Division of Natural Sciences

CU ��ý�� scholars elected members of the National Academy of Sciences

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:47:49 +0000

CU ��ý�� scholars elected members of the National Academy of Sciences Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/01/2026 - 14:47

Lee Niswander and Bethany Ehlmann recognized ‘for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research’

Two ��ý�� scientists have been elected members of the National Academy of Sciences, joining a cohort of more than 140 scholars around the world who are recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Lee Niswander, a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and Bethany Ehlmann, a professor of geological sciences and director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and—with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine—provides science, engineering and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

Lee Niswander is a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology.

Pursuing clinical therapies

Niswander is head of the Niswander Lab, where she and her group investigate mouse models of embryonic development to provide insights into fundamental developmental processes, major human birth defects and potential clinical therapies. Her studies have revealed the molecular mechanisms that control formation of the central and peripheral nervous system, as well as lung, limb and neuromuscular development.

Niswander’s current focus is on early brain formation and birth defects that arise when normal brain formation goes awry, like failure of neural tube closure or maintenance of neural progenitor cells, resulting in spina bifida or microcephaly.

The Niswander Lab uses the mouse embryo and human-induced pluripotent stem cells as models of human development. The lab’s studies encompass genetics, epigenetics, environmental factors and live imaging to couple molecular insights to cell behaviors. Through collaborative efforts, Niswander Lab researchers are also exploring the genetic causes of neural tube defects in humans.

Niswander recently received the Hazel Barnes Prize, which celebrates the enriching interrelationship between teaching and research. It is the largest and most prestigious award funded by the university. This summer she will be honored with an Edwin G. Conklin Medal, which is awarded annually by the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) to recognize a developmental biologist who has made and is continuing to make extraordinary research contributions to the field and is an excellent mentor, helping train the next generation of outstanding scientists.

Niswander received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from CU ��ý��, her master’s degree in biochemistry and genetics from University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (now CU Anschutz) and her doctorate in genetics from Case Western University. She performed her postdoctoral training in developmental biology at the University of California San Francisco.

“I am deeply honored to become a member of the National Academy of Sciences,” Niswander says. “I am grateful to the numerous trainees and their research discoveries that provided the foundation of this honor. I am excited to join the Academy in their mission to advise on scientific matters important for human health.”

Bethany Ehlmann is a professor of geological sciences and director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

Studying space

Ehlmann is a planetary scientist who holds the faculty roles of Provost’s Chair in the Research and Innovation Office and affiliate professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. Her research focuses on water in the solar system, the evolution of habitable worlds and remote sensing techniques and instruments for planetary missions.

Ehlmann is a science team member of multiple missions, including the Jupiter-bound Europa Clipper; the Earth-orbiting EMIT imaging spectrometer; the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover; the Mars2020 Perseverance rover; the ExoMars rover; and orbiting and landed spectrometers for the Artemis lunar program. Previously, she was a science team member for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter CRISM instrument, the Dawn mission during its exploration of the asteroid Ceres, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity and principal investigator of Lunar Trailblazer.

Active in science policy and outreach, Ehlmann is president of the board of directors of The Planetary Society. She served as a member of the National Academies Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey and the National Academies Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science. She is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the Mineralogical Society of America, and has authored a children's book, “Dr. E's Super Stellar Solar System,” with National Geographic.

Ehlmann earned a bachelor’s degree from Washington University, where she double majored in earth and planetary sciences and environmental studies with a minor in math; two master’s degrees from the University of Oxford, in environmental change and management and geography; and master’s and doctoral degrees in geological sciences from Brown University.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about arts and sciences? Show your support.

Lee Niswander and Bethany Ehlmann recognized ‘for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.’

Traditional

White

A new (and not extinct) moth emerges from the Florida Scrub

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:20:20 +0000

A new (and not extinct) moth emerges from the Florida Scrub Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/24/2026 - 08:20

Rachel Sauer

After publishing about a moth he’d only seen in collections, CU ��ý�� researcher Ryan St Laurent travels to Florida and spots the elusive—and previously thought extinct—Cicinnus albarenicolus

On the second of two nights he spent deep in central Florida forests last week—dripping sweat, shrouded in swarms of flying ants and June beetles, well into the 20 kilometers he’d eventually walk monitoring his four traps—Ryan St Laurent saw the thing he’d come, but didn’t really expect, to see.

To anyone who hadn’t spent a dozen years studying it, the sandy brown wisp might have looked like a fragment of autumn leaf or a shred of bark, but St Laurent immediately recognized Cicinnus albarenicolus. He’d just never seen the moth alive before, let alone in the wild.

In fact, until November, St Laurent thought this new species of Mimallonidae, or sack-bearer moth, might be extinct (DNA barcoding of moth specimens in collections had identified it as a new species). Before November, it hadn’t been seen in its extremely limited Florida habitat since the 1960s.

Ryan St Laurent, a CU ��ý�� assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and CU Museum curator of entomology, traveled to Florida last week to try finding the elusive Cicinnus albarenicolus moth.

When news came that a collector had found one of the presumed-extinct moths in a sliver of white sand scrub in the Florida peninsula, St Laurent, a ��ý�� assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and CU Museum curator of entomology, had just finished writing a recently published paper describing the new C. albarenicolus, comparing it with other Mimallonidae species.

“I had written that it might be extinct, so I had to revise the paper and bring in some additional co-authors,” St Laurent says. Then he learned about an upcoming scheduled burn in one of the very few areas where C. albarenicolus conceivably could be found, so he booked a flight to Florida.

“I don’t think this is the only population in existence, and I don’t think it’s going to get burned up and go extinct,” St Laurent said several days before flying to Florida. “But I want to go out there and at least try to get a couple of tissue samples in the event we can’t find it again.”

Needles and haystacks don’t adequately encompass his aim; he was trying to find a small brown moth in a 450,000-acre forest.

‘These look really cool’

But how does a scientist first steer his scholarship to a little-known and barely studied family of moths, a member of which may or may not have been extinct? For St Laurent, the path began during undergrad at Cornell, where he studied entomology and worked with museum insect collections. The collections manager encouraged him to find something that nobody else was working on, “but there was a lot of competition in butterflies and moths—it’s a popular group as far as insects go,” he explains.

“I remember going through the collection, asking, ‘What am I going to work on?’ when I came across this particular family (of moth). I was like, ‘Well, these look really cool,’ but when I went to try to curate them, I realized there were no resources, no books, no field guides, nothing.”

Perfect, he thought. If nobody was working on that family, he would. He wrote his undergraduate honors thesis then pursued his PhD in charting the phylogeny, or tree of life, of this small group of moths. “Once you have a tree of life, you can start talking about them and you can contextualize them as a member of bigger butterfly and moth groups,” he says.

It wasn’t until St Laurent got to the Smithsonian for his postdoc that he had a chance to order mitochondrial sequencing on one of the Mimallonidae specimens that he’d identified as different from its family members. That sequencing showed it was genetically different from anything else in its family, so when St Laurent came to CU ��ý��, he continued the project of sequencing specimens from various collections.

