CU Denver’s College of Engineering and Applied Science sent its largest-ever delegation of faculty, students and alumni to the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union. This meeting, held in Washington, DC December 10 – 14, 2018, brought together more than 28,500 scientists studying all aspects of the earth and environmental sciences.
This record-breaking group comprised civil engineering faculty Allison Goodwell and David Mays, who presented their hydrology research with students Laurna Kaatz and Eric Thomas, and alumni Maryam Pournasiri Poshtiri and Eric Roth. The group also included electrical engineering faculty Mark Golkowski with students Poorya Hossini and Chad Renick, who presented research on atmospheric electricity and space science. Mays also presented his NSF-sponsored work on Environmental Stewardship of Indigenous Lands.
Renick also was honored with an Outstanding Student Presentation Award for his poster, LWPC Modeling of Lightning Induced Changes in D-Region Electron Density, coauthored with Golkowski and Sandeep Sarker and Georgia Tech’s Morris Cohen. This coveted award recognizes the top few percent among literally thousands of student research presentations. Congratulations, Chad!
Dr. Nikki Farnsworth, a Research Instructor working in the lab of Dr. Richard Benninger, was recently awarded a Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Advanced-Postdoctoral Fellowship to study novel mechanisms of pancreatic β-cell death and to exploit these mechanisms to protect against the onset and progression of type 1 diabetes (T1D).
Dr. Vira Kravets, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Richard Benninger’s lab was recently awarded the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship: an award for promising scientists entering their professional career in the type 1 diabetes research field. The fellowship will support understanding heterogeneity of insulin-producing beta cells and their calcium response to glucose. In collaboration with the University of Miami Dr. Kravets will study alternations in beta cell subpopulations of the encapsulated islets for transplantation therapy. One of the potential outcomes of this collaboration is improvement of transplantation of stem-cell-derived islets.
Niki Clark is a PhD student in Dr. Bodine’s Socially Assistive Robotics lab. She received her undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Biology, and she now works on developing a clinical augmentation tool for young children with complex cerebral palsy. Her current focus is on applying machine learning techniques to allow the robot to recognize each child’s movements, with an emphasis on behavior-based control to ensure the robot mimics movements that clinicians would make during therapeutic interaction. This work has been a collaboration across multiple disciplines that include Bioengineering, Computer Science, Early Childhood Education, and Industrial Design.
Dr. Mitchell VeDepo, a Postdoctoral Fellow of Bioengineering at the University of Colorado Denver, was recently awarded a postdoctoral grant by the American Heart Association (AHA). This award will help propel Dr. VeDepo’s project on the recellularization mechanisms for heart valve tissue engineering.
