and artist, Laura Devendorf blends engineering and weaving to empower the craft community while pushing the boundaries of textile science for applications in human-computer interaction, health, art, aerospace and more.

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2025 ATLAS student award winners

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:35:03 +0000

2025 ATLAS student award winners Michael Kwolek Wed, 04/30/2025 - 15:35

Every year, ATLAS awards recognize distinguished graduating students in our Creative Technology & Design programs who demonstrate remarkable qualities, such as academic excellence, innovative thinking, research efforts, leadership, community mindedness, and outstanding creativity and/or technical performance.

Every award winner this year is unique, but together they all exemplify the ATLAS spirit and all have made their mark on our community through scholastic pursuits, contributions to our community, positive energy, persistence, curiosity, and compassion.

Nefeli Hadjiyiannis - ATLAS Outstanding Student Award

Nefeli Hadjiyiannis graduates Summa Cum Laude from CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Science with a major in Creative Technology and Design (CTD) and a minor in Art Practices. Nefeli has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the ATLAS community and has become part of the fabric of the CTD program. She has been a Learning Assistant for Text (ATLS 2300), a core class in the CTD major curriculum focused on graphic design and typography. Additionally, she is part of the student staff in the BTU Lab, the ATLAS maker space, supporting students in fabricating and designing their project work. Nefeli has also worked as an undergraduate research assistant with the Utility Research Lab, which combines computational fabrication, materials science, and sustainable design practices. There, Nefeli explored bio-based material formulations to make sustainable textile fibers and helped develop various formulations of gelatin-based dissolvable textile fibers with unique properties and colors. She has also worked on research projects exploring wellbeing and digital device use. She has also been active in CU’s Society of Women Engineers/SWE and participated in several leadership positions to provide support and resources to other engineering students. Nefeli is interested in interactive textiles and innovative sustainable fabric creation. She is also interested in installation work and using computation for fabrication. After graduation, Nefeli hopes to attend graduate school to further her studies in engineering and creative design.

In addition to her ATLAS award, Nefeli received the Research Award from the College of Engineering and Applied Science.

“I am incredibly grateful to the ATLAS community. Genuine enjoyment of learning has been a key factor in my success with multiple previous projects but also in keeping me inspired and motivated. I've made many close friends that have been such a support system in academic and professional settings. The opportunities that CU provides for research have also been incredibly important to me. The research I've completed in the Utility Research Lab has shown me what I want to continue learning.”

Sophie Berry - ATLAS Distinguished Student Award

Sophie Berry graduates from CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Science with a major in Creative Technology and Design (CTD). As an undergraduate, Sophie has worked as a Research Assistant in the Utility Research Lab at ATLAS. As her initial project, she demonstrated remarkable tenacity and out-of-the box thinking to design a custom extrusion set-up to prototype different bio-based materials as candidates for 3D printing. She then continued her work creating a novel material based on gelatin and agar-agar (from seaweed.) While the team are still running tests, preliminary results suggest this material’s strength is on-par with typical thermoplastics—the outcome of this could be a huge breakthrough in sustainable 3D printing materials. Sophie has approached her endeavors with fierce determination and curiosity, rapidly learning and methodically experimenting to understand how materials behave. Sophie has also served as a Learning Assistant in Object (ATLS 3100), a core class in the CTD major on fabrication and modeling. She has demonstrated a unique comprehension of technical systems, their relationship to each other, and how to see creative solutions to problems. For her senior capstone project, Sophie is building ornithopters, a group of tiny flying robots. The project is highly technical and ambitious, requiring an immense amount of investigation and fabrication expertise.

Seneca Howell - ATLAS Distinguished Student Award

Seneca Howell graduates Summa Cum Laude from CU with an engineering major in Creative Technology & Design (CTD) and a minor in Technical Theater. She has served as head Learning Assistant/LA for Image (ATLS 2100), a core course in the CTD major. As an LA, Seneca demonstrated terrific leadership and was dedicated to helping students learning technical skills and applying them to coursework and projects. As an undergraduate research assistant in the ACME Lab at ATLAS, Seneca worked on designing the interactive curriculum for high school students using Cartoonimator, a low-cost, paper-based and tangible kit for computational thinking and keyframe animation. The research project utilizes computer vision algorithms running on a smartphone to detect and process hand-drawn or printed illustrations on paper templates and produces a digital animation. The paper that details the keyframe animation evaluation has been submitted to the ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction for review. Additionally, during her time at CU, Seneca has been involved with the Engineering Honors program and the Society for Women Engineers.

Kaya Hamon - ATLAS Distinguished Student Award

Kaya Hamon graduates from CU with an engineering major in Creative Technology & Design (CTD) and a minor in Art Practices. Kaya serves as the head Learning Assistant for Design Foundations (ATLS 1100), a large lecture class taught in the CTD program, where she demonstrates a rich combination of strong technical and mathematical abilities with a passion for design and ceramics. Kaya has been a student employee at ATLAS for 3 years working with communications. She is currently Social Media Manager, where she demonstrates herself to be remarkably intrepid. Kaya has the natural ability and confidence to step into a lab, understand dense research or technical material, and convey it in creative and compelling ways. As a member of the TYPO Lab at ATLAS, Kaya works as an undergraduate research assistant contributing to research and creative projects in typography and technologies of language. She is also an active student member of the BTU makerspace, where she seamlessly meshes herself into all aspects of fabrication in the lab. She is known as a capable mentor on design and UI/UX projects. A natural leader, Kaya is always interested in finding common ground, building connections and finding engaging solutions with partners and fellow students.