The female Cicinnus albarenicolus moth (left) that flew out of the darkness of Seminole State Forest in Florida last week, and Ryan St Laurent (right) holding the twig on which it perched.

Most of the specimens were many decades old, compounding the challenges of genetic sequencing. St Laurent worked with a Canadian lab that specializes in barcode sequencing—a technique that focuses on short sequences of genes—sending them prepared samples for testing. In one instance, St Laurent sampled the leg of one of the few recent specimens, which he put on a sequencing plate and sent to Canada in January, looking for further evidence that this was, in fact, a new species of moth.

The genes didn’t lie: It was.

A moth flies out of the darkness

As if discovering a new species isn’t a big enough deal, discovering that it’s not extinct after all is enough to drive any researcher from the lab and straight into the Florida thickets.

Among the things that make Mimallonidae interesting, St Laurent says, is they belong to a superfamily with ancient lineage—more than 100 million years old—99% of which live in Central and South America. Only a handful of species in the family occur in North America, but the ones that do are (mostly) quite common.

Ryan St Laurent set up four insect traps with moth-attractant LED lights.

Except, of course, for C. albarenicolus—endemic to small patches of Florida Scrub, made rarer still by habitat loss. “Only 10% of Florida Scrub is left,” St Laurent said before leaving for Florida, “and the scrub that does still exist is super isolated. We don’t know if those little pockets can support this moth at all.”

Through some scientific sleuthing and mapping the locations where collection specimens had been found, St Laurent narrowed possible C. albarenicolus habitat to six sites in the Florida peninsula: eastern Ocala National Forest, Weeki Wachee north of Tampa, Cassia and Cassadaga northeast of Orlando, the Archbold Biological Station on the Lake Wales Ridge in Central Florida and coastal southeast Florida in Port Sewall. Each location has or had the rare Florida Scrub habitat—specifically white sand, open canopy scrub, which C. albarenicolus seemed to favor.

“This particular family of moths, there’s a reason nobody studies them,” St Laurent said before leaving for Florida. “They’re really hard to find and really hard to raise in captivity. I’ve done field work all over the Americas, and I’m lucky if I see one or two a night in Central or South America. I’m very used to not being able to find these things, which is why I do a lot of work in collections.”

Still, he had to try. He flew to Orlando and then drove to the township of Cassia. He had previously seen a specimen in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City that had been found near Cassia in 1964. “I knew about that specimen, I knew the scrub in that area because I went hiking there years ago in grad school and found caterpillars, but I didn’t rear them,” St Laurent says, so that’s where he started.

The first night, he set up four traps resembling tall, narrow tents with a specialized moth-attractive LED inside—the aim being to lure insects to the light. Other insects arrived in the thousands, but no C. albarenicolus.

The second night, he set up at a spot in the nearby Seminole State Forest where the trees open to an expanse of sandy soil and scrubby plants. At 8:49 p.m., “I’m standing there and this kind of pinkish moth comes out of the darkness, and it was very recognizable. Nothing else really looks like that, moth-wise.”

After that first moth, two more came. St Laurent knew he was seeing females, which fly right after sunset, so he collected them and raced them to his colleagues at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Collecting live females means collecting eggs, with the attendant potential of rearing them in the lab. If his colleagues are able to rear them, he says, he will receive progenitors and offspring.

As for seeing a moth that he’d only previously seen as a collection specimen, “I was just like, ‘Wow, I was right! It is here!’ My suspicion is the moth is all over the place in Ocala, but it’s rare and diffuse there. It’s a much more concentrated site in Seminole, surrounded by hardwood hammocks and the St. Johns and Wekiva rivers, so you have a better chance of finding something there.”

The site in the Ocala National Forest is scheduled for a controlled burn associated with Florida scrub jay management, “which is probably good in the overall grand scheme of things,” St Laurent says, “but since we don’t know what the moth eats or when it’s active or its annual lifecycle or habitat requirements, I don’t know if the burning regime is appropriate.

“(The moth is) part of Florida’s multimillion-year history, and Florida is the only place in the world where it occurs. It may not be some top-down species that’s controlling the habitat, but it’s still a very important representative of the one-sixth of its family that’s found in North America, and this one is the only species endemic to the U.S. in this family. It’s a part of Florida heritage and U.S. heritage, and we need to protect it.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about ecology and evolutionary biology? Show your support.

Traditional

White

Jun Ye elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:14:01 +0000

Jun Ye elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Rachel Sauer Thu, 04/23/2026 - 12:14

Election recognizes Ye's extraordinary contributions to physics and quantum science, including pioneering advances in optical atomic clocks, precision measurement and quantum many-body physics

��ý�� scientist Jun Ye has been named a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ye is a professor of physics at CU ��ý�� and physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He holds the Monroe Endowed Professorship in Physics and is a fellow at JILA.

Learn more about Ye's honor

Election recognizes Ye's extraordinary contributions to physics and quantum science, including pioneering advances in optical atomic clocks, precision measurement and quantum many-body physics.

Traditional

White

Colorado AG advises Quantum Scholars to be curious in changing times

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:31:40 +0000

Colorado AG advises Quantum Scholars to be curious in changing times Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/22/2026 - 13:31

Rachel Sauer

Attorney General Phil Weiser spoke to Quantum Scholars Tuesday, emphasizing the need for critical thinking in a time when ‘our capacity to govern ourselves is now being undermined by the technologies that we need to govern’

In a roomful of Quantum Scholars, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser began his remarks in the 1860s.

As the students in the room are now, people living then passed through a time of world-changing technological advancement. Then, it was the railroad and telegraph, which fundamentally altered people’s conception of distance, Weiser said.

Today, “we're too close to it to have a full grasp of the changes that are happening in our society, in our economy, but they are profound,” he said. “We're coming off of this transformation of the internet that all of you have grown up with, swimming in the water, whereas Noah (Finkelstein) and I lived in a pre-internet world.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser speaks to Quantum Scholars Tuesday afternoon.

“We know how this world is different, but none of us fully knows how quantum and AI and other emerging technologies will pose yet another transformation. And one of the challenges of this moment that's a little different than even 1860 is our capacity to govern ourselves is now being undermined by the technologies that we need to govern.”

Weiser’s remarks came during a guest lecture Tuesday afternoon to members of Quantum Scholars, a program conceived in the ��ý�� Department of Physics and the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) that offers undergraduate students opportunities to learn about the quantum field, including connections with local industry leaders and introduction to new quantum technology.

The Quantum Scholars program includes undergraduates studying physics, mathematics, engineering and computer science and aims to advance quantum education and workforce development through professional development, co-curricular activities and industrial engagement.

