Print Magazine 2020

From Poland to Mexico, to Boulder and White Sands

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 21:49:54 +0000

From Poland to Mexico, to Boulder and White Sands Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/24/2021 - 15:49

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Felita Waxman and her husband, Milt, an artificial intelligence and signal detection pioneer, made scholarship bequests to physics and applied mathematics

Felia “Felita” Sierota Waxman (A&S’49) of Los Angeles, wife of the late Milton J. Waxman (EPEN’49; MMath’50) died June 11, 2020. She was 91.

She was born June 6, 1929, in Navajoa, a city in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, and was just 13 when her parents decided to send her to Denver to continue her education. Juan and Rebeca De Sierota had moved to Mexico in the 1920s from their native Poland, having seen dark, early signs of anti-Semitism and the coming Holocaust.

Milton J. Waxman (EPEN’49; MMath’50)

“They were the only Jewish family in (Navajoa),” says Felita’s daughter, Leslie Waxman of Manhattan Beach, California.

Felita arrived in Colorado speaking only Spanish, and lived for a time with relatives, a rabbi, and at an orphanage for Jewish children. Following graduation from high school, she moved to Boulder to study political science at the University of Colorado. That’s where she met physics-engineering student Milt, who grew up in tiny Akron, a farm town on Colorado’s Eastern Plains, before moving to Denver, where his family owned and operated furniture stores.

Milt was so smitten with Felita that he sometimes waited outside her sorority house at night just to talk to her after she’d had a date with another man.

They both loved CU Boulder, except for one thing: the freezing winter winds that sometimes whistled down the canyons. Unlike many of their fellow students, Milt and Felita were happy to stay on campus.

“Hiking, skiing, fishing—my parents were interested in none of the above,” Leslie says. “He was absorbed by physics, and my mother was interested in being an activist.”

Milt shared Felita’s passion for justice and was far ahead of his time when, as membership chair, he sought to bring diversity to a Jewish fraternity. It soon became clear that the position was not for him.

“He had the ‘misguided’ view that anybody should be able to join,” says the couple’s son, Mark Waxman of San Diego.

After graduation, Milt announced to Felita that he was “going off to be a wild bachelor,” Leslie says. “She said, ‘Great, goodbye.’ I think he only lasted a week or maybe a month before he was back.”

Milt’s family didn’t see Felita as a “good match,” Leslie says. But when Milt died in 2017 at age 88, the couple had been married for more than 67 years.

After graduation from CU Boulder, Milt briefly sold shoes in remote Yuma, Colorado, before taking a job as a civilian engineer for the U.S. Army at the White Sands Proving Grounds near Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he worked on guided missile systems. Recognized as an early expert in artificial intelligence and signal detection, he later worked for Hughes Aircraft, TRW and Lucent Technology. Milt and Felita were friends with top scientists, including Ted Maiman, widely credited with inventing the laser.

CU provided a grounding for (Milt’s) long and successful career."

“He was there at the beginning . . . after growing up in a small farm town, coming to CU and getting into that space ahead of a lot of other people,” Mark says.

Milt also earned a PhD in communication theory from UCLA in 1968.

“Milt had a very distinguished career,” says Paul Beale, professor of physics at CU Boulder, who visited the Waxmans several times at their West Los Angeles home. “Both of them were fascinating to be with.”

Felita focused on raising the couple’s two children and became involved in numerous causes in Southern California, including the League of Women Voters Los Angeles chapter, the Catholic and Jewish Women’s Conference and University Women.

“She was very interested in politics and committed to social equality and justice,” Leslie says.

Milt and Felita, whom Beale describes as “proud CU folk,” chose to recognize their alma mater with substantial bequests to the physics and applied mathematics departments. The gifts will be used for undergraduate student scholarships, Beale says.

“CU provided a grounding for (Milt’s) long and successful career,” Mark says. “They were fond of Boulder and CU. They were successful and happy in life, and it all started there.”

Felita is survived by her daughter, Leslie Waxman, and her husband, Leo Stytle, of Manhattan Beach; son Mark Waxman and his wife, Paula, of San Diego; and grandchildren Sarah and Jake Waxman.

Felita Waxman and her husband, Milt, an artificial intelligence and signal detection pioneer, made scholarship bequests to physics and applied mathematics.

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Making research intelligible to people with power

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 18:36:33 +0000

Making research intelligible to people with power Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/18/2021 - 12:36

Tim Grassley

CU Boulder undergrad whose advocacy helped pass Jude’s Law discusses the role of activism in their research into systemic inequality

Universities are commonly criticized as exclusive ivory towers hidden behind dense jargon. One �鶹��Ƶ undergraduate hopes to create accessible research that contributes to clear legislation that reduces inequality.

“I’m making reproductive justice intelligible to the people with power,” explains Mariana Galvez Seminario, whose personal pronouns are they, their and them.

Galvez Seminario is a senior majoring in women and gender studies and sociology whose honors thesis applies queer theory, an academic tool that studies how gender and sexuality shape dominant points of view, to the reproductive justice movement. That movement advocates for the right to freely make choices about one’s body, the right to have children, the right to not have children, and the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments.