Andrew Widner - ATLAS Distinguished Student Award

Andrew Widner graduates from CU with an engineering major in Creative Technology & Design (CTD). He has served as a Learning Assistant in Form (ATLS 3100), part of the core curriculum in the CTD major, teaching topics including CAD, 3D modeling and digital sculpting. He is described as an exemplary, responsible and responsive LA. In conjunction with his CTD studies, Andrew developed a true passion in 3D printing and took the initiative to launch CU3D, a student club he now leads. He has developed a vibrant student community around 3D printing, rallying a diverse group of students around this passion with meetings, workshops, projects and campus outreach. Andrew has independently advocated for the club and represented the group eloquently, even securing corporate sponsorship of 3D resources and equipment. Additionally, Andrew has worked as a student production artist at CU’s Fiske Planetarium where he has demonstrated an outstanding enthusiasm for the immersive media development and 3D animation. He also serves as one of the student leaders of the BTU Lab, the ATLAS makerspace, demonstrating himself to be a true zealot for design and fabrication and leveraging novel perspectives or approaches to creative problem solving. Additionally, Andrew serves as a student ambassador for the CTD program, leading tours and participating in presentations about ATLAS for prospective students. He is articulate and passionate about the program and shares his academic path and student experience at CU as a CTD major.

College of Engineering & Applied Science Graduating Student Awards

Creative Technology and Design students were well represented in this year's College of Engineering & Applied Science Graduating Student Awards.

Community Impact Award & Perseverance Award - Ari Guzzi, BS in Creative Technology & Design

What was the biggest lesson you took away through all the community work you have been involved in during your time as a CU student?

One of the biggest lessons I've learned through my community engagement at CU is the value of applying my education to contribute positively to the world around me. I worked with Blueprint Boulder (a CU student-run organization) to develop websites and apps for nonprofits. That work taught me that education extends far beyond the pursuit of a paycheck. It's a powerful tool for societal betterment and self-growth.

As you reflect on what you’ve persevered through to make it to graduating, how would you say your time as a student has prepared you for the future?

Many times throughout my time as a student, I felt overwhelmed and considered giving up. However, without completing my education, I would never have received the opportunities I have post-graduation. I learned that although sometimes things feel hopeless, setbacks are temporary, and positive outcomes are just over the horizon with persistence.

What is it about ATLAS that you think would be most exciting to prospective students?

I loved my experience at ATLAS because it offers a unique blend of aspects in engineering that most majors wouldn’t get the opportunity to learn. However, the most significant skill I developed at ATLAS was the ability to approach and persevere through challenging problems. We frequently encountered tasks that initially seemed daunting and beyond our immediate capabilities. However, the program encouraged us to be self-reliant and resourceful, teaching us to seek out and apply solutions independently. This ability to persevere and innovate in the face of obstacles is perhaps the most valuable skill ATLAS taught me, significantly influencing every aspect of my life.

Research Award - Lily M. Gabriel, BS in Creative Technology & Design

What did you focus your research on in the Unstable Design Lab?

My focus in research is really on the structural study of fiber, specifically in fabricating textiles through a variety of methods, (like spinning, knitting, and weaving) along with how older methods of textile production might be used in modern e-textiles.

What was the most important thing you learned as a research assistant?

The most important thing I learned as a research assistant might be how to approach research in an organized way, how to actually produce written work from my findings, and how to work with others in a lab setting.

Research Award - Nefeli Hadjiyiannis, BS in Creative Technology & Design

What did you focus your research on in the Utility Research Lab?

I was completing materials design research on fabricating fibers and alternative 3D printing filament from diverse biomaterials for the creation of bio-based, sustainable smart textiles and fabrication methods. As well as researching mechanical properties of various bio-based polysaccharides and proteins in the use of dry-jet wet spinning fiber creation.

What was the most important thing you learned as a research assistant?

In my previous research positions, I was tasked with purifying specific proteins and performing laboratory tasks while following detailed instructions, whereas at the Utility Research Lab I was able to freely explore topics that I found not only intriguing but also motivating. The most important thing I learned in this exploration was how to design my own experiments, fail, and continue to redesign new tests. It takes an immense amount of mental rigor to fail over and over again until a positive result is achieved, especially when those failures are a result of tests you designed.

Three ATLAS students received awards from the College of Engineering and Applied Science for community impact, perseverance, and research, while five earned student awards from ATLAS.