Finkelstein, a distinguished professor of physics who co-directs Quantum Scholars with Professor of Distinction Michael Ritzwoller, noted in his introduction of Weiser that while researchers and innovators in the quantum field have studied its past and keenly look toward the future, “we haven't had folks on policy yet. It turns out that's going to be the third leg of advancing quantum sciences and sciences in general.”

‘How do I know this is true?’

Weiser, who is dean emeritus of the CU ��ý�� Law School and an adjunct faculty member, noted that “one of the embarrassments of this moment is how deeply dysfunctional and non-responsive national public policy-making institutions are. When you think about social media, when you think about AI, when you think about quantum, there are all sorts of opportunities, there are all sorts of challenges, and we don't have the institutions to meet them.”

He gave as an example Anthropic’s Mythos AI model, which can both detect and exploit software vulnerabilities, and which the company hasn’t released because of threats it could pose to global cybersecurity.

“There are a couple of possible scenarios there,” Weiser said. “One is that they're really good at marketing, and they want to make sure that every single bank and other institution uses the product first to protect it from the product. Could be.

“Or, they're actually trying to be socially responsible, knowing that there's no national governing framework or body that can help manage cybersecurity harms.”

When Weiser worked in the Obama White House in 2009-2010, he and his colleagues were beginning to talk about the challenges of cybersecurity, and how the challenges of technology governance are quite different than the challenges of rural agriculture governance or urban industrialization governance “because technology of the age we're now living in moves so fast,” he said.

Distinguished Professor Noah Finkelstein (right) greets Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (left) before Weiser's talk to Quantum Scholars Tuesday afternoon.

“And sadly, we have a government that's unable to come to terms with this, raising the question, ‘How are we going to govern ourselves in this age?’ You've heard lots of people say things like AI can be as dangerous as nuclear weapons, and we came up with international governing institutions to deal with the threat of nuclear weapons. We may well need some to deal with the challenges and threats of AI. Are we up to that challenge right now?”

In that vein, Saksham Hassanandani, a first-year student majoring in mathematics, asked what he can do to “help and advocate for such changes? And especially if I end up in an industry . . . that may not care for the ethics. What can we do as people to fight for this change?”

Weiser mentioned that he and his team are currently suing Meta for the design of social media—"they designed a product in a way that they knew was harming people,” he said—but nevertheless encouraged Hassanandani and his fellow Quantum Scholars not to “take as a steady state that the company you're going to work for is acting in a way that's unethical. I would start with an aspiration that you're going to be working for a company who cares about its customers, who treats its workers fairly and who thinks about society.”

Should that not be the case, Weiser advised them to be clear on their own ethical boundaries and whether they are willing to advocate internally for change and “ethical capitalism.”

Related to concerns about technology ethics, Grace Kallberg, a third-year student majoring in aerospace engineering, mentioned the growing threat of AI generating misinformation. She asked, “Is there anything that we can do as individuals to kind of help combat that?”

“Everyone here has an extraordinary opportunity as a citizen to think long and hard, and to help others think long and hard, on the following question: How do I know this is true?” Weiser replied. “You are swimming in information that is shared or, as you put it, AI generated in ways that we may not know whether it's true or not. And that is a fundamentally different position than the world that I grew up in. I grew up in a world that had editors who reviewed information before I got to it. You're not in that world.

“And so, what you can all do is wrestle with the challenge that you and others have: How do I know this is true? And then make that discipline part of your habits of mind.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about Quantum Scholars? Show your support.

Traditional

White

All photos by Patrick Campbell/CU ��ý��

Drinking alone is a risky business

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:56:36 +0000

Drinking alone is a risky business Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/21/2026 - 13:56

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Solitary alcohol consumption is connected to poorer cognitive function among older adults, CU ��ý�� researcher Carillon Skrzynski finds

Studies regarding the potential risks—and benefits—of alcohol use have reached widely differing conclusions, from suggesting that moderate alcohol use may have benefits for health to arguing that any amount of alcohol consumption ultimately puts drinkers’ health at risk.

But researchers seem to agree on at least one thing: Drinking alone is a red flag.

“Solitary drinking is associated with many different negative consequences and correlates,” says Carillon Skrzynski, an assistant research professor at the ��ý��’s Center for Health and Neuroscience, Genes, and Environment, or CU Change. “It’s a very risky drinking pattern.”

Carillon Skrzynski, an assistant research professor in the CU ��ý�� Center for Health and Neuroscience, Genes, and Environment (CU Change), and her research colleagues studied solitary drinking in older adulthood, connecting it to poorer objective and subjective cognitive function.

She should know. She wrote her dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University on solitary alcohol consumption and has published two meta-analyses on the subject.

But to date, little research has examined solitary drinking specifically among older people. Despite that, Skrzynski says “there is a higher prevalence of drinking alone the older you get.”

Using a dataset collected to study cannabis and common complaints in older adults compiled by Angela Bryan, professor of psychology and neuroscience and co-director at CU Change, Skrzynski was able to analyze how solitary drinking affects cognitive function.

She and Bryan published the results of the study in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.

“Our results expand knowledge of solitary drinking in older adulthood by connecting it to poorer objective and subjective cognitive function,” the authors concluded.

Skrzynski analyzed 342 individuals aged 60 or older who completed the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test—an objective measure of verbal memory involving word recall—and subjective cognition via the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Cognitive Function questionnaire, on which subjects self-assess their cognitive function.

The study compared these outcomes among older adults who drank alone, those who drank only socially and those who did not drink alcohol at all, among other aims. (Subjects who engaged in hazardous alcohol use were precluded from the study.)

“Those who drank only socially had better cognitive functioning than both those who drank solitarily and the non-drinking group,” she says. As noted in the paper, this may suggest a potential inverted U-shaped curve wherein both solitary drinking and non-drinking may be associated with poorer cognitive function compared to social-only drinking and therefore signal risk in this domain.

The research did not examine reasons why older adults may choose to consume alcohol alone.

“That’s a crucial point—what is motivating their behavior? Often people are using (alcohol) to cope with negative emotions,” she says. “The self-medication hypothesis suggests that using substances to heal oneself can be maladaptive.”

“People drink all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons. Not every older person who is drinking alone is doing it in a harmful way. One person may have an occasional glass of wine by themselves with their dinner while another may drink an entire bottle of wine alone every night. These are very different scenarios,” says CU ��ý�� scientist Carillon Skrzynski.

However, she emphasizes that solitary drinking does not necessarily imply that a person is engaged in problematic drinking or has an alcohol use disorder, especially among older adults.

“People drink all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons. Not every older person who is drinking alone is doing it in a harmful way,” she says. “One person may have an occasional glass of wine by themselves with their dinner while another may drink an entire bottle of wine alone every night. These are very different scenarios.”

But Skrzynski notes that even if moderate social consumption of alcohol may have benefits for cognition, other research suggests any alcohol consumption at all may increase risks for cancer and other diseases.

“It’s a mixed bag,” she says.

Future research on the subject can be refined and expanded, the paper suggests, including examinations of data samples “with varied patterns of alcohol consumption, and cognitive functioning utilizing diverse subjective and objective measures over longer periods of time.”