The goal is to explain the broader impact that laws have on communities, especially marginalized groups. This begins by shifting the definition of “queer” away from sexual orientation and toward a lens through which people can understand relationships, Galvez Seminario says.

“If you think of queer as a relationship to power, rather than a solid, stable identity, it can have so much potential in how we apply queer theory to actual movements.”

Galvez Seminario saw this first-hand when helping to advocate for Colorado House Bill 19-1039, known as Jude’s Law. The bill, which passed in 2019, allowed transgender and nonbinary people to update the gender written on their birth certificates without undergoing surgery, or receiving a doctor’s note or a court order.

The existing law forced people to give up their right to make choices about their bodies, Galvez Seminario says. This led reproductive justice organizations to advocate for the bill, adding more points of view to supportive arguments and building a larger coalition of support.

“Even though (Jude’s Law) was perhaps more explicitly LGBTQ and less about abortion, birth control and things that we understand more as reproductive politics,” Galvez Seminario says, “reproductive justice organizations also showed up, advocated for the bill and testified for the bill.”

Galvez Seminario credits work with the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR) for offering a means of understanding how queer theory can impact reproductive justice. COLOR’s staff immediately encouraged Galvez Seminario to contribute opinions and advocate for issues brought to the Colorado legislature.

COLOR’s affirmation, in part, encouraged Galvez Seminario to seek out information from faculty to help support their arguments.

“Mariana contacted me over a weekend,” says Kristie Soares, assistant professor of women and gender studies. “They said they were preparing to go speak to the Colorado legislature the next day, to testify on behalf of a bill that would mandate teaching about the contributions of racial and ethnic minorities in Colorado K–12 schools.”

Galvez Seminario asked Soares for readings they could use to support the organization’s arguments for this policy.

“Later I came to find out that Mariana had not only read those readings, but also printed out and highlighted copies for each of the legislators,” Soares says. “The legislators said that Mariana’s testimony and research were impressive and contributed to their decision to make the bill into law.”

“That’s Mariana. They get things done.”

Finding a path by reflecting on values

Galvez Seminario has forged their own path at CU Boulder and found an interest that has become a passion driving their research. However, they are quick to note that students can be best served by charting their own academic experiences.

“I don’t want to say, ‘Follow my exact path,’ because that’s not going to benefit a lot of people,” Galvez Seminario says. “Students trying to model themselves after me . . . it might even be hurtful.”

I expect that Mariana will change the world."

Instead, they encourage students to reflect on the way they envision success at CU Boulder and critique those beliefs. This allows students to better understand their own values and perhaps find interests, passions and majors that help them grow.

“I came in with this idea of what it meant to be a student from the successful examples I had seen,” Galvez Seminario says. “And it turned out (those examples) were not what I wanted to be. So, keep asking what you want out of your experience.”

Galvez Seminario credits their academic growth to the care and mentorship offered by many CU Boulder faculty. Soares, mentioned above, and Celeste Montoya, associate professor of women and gender studies and director of Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program, have been especially helpful.

“Dr. Montoya has taken me under her wing, and I could not be more thankful,” Galvez Seminario says. “Dr. Soares is the best thing that this university has to offer. Period.”

Faculty praise Galvez Seminario for a blend of drive, intelligence, empathy and passion that make CU Boulder safer and more inclusive. Montoya and Soares say they believe Galvez Seminario can accomplish whatever goals they pursue.

“I can see Mariana doing amazing work in academia. But I can also see them fully embracing advocacy work,” Montoya says. “Mainly, I hope that they find a path that leads to personal fulfillment.”

Soares says she believes Galvez Seminario will do that and more.

“I expect that Mariana will change the world.”

CU Boulder undergrad whose advocacy helped pass Jude’s Law discusses the role of activism in their research into systemic inequality.

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Three degrees of inspiration

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 23:33:44 +0000

Three degrees of inspiration Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/01/2021 - 16:33

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Alumni are making a difference across the globe; meet a trio of them

It’s no secret that the spectacular beauty and endless recreational opportunities of the Rocky Mountains lure herds of students to the �鶹��Ƶ. But it doesn’t take long for most to recognize that CU Boulder offers more than just a pretty backdrop and weekend fun. It’s also an environment that encourages innovation and inspiration.

After graduation, countless erstwhile ski bums, climbers and social butterflies are eager not just to achieve personal success, but also to make a difference in the world.

What follows are profiles of three of them: an atmospheric scientist who strives to increase the number of women and girls in science, a former English major who launched her own Earth-friendly and philanthropic business, and a former biology and art major whose sculpture aims to represent the rural, American “other.”

Precipitation’s passport

Even as a girl growing up north of Boston, Adriana Raudzens Bailey (MGeog’10; PhDAtmos’14) always had an interest in science and the environment. She loved reading about bugs and animals, and in sixth grade, even wrote a paper about the ozone hole.

“I always had a penchant for understanding how the world worked,” says Bailey, now a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s aviation facility in Broomfield.

Adriana Bailey (MGeog’10; PhDAtmos’14)

That proclivity led her to earn a bachelor’s degree in environmental science with honors from Brown University and to work for the Sierra Club.