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Utility Research Lab develops award-winning sustainability tech for 3D printing

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 22:11:29 +0000

Utility Research Lab develops award-winning sustainability tech for 3D printing Michael Kwolek Wed, 04/23/2025 - 16:11

Michael Kwolek

Over 460 million metric tons of plastic are created each year and only about 9% is recycled. This has led to ever-growing problems with waste disposal, litter, water contamination, microplastics and a host of other issues.

What if we could rethink our approach to plastics upstream in the manufacturing process before these problems manifest?

Michael Rivera, assistant professor and director of the Utility Research Lab, is doing just that, along with lab members Xin Wen, PhD student, and S. Sandra Bae, PhD candidate.

One of the challenges in recycling is that several types of plastic parts may be used to assemble a single item. These multi-material objects are more difficult, and in some cases near-impossible, to recycle because different plastics need to be processed independently, but cannot be easily separated.

A dissolvable solution

To improve sustainability in 3D printing, Rivera and his team propose using dissolvable interfaces between parts during assembly to simplify their separation for recycling at end-of-life. These interfaces can be made with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), polyvinyl butyral (PVB), high impact polystyrene (HIPS) or other materials.

Dissolvable materials like PVA are used as support structures, labels and other elements in 3D printed objects. The team goes further by printing PVA in objects themselves to simplify disassembly and recycling. To do so, they developed a computational design algorithm that automates the process of generating and cutting dissolvable interfaces in multi-material 3D-printed objects.

This idea is inspired by the concept of design for disassembly (DfD), “the consideration of ease of disassembly in the design process, aiming to enhance the efficiency of disassembling products by evaluating factors such as time, tools, and effort required for disassembly.”

For their work, the team has been awarded Best Paper (Top 1%) at CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Yokohama, Japan, for Enabling Recycling of Multi-Material 3D Printed Objects through Computational Design and Disassembly by Dissolution.

Sustainable benefits

The team won the Innovation award at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� 2025 Campus Sustainability Summit Student Ideas Showcase

The team has also found that their technique can improve the strength of bonds between different materials in a 3D-printed object. Wen notes, “We ran a bunch of tensile and shear tests that show that varying the parameters of the interface joints can increase the attachment strength” compared to standard multi-material printing.

Alternative manufacturing processes using lego-like building blocks can make reuse and recycling easier, but require more time to build and take apart. The Utility Research Lab’s techniques simplify both of these processes.

Results show their technique can allow for ~90% of the total mass of their designed objects to be recycled. The remaining 10% consists of dissolved material that also has potential for recyclability.

They note in their paper that “recycling 3D printed plastics is a key way to reduce their environmental impacts. Life-cycle assessment has shown recycling 3D printed objects made from PLA and PETG back into printing materials can reduce environmental impacts by more than 50%.”

Wen elaborates, “There are a couple ways you can recycle” these plastics. “There are some DIY recycling machines that you can buy or build off open source designs and there are companies like Printerior that recycle sorted and separated pieces.”

Currently, the team’s technique requires more time to print than conventional multi-material 3D prints due to increased complexity of printing requirements. But they believe with ongoing advancements in printing technology, much of that can be overcome.

For their efforts, the team work won the Innovation award at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� 2025 Campus Sustainability Summit Student Ideas Showcase.

Winner: Best Paper (top 1%) at CHI 2025

Designs for impact

The team has filed a provisional patent. Rivera explains, “We'd like to be able to license to existing CAD software companies and build an extension inside current 3D printing slicers” by PRUSA and other brands.

They also plan to engage with a local recycling facility this summer to connect the research they are doing in the lab to real-world applications by understanding the logistics and methodologies of plastics recycling at scale.

Looking even further, Rivera sees opportunities in applying this research in the much-larger injection molding industry, a common manufacturing process where molten materials like glass, plastic and metal are injected into a mold to create a form. A pen for example may have separate injection molded parts for the shaft, clip and rubber grip.

Rivera details, “Our algorithm does not really care about the [manufacturing] process per se. If we were to move to injection molding, we would do a multi-stage [process] where you mold the first material, inject the dissolvable on top, and then do another one.”

The team is optimistic for the future of this research.

For those in the maker community, they have developed a plug-in for Grasshopper, a visual programming language in Rhino used for design and fabrication. It is available upon request for non-commercial use.

As for next steps, Rivera says, “For us to have long-term impact, we need the people who run the companies that make the tools. Our conversations with people doing injection molding will be enlightening.”

Recycling is extremely difficult for things built with more than one type of plastic. Michael Rivera and the Utility Research Lab team have developed a novel way to disassemble 3D-printed objects for easy recycling.

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Fabrics That Remember

Michael Kwolek — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 19:30:44 +0000

Fabrics That Remember Michael Kwolek Fri, 04/18/2025 - 13:30

Laura Devendorf describes how wearable technologies like e-textiles can help people to gather insights into and reflect upon intimate moments rather than to modify or enhance them.

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 20:03:22 +0000

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program Michael Kwolek Wed, 04/16/2025 - 14:03

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� ranks number 11 among public university peers for its engineering graduate programs according to U.S. News and World Report Best Graduate Schools rankings for 2025-26.

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Utility Research Lab develops award-winning sustainability tech for 3D printing

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���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program