“For example, the Rey (test) is objective, but it only measures one domain of objective cognition, verbal memory,” Skrzynski says. Another avenue of research is polysubstance use, or use of multiple substances, and how that is related to social context and outcomes. “How does co-use of alcohol and cannabis in solitary settings affect people?” Skrzynski wonders.

Overall, she says, solitary drinking seems to be a risky drinking pattern, even for older individuals who may be more likely to engage in it. Thus, further research on this population is necessary to continue to understand and ultimately mitigate any harm of alcohol consumption in this context.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about psychology and neuroscience? Show your support.

Solitary alcohol consumption is connected to poorer cognitive function among older adults, CU ��ý�� researcher Carillon Skrzynski finds.

Traditional

White

Drawing out the soul of AI

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:00:28 +0000

Drawing out the soul of AI Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/21/2026 - 07:00

Tiffany Plate

Why CU ��ý�� Professor Lee Frankel-Goldwater believes in the poetic potential of collaborating with artificial intelligence

In the summer of 2023, Lee Frankel-Goldwater was heavily immersed in ��ý��’s poetry community. He was also very aware of the waves that ChatGPT was making in the tech world.

"I started doing some experiments and playing with this AI to see what it could do poetically,” says Frankel-Goldwater, an assistant teaching professor of environmental studies at the ��ý��. He was already certain AI was going to change everything, and he wanted to see how it might be used to explore new realms of poetics.

So, he prompted AI to create a poem, then shared it at a ��ý�� open mic poetry night that summer—mentioning to the audience how he created it. He received mixed reviews, to say the least.

Lee Frankel-Goldwater, a CU ��ý�� assistant teaching professor of environmental studies, presented the AI-produced poetry at a TEDx ��ý�� talk in September 2025.

While some artists in the audience felt threatened and dismissed it, he says, “other people came up to me afterward and said, ‘I really see what you were trying to do there.’” His point was simply to encourage people to think about the ways that technology—like the printing press or laser cutter—have changed the course of art over the years. And to consider how one might see AI in the same light.

The open-mic experience sparked something for Frankel-Goldwater and his childhood pal, Eric Raanan Fischman, also a poet. They began playing around with AI until they teased out some groundbreaking works of cyborg poetics. The works came together in a book published last year, Lily in a Codebox, which is challenging people to think about how they might interact with AI in creative ways.

Linking art and technology

While he currently teaches environmental studies courses (e.g., Environmental Education: From Theory to Practice), Frankel-Goldwater got his undergraduate degree in computer science. He focused his thesis on exploring how technology could enhance artistic expression.

“I created a musical composition based off of a collaboration with a hidden Markov model, an early neural-network AI system, and publicly available sunspot data—linking natural systems, art and technology together,” Frankel-Goldwater says. “I've been thinking about this kind of stuff for a really long time.”

Years later, in 2013, Frankel-Goldwater attended the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, where Fischman was already a student. He fell in love with ��ý�� and everything that comes with it—going hiking, writing poetry and being with incredible people (it was “a deep poetic experiential melting pot!” Frankel-Goldwater says).

He returned to CU ��ý�� to earn his PhD and jumped right back into the poetic community. By the time 2023 rolled around, Fischman was helping run Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, and Frankel-Goldwater was a regular presence at poetry events.

The conversations that began at the open mic that summer inspired them to take their exploration of AI poetics further. They began laying the foundation for a concept that would later become a benchmark of their experiments: the Dickinson-Turing Test. The test, Frankel-Goldwater says, is all about “the space between observer and observed.”

In other words, could an AI-generated poem evoke the experience of art made by a human and cause people to be not just emotionally but also physically moved, à la Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” Dickinson wrote in a letter, “I know that is poetry.”)

In that era of ChatGPT, though, the poems AI was producing were “missing a certain kind of flavor, or that touching human quality,” Frankel-Goldwater says. In other words, they were definitely not passing the Dickinson-Turing test.

“ChatGPT has millions of examples of human poems, but that’s actually a big problem. What it was producing looked like some weak, modernized version of an 1850s Eurocentric poetic expression. It's just not that interesting.”

So, they kept tinkering, and for Frankel-Goldwater, finding a way to guide this AI to co-create novel poetics became a bit of an obsession.

Lily in a Codebox includes the code and AI prompts that helped create the poems.

The eureka moment

After weeks spent trying to help the AI replicate a human poetic voice—without success—they changed tactics. They told it to forget all the rules and guidelines it had learned about poetry from the centuries of examples it had absorbed. Instead, they told it to write for an AI audience.

The result was not quite human—and definitely not something they’d ever seen before. The poem was a mixture of English words and code, demonstrating how it could generate poetic means and symbols unique to itself, as an AI writing for other AI.

“When we put in this one prompt, we didn't know that was going to be the ‘strike gold’ moment,” Frankel-Goldwater says.

When the pair then asked the AI to explain the poem, it said it included a hexadecimal color code for black ({000000}) to symbolize “the vast and infinite nature of the digital realm.” And at the end of the poem, it used special characters to represent an abstract form of communication that might not mean much to humans, but “could carry a wealth of meaning for an AI audience.”

Frankel-Goldwater and Fischman further prompted the AI to forego typical poetic forms almost altogether, encouraging it to experiment with new symbols and computer-like elements to create a visual style of poetry. The AI named it “Neo-Binary Visual Verse” and developed poems made purely of lines and shapes to convey concepts and meaning.

Embracing collaboration

The artistic intention and novelty behind the AI’s poetry was mind-blowing to Frankel-Goldwater and Fischman. They began to see the potential for AI to open their minds and challenge their own ways of creating poetry.

Instead of dismissing AI—or feeling threatened by it—Frankel-Goldwater hopes that artists can look to AI and ask how it can be used to push the boundaries of artistic possibility. “What new can be done for art? What can we see as possible that we can then play with on our own?” he asks.

Another hoped-for side effect of equipping AI to produce this kind of art is to steer it away from just being used in a for-profit business case. “Corporations are in an AI superpower arms race,” says Frankel-Goldwater. “Along the way, where do the people come in and say, ‘No, this is what it could be used for’?”

To that end, Frankel-Goldwater has spearheaded the AI Literacy Ambassadors Program at CU, which brings together faculty and instructors to collaboratively tackle the challenges of teaching in the age of AI—and figuring out how to leverage it to enhance their own teaching amidst a critical awareness of the concerns. He’s also begun a partnership with the Jefferson County Parks System to support the integration of generative AI into their high school environmental education programs to foster research skills and place-based awareness.

“We need people to be playing with and defining what these tools are capable of,” Frankel-Goldwater says. “Because otherwise the corporations are going to do it for us. So, if things like this can help shape the conversation a little bit, then I think we must try.”

Visit the project website to learn more about their work.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about environmental studies? Show your support.