When her husband showed her a job listing for a science writer at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at CU Boulder, though, she jumped at the chance.

“I’d done media work; I have a science degree,” she says. “So, I got into science writing and loved it.”

Working with scientists doing all kinds of research—“the critters that live on your fingers, earthquakes in Nepal, people dragging sleds across Antarctica,” she says, ticking off just a few examples—was exciting.

But it wasn’t until she traveled to the high, barren slopes of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii to report on the first test of an instrument to measure isotopes in atmospheric water, being conducted by David Noone, then-professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at CU Boulder, that something really clicked for Bailey.

“It was a really cool and different way of observing Earth’s system and learning about the water cycle,” she says. She asked Noone if he were looking for graduate students, and when he said yes, she scrambled to take the GRE and eventually applied for and won a competitive National Science Foundation grant. Over the next five years, she earned a PhD in atmospheric and oceanic sciences. After postdoctoral stints at the University of Washington and Dartmouth College, she came back to work for NCAR.

I’m motivated to try to get people to see science as more than somebody in a white coat in a lab."

Today, she’s still hot on the trail of answers in Hawaii, capturing and measuring hydrogen and oxygen isotopes in water to interpret what she calls a “passport” for moisture, a glimpse into where it has traveled.

“Water that evaporates in one region of the Earth may have traveled hundreds of miles before it reaches your home and falls as precipitation,” Bailey wrote in a recent abstract. “Using both real-world observations and com- puter models, scientists can track moisture as it moves between our atmosphere, oceans and land.”

Isotopes reveal where water has been, which helps scientists investigate how clouds form, the influence of climate on moisture transport and how moisture mixes with our atmosphere. Bailey says this information can “help us predict future climate change more accurately.”

Besides her research contributions, Bailey also strives to be an ambassador for science.

In 2019, Bailey became one of about 125 If/Then Ambassadors, an American Association for the Advancement of Science program to highlight women in STEM fields and serve as role models for girls.

“(Ambassadors) represent an amazing spectrum of fields, but I’m the only atmospheric scientist,” she says. “There is a woman mechanic for Southwest Airlines, people who design video games, science teachers—a full gamut of women who work in STEM.”

In that role, Bailey recently appeared on a segment of the CBS program Mission Unstoppable, hosted by Miranda Cosgrove, to explain her work.

“I’m motivated to try to get people to see science as more than somebody in a white coat in a lab,” she says. “I’m sometimes in a lab, but science is so much more than that.”

Holding up pants—and values

Jennifer Fait Perry (Engl’92) confesses that she was living a pretty sweet life in Bozeman, Montana, when things took a turn that helped refocus her priorities.

She’d already been a ski bum in Colorado and worked for a media-buying company in New York before she and her husband moved to Bozeman. There, she earned a master’s degree, worked as an academic advisor and adjunct professor at Montana State University, and became a stay-at-home mom.

Jennifer Fait Perry (Engl’92)

But then, when her two boys were still young, she suffered a ruptured appendix. She got sepsis and spent two months in the hospital.

“I lay there thinking, ‘What the hell are you doing? You’re just a goofball skiing and playing and doing nothing to contribute. What can you do with your life to give back?’” she recalls. “‘If I survive this, I’m going to change my life, be a better person and contribute to the world.’”

She kept that promise, began volunteering at a local nonprofit and became intrigued with companies that make a difference by donating a portion of their revenue to charitable causes. She began wondering what kind of business she might start when an idea popped into her head.

“When I was out running around, my pants were always falling down. I wanted a belt I could wear with my ski pants, hiking shorts and jeans,” she says. “One with no metal parts so I could leave it on through airport security, and made from sustainable materials so I wouldn’t contribute to pollution in our oceans and landfills.”

Memories of “rainbow stretch belts” and the “grippy” elastic on the powder skirt of ski jackets soon melded in her mind and the Jelt belt, an elastic belt with a flat, nonmetal buckle made from recycled plastic bottles, was born.

If I survive this, I’m going to change my life, be a better person and contribute to the world."

A year later she was selling Jelt belts. The name is a contraction of “Jen’s belts” and a sly reference to the silicone gel that prevents slipping.

But Perry’s hospital epiphany was about much more than starting a business—it had to be a company that could make a difference in the world. Producing and selling the belts was great, but from the beginning, Perry focused on giving back. Jelt belts are made from sustainable, recycled materials, manufactured by under-served women, including prison inmates and women living on remote Montana ranches. The company donates a portion of each sale—not net profits—to charity.

In some ways, Perry says, it’s unsurprising that she ended up at CU Boulder. When it came time to leave her native Orange County, California, in 1988, she had just one destination in mind: Colorado.

“I really wanted to get out of California, and Colorado always gave me that peaceful, easy feeling,” she says, chan- neling the 1970s-era Eagles. “I liked the snow. I liked the vibe.”

It turned out to be the perfect choice for her.

“CU was life-altering for me. I learned how to think outside the box. I was exposed to people from all over the country and all over the world,” Perry says. “Not only did it change me from the person I’d been growing up in Southern California, but when I moved there, I finally felt like I could be myself. I learned empathy, compassion, the beauty of having an open mind and even a thing or two about Shakespeare.”