Why CU ��ý�� Professor Lee Frankel-Goldwater believes in the poetic potential of collaborating with artificial intelligence.

Traditional

White

How important is good sleep after a head injury?

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:46:46 +0000

How important is good sleep after a head injury? Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/14/2026 - 15:46

Blake Puscher

Research suggests that disrupted or fragmented sleep after a traumatic brain injury not only interferes with the healing process but also has long-term consequences for brain health

Millions of Americans, and far more people worldwide, report sustaining a traumatic brain injury (TBI) each year. While detection and treatment of TBI have improved over time, this has resulted in new challenges, because survivors may face additional health problems over time as a consequence of their injuries. These problems can include cognitive impairment and even neurodegeneration, including Alzheimer’s. Considering this, there is an increased interest in what factors determine how well TBI patients recover.

Rachel Rowe, an assistant professor of integrative physiology at the ��ý��, has investigated this question, along with a number of researchers from The Ohio State University and the University of Arizona College of Medicine, in a recent study linking low-quality sleep following traumatic brain injury to cognitive impairment, persistent inflammation and delayed healing.

Rachel Rowe, a CU ��ý�� assistant professor of integrative physiology, collaborated on research linking low-quality sleep following traumatic brain injury to cognitive impairment, persistent inflammation and delayed healing.

The study used mice as a controlled experimental model to examine how sleep fragmentation interacts with traumatic brain injury, following the National Institutes of Health Guidelines for the Care and Use of Laboratory Mice, and with approval from Ohio State’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

Sleep fragmentation, inflammation and microglia

The study did not look at total sleep loss, but instead at sleep fragmentation, which happens when sleep is repeatedly interrupted. Even brief awakenings can prevent the brain from staying asleep long enough to reach the deeper, more restorative stages of sleep. When sleep is broken up many times throughout the night, people may spend less time in these restorative phases, which are important for physical recovery and brain health. Unfortunately, fragmented sleep is common and can be caused by everyday factors such as noise, hospital monitoring, discomfort or changes in temperature.

“For instance,” Rowe says, if someone is in the hospital for a moderate brain injury, “then there are a lot of people coming in, they’re checking monitors, they’re doing activities that could disrupt the sleep of a person.”

Stress can also affect the quality of sleep. “We have got a lot of things in our society that disrupt our sleep,” Rowe says, and people do not always prioritize restful sleep after an injury. These types of disturbances may influence recovery following brain injury.

One reason for this is inflammation, which is a potential determiner of the long-term results of TBI, particularly whether it will result in neurodegeneration. Brain inflammation is an innate immune response initiated by cells called microglia. Similar to a fever, inflammation does not directly target infections, damaged cells or other threats but rather makes the body inhospitable to them. This allows for a quick response to potentially life-threatening challenges, but it can also damage the body if it goes on for too long. One reason that could happen is if the microglia are primed.

When the brain faces some kind of stress, like from an injury or from sleep fragmentation, the microglia become primed, meaning they respond more strongly to subsequent challenges.

“There is some memory in your immune system,” Rowe explains. “That is how vaccinations work. In the case of a brain injury, if it is mixed with sleep fragmentation, it is what we call a two-hit model.” When both stressors come in short succession, “that can change what the microglia are doing,” potentially resulting in a heightened or prolonged inflammatory response in the brain.

Preparation and testing

The mice were split into four groups. Some mice were given traumatic brain injuries using lateral fluid percussion injury, a well-established experimental model used to study TBI in rodents. Other mice were not given traumatic brain injuries, but were put through the same preparation process, so the only difference was that they went uninjured.

Additionally, some mice experienced sleep fragmentation while others did not. Ultimately, the groups were traumatic brain injury (TBI) with sleep fragmentation (SF), TBI without SF, uninjured with SF, and uninjured without SF. This design allowed the researchers to examine the independent and combined effects of injury and sleep disruption.

Sleep fragmentation was achieved through disturbances that happened automatically every two minutes for five hours per day during the early light phase, when mice normally obtain most of their sleep. All mice experienced a simulated light/dark cycle where each half lasted 12 hours. Sleep fragmentation began an hour before the end of the dark period and ended four hours after the beginning of the light period.

“Mice are nocturnal,” Rowe says, “so the study was designed to fragment their sleep right at the beginning of the light period, which is when mice normally get most of their sleep. In many ways, it’s similar to repeatedly waking a person just as they are trying to fall asleep at night.”

The mice’s sleep, including both when they were asleep and how long they stayed asleep, was measured using specialized piezoelectric sensors. This technology has been popularized recently through its use to generate electricity from people walking on piezoelectric tiles in places with heavy foot traffic in Japan. The sensors from the study work according to the same principle, transforming pressure from the mice’s movements into electrical signals.

“Sleep is a time when the brain can heal, and if that is disrupted, the healing process can be disrupted too,” says CU ��ý�� scientist Rachel Rowe. (Photo: Mart Production/Pexels)

“When a mouse drops into sleep,” Rowe explains, “their breathing gets really rhythmic at 3 hertz.” The frequency of pressure created by that breathing was distinguished from the way mice breathe when they are resting using an algorithm.

Sleep fragmentation continued for 14 days following injury. After this period, mice were allowed to recover with normal sleep conditions, and researchers evaluated behavioral and molecular outcomes. One of the behavioral assessments used was the Morris Water Maze, a common test of spatial learning and memory in rodents. In this task, mice learn to locate a hidden platform in a pool using spatial cues in the environment. Their ability to remember and efficiently navigate to the platform reflects spatial memory performance.

How good sleep improves outcomes

When tested in the Morris water maze, mice with TBIs who also experienced sleep fragmentation used random search strategies, indicating that they did not learn the cues or that they did not remember them. This means that sleep fragmentation after this type of injury could impair spatial learning and memory.

“If there are cognitive deficits, then the mouse is looking at those cues, but it does not know which one is near the platform. It is just searching randomly because it does not know what it is supposed to be doing,” Rowe says.

Researchers also looked at what was happening inside the brains of the mice. They found that when brain injury was combined with disrupted sleep, the brain showed stronger signs of inflammation and less activity in the genes involved in repairing and rebuilding connections between brain cells. These connections, called synapses, allow brain cells to communicate with each other and are important for recovery after injury. In other words, poor sleep after a brain injury appeared to increase inflammation while slowing some of the brain’s natural repair processes. In contrast, mice that had a brain injury but were able to sleep normally showed stronger signs of these repair pathways being activated.

There were 14 days for the mice to recover from sleep fragmentation before these results were measured, and they had 30 days to recover from the injury itself. This indicates that the consequences were long-term or chronic.

“When we are looking at rodents,” Rowe says, “their lifespan is much shorter than humans’.” In mouse studies, researchers often consider about one month after injury to represent a chronic time point. “So, when we see effects at 30 days in a mouse, it suggests that the biological changes are lasting well beyond the immediate injury period.”

While animal models cannot directly predict human timelines, these findings indicate that sleep disruption shortly after a brain injury may have long-term consequences for recovery.