‘Surveyor of the Anthropocene’

Having just graduated from CU Boulder, Aidan Patrick Welby (EBio, BFA Art’20) might be expected to head off to one of the nation’s “art capitals”—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles.

But that’s not what he did. Instead, in late July he moved with two friends to the tiny town of Wallace, population 782, located along Interstate 90 at the base of Idaho’s northern “chimney” just a few miles from the Montana border.

Aidan Patrick Welby (EBio, BFA Art’20)

Although hardly known as art capital—or frankly, known at all by the vast majority of Americans—Welby sees it as a perfect place to continue his explorations of “peripheral” places and the relationships between land and people. Indeed, moving to such a remote place is a kind of kinetic, real-world reflection of his artistic vision. “Following urban migration, art in the United States has long been the privilege of centered areas, wealthy cities with large populations,” Welby says. “Part of my own practice stems from a desire to dismantle this model and create meaningful art in the periphery, the American rural ‘other.’”

Growing up in St. Louis, the self-described “Gateway to the West,” metaphorically prepared the way for his sculpture and writing.

“It’s the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. We are in the center of the nation, geographically,” he says. “This was the starting place for many of the white settlers moving west, and this is the identity St. Louisans are taught to embrace from a young age. What we are talking about is a narrative of exploration and discovery”—a border between urban life and untamed wilderness.

But that narrative, he says, is “naïve and Anglo-centric and potentially enables violence.”

As a boy, Welby’s family visited national parks in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and elsewhere. When it was time to go to college, there was no doubt which point of the compass he would follow. After he expressed his interest in art at CU Boulder, an instructor recommended he take a sculpture course.

“I had a fairly narrow understanding of what sculpture was or could be: three-dimensional objects built from stone or clay,” he says. “Of course, I was completely wrong.”

I feel really lucky that I ended up where I ended up.”

Making sculpture that conveys ideas through space, time and action turned out to be exactly what he was looking for.

Simultaneously studying ecology and evolutionary biology turned out to be symbiotic with his art practice: “One degree influences the other my education in science serves as a foundation for my sculpture and writing.” Living in Boulder gave him the opportunity to undertake a lot of “nondestination traveling, making eight-hour sojourns to nowhere and whatever is along the way.” He explored public lands across the West and the human communities with which they are inextricably entwined. Through those travels and evolving artistic practice, Welby found himself becoming more and more interested in vast scales of time and space, and the enormous scope and complexity of climate change. His work now—including his writing, drawing and photography—often examines the intricate webs between people, land, industry and government.

For example, after interviewing local residents and Bureau of Land Management staff in Conejos Coun- ty, Colorado, he pondered the contradictions in the very idea of public land and created Mogote Slope Public Claim, a 75-foot-by-75-foot “brand” on a sage-studded hillside.

“Every citizen has access to this certain acre of public land. But if the mineral rights are sold to Standard Oil, suddenly it’s illegal to put a shovel in the ground, or pick up a stone,” he says.

To express that conundrum, he created the sprawling, stark-orange piece using the simple, locally iconic symbols of a cross and concentric circles.

“You see these compositions, the quartered circle, the concentric rings, in the petroglyphs and sand paintings of Mesa Verde, in the division of center-pivot irrigated farmland, and sold in hardware stores as paper shooting targets—together they create a symbol that marks an object that will be perforated, destroyed,” Welby says. Welby says CU Boulder encouraged open-minded approaches to both science and art, allowing him to explore and develop the ideas that intrigued him.

“I feel really lucky that I ended up where I ended up,” he says.

Alumni are making a difference across the globe; meet a trio of them.

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Transformative leadership through (and by) design

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 19:11:34 +0000

Transformative leadership through (and by) design Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/16/2021 - 12:11

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU Boulder grad is a global leader in human-centered design

Ford Motor Co. has come a long way since Henry Ford’s days, but one thing remains the same: Today’s Ford is thinking in new and innovative ways, and Sandy Fershee (WomSt, Anth’96) is charting that new course within this legacy company.

Fershee’s role as lab director and design executive leading D-Ford Detroit, Ford’s 21st-century “human-centered design” team, evolved from Fershee’s leadership with Ford’s Global User Experience team. But if you ask Fershee, it all goes back to her own background in anthropology.

“It’s ethnography. You have to observe people and deeply engage with them, live with them,” Fershee says. “Where anthropologists might live with people for months on end, we spend days observing how they live their lives, following their behaviors and interactions, and then working to tap into what we could do to make those everyday activities easier and better.”

Over her career, Fershee has worked with the world’s leading organizations—automotive, consumer electronics, technology and media companies, designing everything from operating systems and applications, to education, health care, and entertainment services and experiences.

She has worked on numerous projects inventing the future for companies like Google, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, Motorola, Comcast, Infiniti and Samsung.

Sandy Fershee

Fershee grew up in the hamlet of Charlevoix, Michigan, skiing, swimming, playing sports and violin, reading, and yearning for “life in the big city and travel.” While in high school, she visited family friends in Boulder and immediately knew she wanted to go to the �鶹��Ƶ.

Always intellectually curious, Fershee decided to pursue a double major in women’s studies and anthropology.

Double-majoring in the social sciences offered just the right amount of breadth and depth. But she was also intrigued with emerging technologies and spent time in Norlin Library computer labs exploring digital technology and independently learning to build webpages—“not a very mainstream activity at that time,” she notes.

After graduation, she spent a year traveling around the world, including Australia and New Zealand, Thailand, India, Nepal and both Eastern and Western Europe. Upon returning, she took a job as a user-interface designer, developer and project manager for Wall Street on Demand in Boulder, which created websites for the financial services industry.

“That taught me more about how to design, code, write and research,” she says.

Fershee recognized that she was too interested in people to become a technologist. She received five job offers in one week of interviewing during the dot-com boom and spent the next 17 years working in design for companies in New York and Chicago, including running her own design agency.

Her job was often to identify emerging technologies and anticipate what services would be needed as they became faster and more sophisticated.

“I was one of the first people to be called an information architect and an interaction designer,” she says. “I like to spend a lot of time imagining the future. I draw on history, draw on people in their context and use ‘futuring’ scenarios and creativity to imagine everything possible—then work to get more tangible.”

In 2015, Ford hired Fershee as a design leadership consultant to create a “global experience design team,” establishing human-centered design practices and identifing and running projects to create opportunities for the company. That work led Ford to bring her on as an executive in 2016 to lead what would become D-Ford in early 2019.

For Fershee, D-Ford is “about understanding people in a future context, uncovering unmet or untapped needs, and based on that, starting to prototype possible ideas.”

The lab’s process is fast-moving and highly iterative. Failure is a critical part of the early process.

“We rapidly generate lots of ideas, testing our thinking and tossing out the ones that aren’t working. We fail fast, to push the best ideas forward where the richest opportunities lie,” she says.

My job is to create the conditions for creativity to thrive, drive a shared mission and purpose for teams, and manifest impact in the future of mobility."

For one of its first projects, the team set out to improve Ford’s top-selling F-150 pickup truck. Team members spent thousands of hours with truck owners, including those in Boulder, conducting in-depth research by observing people in their lives.

Their findings showed that the F-150 is a “hub for work and play.” They collaborated with Ford engineers to make it a vastly improved hub. Noting that people used the bed to haul tools, use generators to power tools and other appliances, and conduct work around the bed night and day, they improved exterior lighting to be productive during early mornings on the job or at night when they might be setting up camp.

And they “completely electrified” the bed to provide power to tools and appliances, Fershee says. They also created a workbench by adding small details such as a built-in ruler and places to easily attach clamps and store pencils and tools to make the bed more usable as a mobile workshop.

“Nothing gadget-y, just great technology with a purpose,” she says.

In another recent example, the lab addressed the shortage of personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Face shields were a big need, and Ford stepped in to help.

Researchers swiftly queried health care workers and first responders about their needs, researched open-source designs, created multiple prototypes that they tested with health care workers, and worked with specialists across Ford to tap readily available materials to use in mass production. Within a week, the company managed to distribute 10,000 face shields.

“We played an instrumental role in jump-starting the process,” she says.

At this stage in her career, Fershee is focusing on her role as a design executive, innovator and leader.

“My job is to create the conditions for creativity to thrive, drive a shared mission and purpose for teams, and manifest impact in the future of mobility,” she says. “I love a big challenge and working with diverse teams to find new opportunities and create new solutions.”

Fershee’s role at D-Ford Detroit has made her an increasingly sought-after guest for conferences, podcasts and other media. She was a featured speaker at Austin’s South by Southwest technology, film and arts conference in 2019 and 2020. She was also featured in a recent “Editors Choice” Forbes interview.

“For the last 20 years, I was completely focused on delivering in my career and caring for my marriage and two sons,” says Fershee, whose husband, Sandy Selinger is a fellow CU Boulder graduate (Econ’97) and consultant who connects Israeli startup companies with American clients. “With my evolving role at the corporate level, I’m now able to spend a larger part of my time sharing my knowledge and experience with more people and a wider audience.”

Nearly a quarter-century after graduation, Fershee still credits CU Boulder and the College of Arts and Sciences for paving the way for success in her life and career.

“One of the gifts of a liberal arts education is the ability to explore ideas and systems broadly, think critically and sharpen communication skills—all things that will make one more successful in life in general,” she says.

CU Boulder grad is a global leader in human-centered design.

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Microbiome may unlock the secrets of aging

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 23:40:10 +0000

Microbiome may unlock the secrets of aging Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/10/2021 - 16:40

Sarah Kuta

CU Boulder-led research seeks to understand the connection between microbiome and aging

If our bodies could talk, they’d tell stories about our childhoods, our working conditions, our exercise regimens, our diets, even our neighborhoods.

Now, researchers at the �鶹��Ƶ and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill hope to unlock even more secrets about the environmental factors that affect our health by studying the microbiome, the diverse collection of bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes that live on and inside the human body.

This research, recently awarded five years of funding from the National Institute on Aging, aims to create a “microbiome age clock,” that could help identify people whose bodies are aging faster because of environmental stressors.