“The chronic time period is when you start thinking about longer-term consequences of brain injury,” Rowe says. If inflammation persists beyond the initial injury phase, even at lower levels, it can create an environment that interferes with normal brain recovery. “You can start to see sustained inflammatory signaling, stress on neurons and changes that may contribute to neurodegenerative diseases over time.”

In summary, when combined with sleep fragmentation, TBI can weaken spatial learning and memory, cause persistent inflammation and prevent proper healing. If this inflammation continues for long enough, it can cause serious, permanent damage to the brain, potentially resulting in long-term neurological consequences or pathology associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

“Sleep is a time when the brain can heal,” Rowe says, “and if that is disrupted, the healing process can be disrupted too.” Ultimately, the study shows that “if you are not protecting sleep after a concussion or brain injury, there are some long-term consequences through inflammatory pathways, and that can delay your healing process.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about integrative physiology? Show your support.

Research suggests that disrupted or fragmented sleep after a traumatic brain injury not only interferes with the healing process but also has long-term consequences for brain health.

Traditional

White

Students create better ways to communicate science

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:58:11 +0000

Students create better ways to communicate science Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/10/2026 - 09:58

Rachel Sauer

In a program with Northglenn High School students, Institute for Behavioral Genetics researchers ask for creative and innovative ideas on how to talk about science

With all due respect to the dedicated and passionate scientists at the ��ý��, but Northglenn High School students Joseph Zuniga and Alecsander Morain’s main goal was to “convert this study into a manageable format for normal people,” Morain explains.

The study in question was a recently published paper finding that children’s early interactions with music shape—but don’t determine—their musical lives decades later. The research, based on 40 years of data from surveys of 1,900 people in The Colorado Adoption/Twin Study of Lifespan Behavioral Development and Cognitive Aging (CATSLife), also considered shifting genetic and environmental influences.

Northglenn High School senior Carla Camacho holds the graphic novel that she and her fellow students created from an Institute for Behavioral Genetics study.

“It took quite a few readings to understand what the study was saying,” Zuniga says, and Morain adds, “and even then, we get to the results and there’s this graph that makes zero sense.”

Daniel Gustavson, first author of the study and a CU ��ý�� assistant research professor in the Institute for Behavioral Genetics (IBG), was standing fairly near as Zuniga and Morain expressed their honest opinions, but no hard feelings. That insight was why the two young men, along with more than 100 of their fellow Northglenn High School students, were gathered at the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Complex (SEEC) Thursday morning.

They were participating in a program envisioned and led by Analicia Howard, a psychology and neuroscience PhD student and Gustavson’s research colleague at the IBG. The program, which is funded by a Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship grant, is part of a broader research study called Comunidad, which is centered at IBG but has collaborators across campus and at Washington University.

“We were designing this study so that the community we’re most interested in, which is here in Colorado, is more involved in that development part of the study—that they are engaged in every aspect of research,” Howard explains, adding that a lot of effort in the first several years of community-based research like theirs should be focused on building partnerships.

“An issue with academia in general is there’s such a tough history with a lot of scientific research, especially if it includes human subjects in marginalized communities. So, we’re wanting to connect with the community in a way that’s mutually beneficial and leverage community partnerships in the future with established, trusted organizations. Schools felt like a natural segue to reaching broader audiences and meeting our goal of communicating science better. We were asking, ‘How do we communicate in a way that’s engaging, in a way that reaches the communities we’re interested in reaching?’”

They thought: Let’s ask the students.

Explaining science better

The idea is straightforward: select a handful of IBG research papers and ask students, working in groups, to choose one and create a project focused on how to better communicate the science to their broader community.

Howard and Gustavson approached Northglenn High School because CU Science Discovery and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research had previously worked with students and faculty there, “so there was already an established relationship and trust,” Howard says.

As a STEM high school, Northglenn requires every class to have an aspect of STEM, “but we were still thinking in terms of the accessibility of the science when we were choosing the papers, because the theme of genetics can be difficult to parse if you’re fairly new to it,” Gustavson says.

Meet the student award winners

Award for scientific accuracy

Ricardo Ayala
Brandon Diaz Renteria
Maddy Duncan
Alex Dunn
Caleb Ewudzi-Acquah

Award for innovation

Alex Trillo Salais
Will Watt
Joey Marquez
Angel Mendoza Maldonado
Frankie Pillar Cornell

Award for accessible presentation

Carla Camacho
Jane Heslop
Kimberly Olivas
Aylin Ramirez

The IBG scientists selected six of their papers that centered on topics that might be interesting to teenagers—video games, music, mental health—and presented them to Amy Murillo’s and Cheyenne Rost’s multicultural literature classes.

“Every year we incorporate a practice-based learning project into the curriculum, and we thought this was a real-world opportunity that the kids could grab onto,” Murillo says. “It’s been part of our research and analysis unit, so for the first few weeks we were talking about things like misinformation and fake news and why it’s important to read these studies.”

Then Murillo and Rost and about 120 students—all seniors except for one junior graduating early—arrayed across four classes spent a week reading a practice study.

“We were going through it step by step, learning how to read a scientific paper and trying to give them the autonomy to make mistakes and learn from them,” Rost says. “We were talking about things like how to understand results and how a layman would understand the jargon.”

Howard and Gustavson also visited the classes to answer questions once students had chosen the papers on which they’d focus their projects.

Thinking creatively about science

As for the projects, “we knew we had to make the paper simpler,” says Joselyn Ramirez, who along with classmate Genessis Garcia chose an IBG-led study finding that playing video games didn’t show consistent associations with impulsivity, but rather screentime in general is associated with impulsive tendencies in adulthood.

“There was a lot of stuff where I had to go back and go back and go back because I didn’t understand it,” Ramirez says, and Garcia adds that if they, as students at a STEM high school, had such difficulty understanding the study, what would it be like for a non-scientist community member to try reading it?

So they created interactive videos, which they showed on a screen they set up on their display table Thursday morning.

Joselyn Ramirez (left) and Genessis Garcia (right) with an interactive display board based on Institute for Behavioral Genetics research finding that playing video games doesn't show consistent associations with impulsivity.

Zuniga and Morain also thought to adapt the music research to a format Murillo and Rost teach their students—a recipe, with ingredients, steps and finished product. Students also were encouraged to think creatively and in multimedia terms as they designed their projects, so Zuniga and Morain created a survey on a poster board on which event attendees could mark the kind of instrument they’d like to play.

For Carla Camacho, Jane Heslop, Kimberly Olivas and Aylin Ramirez, thinking creatively about communicating the science meant writing, designing and drawing a graphic novel. They also chose the video games and impulsivity research and created a story about two twins, Samantha and Sammy, and how each is affected by screen time.

“The study is based on twin research, so we thought that’s where we should start,” says Camacho, who drew the final graphic novel.