We’re hoping to gain some new insights about how the environment affects health as it operates through the microbiome."

In the future, doctors could look at a patient’s microbiome to search for clues to premature aging caused by factors like a poor diet or unhealthy stress levels, then make recommendations to help prevent or even reverse these effects. Beyond individual care, the research has the potential to inform how communities and policymakers think about and address the social, economic and environmental factors that lead to poor health and contribute to premature aging.

“Microbiome is the new frontier,” said Kathleen Mullan Harris, co-investigator on the project and professor of sociology and public policy at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. “We know the microbiome is extremely responsive to the environment. We’re hoping to gain some new insights about how the environment affects health as it operates through the microbiome.”

The researchers are using data from the Add Health study, known more formally as the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a project led by Harris.

Since 1994, Add Health researchers have been following a nationally representative group of 20,000 people who began the study when they were teenagers. Over the last 26 years, the researchers have checked in with participants five separate times to gather demographic, socioeconomic, behavioral, cognitive, psychosocial, familial and health data.

Soon, they’ll ask more than 10,000 of these participants, who are now in their 40s, to send in saliva and stool specimens so researchers can catalog their oral and gut microbiomes.

The researchers will be able to compare the microbiomes across groups of people, the first effort with such a large and representative sample of the population.

“This is going to be one of the first studies to be able to really characterize the microbiome across race, ethnicity, gender, age, geography and so on,” Harris said. “We don’t know how the microbiome varies by those fundamental kinds of demographic differences. Even just describing the microbiome from a nationally representative sample and how it varies in the South and the Northeast and the West is going to be fascinating.”

Because Add Health has collected so much rich data from participants over the last 2 1/2 decades of their lives, researchers also hope to connect people’s early experiences with the current makeup of their microbiomes.

“We’re interested in how early life exposures are related to your microbiome in adulthood—the mode of (birth) delivery, whether or not you were breastfed, the early life social and economic conditions of your family, your involvement in risky behavior like drug use, whether or not you have any health conditions,” Harris said.

It takes an otherwise biological process and makes it social."

Long term, this microbiome characterization data could ultimately help communities make changes to help improve the health of residents, such as building more parks or providing greater access to healthy foods.

“If we can demonstrate geographic clustering of microbiome variation that correlates with social or built environmental features, then what appears to be an individual-level process is linked to the places in which people live, work and go to school,” said Jason Boardman, CU Boulder professor of sociology and a co-investigator on the project. “It takes an otherwise biological process and makes it social.”

The researchers also hope to connect the microbiome to biological markers of aging, such as inflammation and changes to the immune system.

Doing so means that doctors could someday use the microbiome to help prevent disease and extend their patients’ lives.

“Instead of studying people when they have a disease, we’re actually able to identify these predisease markers. People who have high inflammation, for example, that’s pretty asymptomatic. They don’t know they have it but it’s a marker of future disease,” Harris said. “One of the values of our study is we’re going to be able to identify people who are on a pathway to disease in the future and even premature mortality.”

Other researchers on the project include Matt McQueen, an associate professor of integrative physiology, and Ken Krauter, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, from CU Boulder; Allison Aiello from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; and Jennifer Beam Dowd from the University of Oxford.

CU Boulder-led research seeks to understand the connection between microbiome and aging.

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Harry Potter as modern religious text

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 18:00:29 +0000

Harry Potter as modern religious text Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/09/2021 - 11:00

Kenna Bruner

CU Boulder senior’s thesis reflects on what it means to be a spiritual text

One of Natania Bloch’s earliest memories was waking up with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire open on her lap. A devoted fan of the fantasy series, 5-year-old Natania fell asleep reading about Harry outfoxing a dragon to retrieve a golden egg.

And while she didn’t know it then, Bloch would return to the magical world of Harry Potter as inspiration for writing her honors thesis.

“I loved the Harry Potter books growing up,” Bloch said, adding, “I’m a Hufflepuff.”

Bloch studies the Holocaust and graduated from the �鶹��Ƶ in December with majors in history and Jewish studies, and minors in communications and biochemistry.

For her honors thesis in the Jewish studies department, Bloch looked at the “Potterverse” through a spiritual lens using the Harry Potter series as modern religious text.

Natania Bloch

“A lot of people turn to Harry Potter instead of the Bible, Torah or Quran when they are in times of need,” Bloch said. “I think that’s what religion is for, speaking to you when you need it. For a lot of people, that can be many things, whether it’s Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, even science and evolution. It’s interesting to look at the world and see how it’s changing and diversifying and to find a way to fit all of those new things into a broader conception of religion.”

Bloch is also delving into different themes of religion, in particular Jewish sources and philosophers, to compile a framework for examining the existence of a god-figure in the series and whether it has to be a singular entity or if it can take a completely different form.

“I will be talking about magic as a god-figure,” Bloch said. “I will also look into how people practice religion, what that involves and the different laws in religions. The thing about Harry Potter, it’s got all those morals and teachings in it, but it shows them in a different way from biblical text. What makes it so special and unique among the overtly religious texts I’ve encountered is that it speaks to children, too.”

For a lot of people, that can be many things, whether it’s Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, even science and evolution."