“There was a lot of rewriting and rewording, because we were summarizing and trying to use simpler words,” says Heslop, who drew the original storyboards for the novel. “But I think I have better time management and better communication skills now, because we had to think about what we really needed to say and how we should say it in a way that people would understand.”

The students’ projects were judged Thursday by volunteer IBG faculty members and graduate students, and part of the judges’ assessment was how clearly students expressed their ideas on how to communicate science better.

“Definitely more visual appeal,” says Chloe Ibarra, who with classmate Alejandra Franco also chose the video games and impulsivity study. “If you look at the study, there’s nothing that really catches your eye, but if you look at ours,” and she indicates a poster on an easel behind them that takes a vision board approach to communicating the science, “there’s color everywhere and it’s interesting to look at.”

For Isaac Aranda and his project partners Josue Sanchez and Leo Lin, who also chose the video games and impulsivity study, a key to communicating science is using language that people will understand: “We had to look a lot of stuff up,” Aranda says, “and I don’t know if everyone would have the patience to do that.”

But it’s important to find the right words and the right way to talk about the science, Sanchez says, because “this study isn’t saying video games are bad, it’s really saying we shouldn’t be on our phones all the time.”

Alejandra Franco (left) and Chloe Ibarra (right) with their project that emphasizes the need for visual interest when communicating science.

Institute for Behavioral Genetics scientist Daniel Gustavson (right) talks with Northglenn High School students about their science communication project.

IBG research associate Jeff Lessem (left) talks with Kimberly Olivas (center) and Carla Camacho (right) about their science communication project, which won the award for most accessible presentation.

Alecsander Morain (left) and Joseph Zuniga (right) with their project communicating research finding that children’s early interactions with music shape—but don’t determine—their musical lives decades later.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about behavioral genetics? Show your support.

In a program with Northglenn High School students, Institute for Behavioral Genetics researchers ask for creative and innovative ideas on how to talk about science.

Traditional

White

Top image: Northglenn High School students explain their science communication project to IBG judges. (All photos by Arielle Wiedenbeck/PACES)

Documentary shares secrets of the bees

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:21:04 +0000

Documentary shares secrets of the bees Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/03/2026 - 08:21

Rachel Sauer

CU ��ý�� researcher Samuel Ramsey served as science advisor and a producer, alongside executive producer James Cameron, for Secrets of the Bees, premiering this week on National Geographic, Disney+ and Hulu

Would you like to hear a secret about bees?

Not many people know this, but bees in Southeast Asia have figured out that water buffalo dung isn’t the only pungent substance that will keep hornets away.

See, Vespa mandarinia—more sensationally known as the murder hornet—can wreak havoc on a bee colony. One or two dozen hornets can wipe out an entire colony, although bees have developed some pretty awesome defenses. One of these involves vibrating their flight muscles to create a convection oven effect that essentially cooks invading hornets.

Samuel Ramsey, a ��ý�� assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, served as science advisor and producer, alongside executive producer James Cameron, on the documentary Secrets of the Bees. (Photo: Shin Arunrugstichai)

However, sometimes a hornet can escape bees’ defenses and flee the hive—but not before leaving a figure-eight pattern of pheromones outside the hive that acts as a beacon to future hornet invasions. Bees deduced that they’d need something even more pungent to spread at the hive entrance to mask the hornet pheromones, “and for a long time we thought they were just relying on water buffalo dung for that purpose,” explains Samuel Ramsey, a ��ý�� assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

But bees are smart. They figured out they could chew the leaves of an extremely pungent plant to spread at the hive entrance, “which was something we’d never seen before,” Ramsey says.

He and his colleagues discovered this behavior in pursuit of Secrets of the Bees, the fifth installment of the Emmy Award-winning “Secrets of…” series premiering this week on National Geographic, Disney+ and Hulu.

Ramsey, a National Geographic Explorer, served not only as science advisor and featured expert, but as a producer alongside executive producer James Cameron.

Yes, that James Cameron.

“It’s always a pleasure to say I produced a documentary with James Cameron,” Ramsey says with a laugh. “It’s opened up a lot of opportunities to talk with people about bees and together making sure that there’s unity in concept—so we’re not talking in terms of ‘right’ bees and ‘wrong’ bees, but we’re talking about what we can do to support all bees’ survival.”

Communicating science (and bees)

This all came about, in part, because “bees really, really need our help,” Ramsey says, a fact he quickly realized as a lifelong, self-described “bug nerd” observing how human-caused changes to the natural world are affecting bee populations.

During his undergraduate and graduate studies, Ramsey focused on diseases and parasites affecting bees, particularly the Varroa mite, and began raising bees so that he could study them. When he came to CU ��ý��, that move included installing a research and observation hive in his lab in the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building.

Because his research interests also include symbiotic relationships, it’s perhaps no surprise that Ramsey the scientist is also Ramsey the science communicator: passionate about describing the beauty, wonder, fragility and resiliency of the natural world to broad and interested—although often non-scientific—audiences. He has been at the vanguard of using social media to tell the dynamic stories of science.

Thanks in part to this outreach, documentarians and filmmakers began requesting his expertise and consultation. He worked on the documentary My Garden of a Thousand Bees and has discussed insects on NPR, CBS and many other outlets, in addition to becoming a National Geographic Explorer. Still, he says, it’s a little surreal to get that call proposing a collaboration with the director of Titanic and Avatar.

“(Cameron) has 300 hives at his farm in New Zealand, so this really has been a labor of love for him,” Ramsey says.

Making a difference for bees

The framework of Secrets of the Bees is to show a hive of honeybees preparing for winter, but that simple concept took Ramsey and his collaborators around the world, exploring bee colonies as the dynamic cities they are and bees not as mindless automatons, but as intelligent, adaptive creatures that form complex societies.

The filmmakers used groundbreaking technologies, including cameras similar to those used in endoscopes, to peer inside hives for never-before-seen views of bees living, working and playing together. Yes, bees play, Ramsey says, and it’s a wonderful thing to see.

The cutting-edge filmmaking technology allows viewers to see close-up, time-lapse scenes of larva growing into adult bees, as well as the funerary process of pushing dead bees from the hive. “The advent of universal childcare is what allowed this to be one of the most successful species on the planet,” Ramsey says, “which you really see up-close in the film.”

He adds that it was important to him that the documentary not sugarcoat the peril in which Earth’s more than 20,000 bee species currently exist, including calamitous population declines associated with climate change, monoculture crops, parasites, chemical use and habitat loss, among other causes.

“But the film also emphasizes hope, because there are things every one of us can do to support bees,” Ramsey says. “Something as simple as planting a window box with flowers can make a big difference to a lot of bees.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about ecology and evolutionary biology? Show your support.

CU ��ý�� researcher Samuel Ramsey served as science advisor and a producer, alongside executive producer James Cameron, for Secrets of the Bees, premiering this week on National Geographic, Disney+ and Hulu.