Although Bloch doesn’t rely on one book in particular, she turns to literature in general for comfort and inspiration.

“I used to love series like Artemis Fowl and His Dark Materials,” she said. “So, I guess it just depends on what I need at the moment, and what gives me comfort at that period in my life.”

Bloch next plans to follow in her family’s footsteps and go to medical school and specialize in pediatrics and psychiatry.

Bloch especially enjoys supporting children. She has worked at summer camps, taught Hebrew classes for kids and been a teaching assistant in a children’s class.

“I love working with kids and making sure they feel heard and seen. It’s so important that they feel that when they’re sick,” she said.

Bloch also assists fundraising efforts for a Boulder County organization called Moving to End Sexual Assault to raise awareness about sexual violence.

Last spring, Bloch was recognized for her outstanding academic achievement and range of service to the university and the community. She was among the 20 students awarded a Jacob Van Ek scholarship, one of the College of Arts and Sciences’ highest honors.

As Hogwarts’ Professor Sprout might say, “Ten points for Hufflepuff.”

CU Boulder senior’s thesis reflects on what it means to be a spiritual text.

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Learning to live with fear

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 19:51:38 +0000

Learning to live with fear Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/25/2021 - 12:51

Kelsey Simpkins

Joanna Lambert’s research in evolutionary biology carries lessons for coexisting with coyotes, COVID-19 and each other

In spring of 2020, as people across the world suddenly spent more time at home, they collectively experienced something unusual: wild animals roaming around their neighborhoods in ways they’d never before seen.

Joanna Lambert

While some viral internet sensations never actually happened—like the swans and dolphins that supposedly reappeared in Venetian canals—mountain lions did indeed walk through empty, snowy streets in broad daylight in Boulder. Wild goats took over the Welsh town of Llandudno.

Even squirrels, raccoons, pigeons and deer became enjoyable sightings in many U.S. cities where they are considered pests, threats to one’s garden or automobile.

“I think it’s wonderful how people have just found joy—a silver lining, if you will, in this pandemic—in watching wildlife do things that they don’t normally do, because now suddenly humans aren’t around,” said Joanna Lambert, a professor in environmental studies at the �鶹��Ƶ. “It builds an awareness of wildlife in a way that we haven’t had previously, and awareness with the fact that we share this planet.”

Lambert is an expert in evolutionary biology and most recently has been researching rapid evolution or the “biology of resilience,” studying why certain animals do well in human environments. While many human city dwellers find squirrels, coyotes and raccoons bothersome, Lambert finds them encouraging.

“I am fascinated with the story of how some of species are doing well in areas that are human-dominated, despite what we do,” Lambert said.

Lambert grew up in major urban cities: first in Oxford, England, then in Chicago. But one of her earliest memories is a kind of peace she found in wilder places.

We can’t go on killing everything that scares us in our backyard—we’ve got to work towards coexistence.”

She also loved animals as a kid, but it didn’t occur to her until college that she could study them for a career. And that’s when she received the opportunity of a lifetime.

“I was the undergrad that volunteered for everything,” Lambert said. “I did that so much that at the end of my undergrad, I had a professor say to me, ‘You know, Lambert, you’ve paid your dues. I’m looking for a field assistant. I’m going to Africa. Would you like to come with me?’”

So she packed her bags, and, all on her own and with no experience, headed to a place she’d never been.

Her destination? Kibale Forest (now a national park), a high-altitude rainforest in the Rwenzori Mountains of western Uganda, bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, she joined her professor to conduct research in a place that had the world’s highest density and species richness of primates, including chimpanzees, red-tailed monkeys and black-and-white colobus monkeys.

Saying she went off the grid is an understatement.

“It was epic. There weren’t even fax machines,” Lambert said. “It was a whole different era in travel and communication.”

There also was no electricity, no water except rainwater, and during her three months there, almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

“You’d think I’d never go back,” Lambert said. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it not only met every one of my expectations, it exceeded them.”

She has returned at least once a year to continue her research.

Turning grief into hope

Joanna Lambert

After spending almost 30 years in Kibale National Park, Lambert has come to know that forest in a way that she’s known no other place on the planet.

She has also seen the local human population more than triple and observed an accelerated version of what’s happened around the planet for the past few hundred years: Human quality of life has drastically changed, and the biodiversity and abundance of flora and fauna has greatly diminished.

As she observed the loss of wildlife she was studying, Lambert began to notice something changing within herself.

“Every time I came home, it was taking me longer and longer to get over it,” she said. “I realized that I was experiencing this kind of existential loss—something that has now been discussed by some psychologists, called ecological grief.”

Since Lambert joined CU Boulder in 2015, this feeling has made her think about ways of maintaining hope on a planet that has undergone extraordinary change and loss.

What she found in both Africa and North America is that some species thrive in human-dominated spaces and are resilient. For example, even as human populations grew and habitat was shrank, baboons became more common around Kibale National Park.

She saw similar trends in North America, where coyotes have become a common sight across the western United States and can sometimes be a danger to peoples’ pets.

“It started me thinking about, what is this process of resilience? What is this process of adapting to human landscapes? And can we use that to inform the ways in which we are managing our urban and suburban landscapes and the species that live in them?”

Lambert has been researching coyotes in two differing settings: where there are and where there are not wolves. By studying behavior and genetics, she aims to find out whether coyotes undergo rapid evolution when they live in urban human spaces, where there are intensive human, pressures, different kinds of foods and no natural predators.

Lambert has found that creatures that thrive in human environments tend to share the same kinds of traits that have made us successful and widespread as a species: being able to eat a wide variety of foods, to adapt behaviorally to new environments, and a high ability to learn quickly and teach their offspring. Many of these animals can reproduce quickly, as well.

We know these animals—raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, pigeons—and we often view them as too familiar, as nuisances in our cities.

“There’s an old expression of ‘familiarity breeds contempt,” said Lambert. “But COVID-19 has reopened our eyes to our backyard and urban animal neighbors.”

Learning to coexist

For Coloradans, these urban animal neighbors can also breed fear. Simply letting the dog out in the backyard could result in a dangerous encounter with coyotes.

“There are some species that historically have evoked a lot of fear in humans,” Lambert said. “When black bears, mountain lions or coyotes start coming into our world, it can feel threatening. And often, the way that we deal with that fear is just to kill the things that make us scared.”

A coyote smiling at a camera trap in Broomfield, Colorado.

But, she said, “we can’t go on killing everything that scares us in our backyard—we’ve got to work towards coexistence.”

Modern humans have been around on the planet for at least 150,000 years. And throughout all of our history we have lived alongside large-bodied predators.

We lost that knowledge only very recently, Lambert said. She argues that we must do three things to coexist with coyotes and other threats, like COVID-19.

One, become habituated to the novelty of these threats. At first, living near large predators or in a world with a new virus will seem quite scary, but it will seem less threatening with time and exposure.

Two, regain the knowledge of how to live around top predators and other threats. For example, in parts of Europe where wolves are coming back, some residents use guard dogs. With COVID-19, face masks that have long been a common courtesy in Asia have now been adopted globally, sometimes reluctantly.

And finally, we need to change our behavior, Lambert said. She likens leaving the house in 2020 without a mask to naïvely approaching a black bear and her cubs—a failure to apply knowledge about a situation and adjust behavior accordingly.

While we still don’t fully understand COVID-19, that doesn’t mean we can’t change our behavior with the scientific knowledge we do have, Lambert said.

Lambert is ever-optimistic. As she has watched the world around her change drastically in the past 30 years, as well as in just the past year, she sees an opportunity to understand things we don’t yet comprehend—whether that’s how to live with coyotes in our cities, a novel virus or simply each other.

Coping with fear is key. “When people look out and realize how much we have done to our planet, that scares a lot of people,” Lambert said. “But I think we’ve got to have hope.”

Joanna Lambert will be speaking about her research at the upcoming CU on the Weekend lecture series. Learn more about the event, including registration details, on the Office for Outreach and Engagement's website.

Joanna Lambert’s research in evolutionary biology carries lessons for coexisting with coyotes, COVID-19 and each other.

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So you think the pandemic will doom higher education?

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 18:55:35 +0000

So you think the pandemic will doom higher education? Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/16/2020 - 11:55

James W.C. White

As is always the case during significant crises, we need more dynamic, well-rounded critical thinkers

I won’t sugar-coat it: These are uniquely challenging times.

When the novel coronavirus burst into the human world, we were all already vulnerable. Now, in one way or another, we are all affected.

Like other sectors of our economy, higher education has been hit, with nationwide enrollment declining this fall by about 2.5%, and CU Boulder’s decline is about the same. Some evidence suggests that uncertainty—about the job market, the economy, the value of higher education—is taking a bite out of college enrollment this year. That is unfortunate. But today’s uncertainty is precisely why today is the time to pursue higher education.

James W.C. White, interim dean of the college, soaks up the scenery in the foothills above Boulder.

The looming questions humans faced before 2020—a better economy for all, human rights, racism, climate change, effective self-governance and human health—are still with us. So, too, are new conundrums about how to help people wracked by the pandemic and an economy that is partly in tatters.

As is always the case during significant crises, we need more dynamic, well-rounded critical thinkers. And the place that helps those rising stars meet their potential is here, in college.

I know some people believe that a traditional liberal-arts education—which exposes students to a broad range of disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences and arts and humanities—is less important in such times than degrees in technical arts or applied sciences.

We will, of course, need workers in technical fields, applied sciences and natural sciences. But we will need more. We will need geographers, linguists, classicists, historians, sociologists, artists, philosophers and writers. We will need interdisciplinary specialists who can speak intelligently with all of them.

The solutions to problems in the realm of the environment, human health, democratic institutions and others will surely involve science, engineering and technology. But the solutions will be propelled by and honed with a clear understanding of social sciences and the humanities.

A liberal-arts education—one that exposes students to the breadth of human knowledge—conveys skills in critical thinking, communication and adaptability. These are desperately needed skills. The alumni, researchers and teachers we profile in this edition exemplify these strengths.

So, if someone you know is having second thoughts about college, thinking that the time and tuition are not justified, please share two words from me: Think again.

James W.C. White is interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Think again.

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