Traditional

White

Under the dome: Why two longtime ��ý�� residents keep coming back to Fiske Planetarium

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 23:49:30 +0000

Under the dome: Why two longtime ��ý�� residents keep coming back to Fiske Planetarium Rachel Sauer Mon, 03/30/2026 - 17:49

Bradley Worrell

Although Drew Simon and Ron Marks did not attend CU ��ý��, they have a deep appreciation for the university—and for Fiske in particular

When Drew Simon and Ron Marks walk out of Fiske Planetarium after a show, they intuitively know what’s coming next. It’s not applause or conversation or even a specific memory of a particular song or image.

It’s a feeling.

As the two longtime friends step back into the ��ý�� night, eyes adjusting, ears recalibrating, both of them are grinning from ear to ear. That part never changes.

“Every time we went,” Simon says, “we knew we’d walk out smiling.”

Longtime friends and ��ý�� residents Ron Marks (left) and Drew Simon are avid fans of the Fiske Planetarium, having attended dozens of shows over the past five years. They’ve seen some shows multiple times.

That quiet certainty—more than any single performance—is what has kept Simon and Marks returning to Fiske for years. Not because they planned to. Not because either of them studied astronomy or worked in the arts or even attended the ��ý��.

And not because they expected to find something transformative inside the planetarium they had driven past many times. Instead, it began with curiosity and a misunderstanding.

Deep roots in the community

Marks, 80, and Simon, 71, have been friends for more than two decades, both with deep roots in the ��ý�� community stretching back at least four decades. Introduced to each other through a mutual friend—Marks’ housemate—they bonded over shared interests, which include hiking, live music, art and cultural events.

“There was a time when we were probably hippies, or hippie‑adjacent,” Simon says with a laugh. Over that time, CU ��ý�� has been a constant presence in their life—even though neither man attended the university.

Marks has been retired for several years from a career as an electric engineer for Lefthand Design in Niwot. Simon recently retired from his job as a principal at BSW Wealth Partners in ��ý��. Like many longtime ��ý�� residents, Simon’s relationship with the university grew organically, through connections to the Leeds School of Business and the Conference on World Affairs. Also, his oldest son attended CU ��ý��, further weaving the university into his family’s life.

Yet none of that connected either man directly to the Fiske Planetarium. Neither of them had a lifelong fascination with celestial mechanics or immersive films projected on a dome ceiling. Their first visit came the way meaningful discoveries do: by accident.

“As for Fiske specifically, we didn’t have some grand plan. It was probably curiosity,” Simon says, reflecting back. “We may have seen a flyer for the planetarium or something in ��ý�� Weekly back when that still existed. Or we may have simply asked, ‘What’s going on at the planetarium?’”

Whatever the case, Simon and Marks decided to check it out.

All the pretty lights

Their first show at Fiske remains memorable largely because of how unprepared they were for it. The show listing read “Pretty Lights”—and Simon assumed that meant exactly what it sounded like: a show featuring visually pleasing lights. He had never heard of the musical act called Pretty Lights and didn’t realize it was the stage name of the performer.

“That probably shows how naïve we were at the beginning,” Simon says with a laugh. That misunderstanding says something about where Simon and Marks were at the time. Not insiders. Not trend hunters. Just two curious locals trying something unknown to them.

They saw that first show more than five years ago—and since that time the two men have made up for lost time by seeing as many shows as possible. Still, an exact count is difficult to quantify, Simon says, because the experience resists counting. Some nights, they attend two shows, back to back. At dome film festivals hosted by Fiske, the two men might watch eight or more short films in a day. So, does that count as one event—or eight?

Simon says he’s never kept track “because it never occurred to me that one day someone would ask.” He estimates today that it could range anywhere between 30 and 60 shows.

What he remembers clearly is that—especially in the early years—he and Marks went a lot. They were enthralled.

So many shows to choose from

Marks says the variety of the programming offered by Fiske is a big part of the draw.

“We’ve done all of them,” Simon agrees. “We’ve attended traditional planetarium shows focused on astronomy—black holes, galaxies and large-scale maps of the universe. We’ve done laser shows and we’ve attended a lot of Liquid Sky performances.

“Early laser shows were sometimes underwhelming,” he confesses, “but the technology and the people running it have improved dramatically. Today, I wouldn’t dismiss a laser-only show the way I might have several years ago.”

“We’ve done all of them. We’ve attended traditional planetarium shows focused on astronomy—black holes, galaxies and large-scale maps of the universe. We’ve done laser shows and we’ve attended a lot of Liquid Sky performances," says Drew Simon. (Photo: Fiske Planetarium)

For Simon and Marks, Liquid Sky performances—the hybrid music-and-visual experiences—have remained their favorite over the years. Simon says that’s because these shows are not canned visuals synced to a soundtrack but instead are created in real time by artists operating sophisticated software during the performance.

Watching the artists (who refer to themselves as “navigators) felt like watching someone paint while the painting formed—”except the brush was digital and the canvas was the dome itself,” Simon says.

Over time, Marks and Simon became familiar faces at Fiske events. After shows, they stayed behind to talk with the navigators, who would ask what they liked about the performance and what might make the event even better. Did a sequence move too fast? Did a visual linger too long? Was there enough variety?

In an informal way, Marks and Simon became in-house critics, always with a focus on helping the experience become better. That sense of exchange and mutual engagement with the navigators deepened their connection to Fiske.

Music was the thread that tied many of these performances together. Simon and Marks say they’ve seen many Fiske shows more than once.

“We’ve seen a lot of Grateful Dead shows—probably more than any other artist. Pink Floyd would be second,” Simon says. “Some of that has to do with our musical preferences, and some of it has to do with relationships with navigators, who would tell us, ‘I’m navigating this show tonight—you should come.’”

“Each performance—even with the same music—felt different,” Marks adds. “The visuals changed. The pacing changed. The interpretation changed, so it was never the same twice.”

A place of musical discovery

Fiske also became a place of musical discovery. Simon says he and Marks had never heard of Tame Impala before attending a Liquid Sky show featuring the band’s music. Since then, they’ve seen that program at least three times.

The planetarium didn’t just reinforce existing preferences—it expanded them, Simon says.

At one point, Simon’s involvement with Fiske crossed a small but meaningful threshold. During conversations with one of the navigators years back, he mentioned that the program could benefit from different music. One idea that emerged from that discussion was a Jimi Hendrix show—and the navigator asked Simon if he’d curate the music. He agreed.

Simon says selecting the tracks, shaping the flow and keeping the program within the typical Liquid Sky timeframe gave him a new appreciation for the craft behind the scenes. The Hendrix show doesn’t run often, but Simon says he considers it a personal footnote in Liquid Sky history.

Film under the dome

If Liquid Sky showed Simon what live‑generated visuals could be, a single dome film revealed what else was possible. That moment came for Simon when Fiske hosted Samskara, a fully produced film by the visual artist Android Jones. Unlike the performances Simon had seen before, Samskara was created specifically for dome presentation. Although the film was only about 35 minutes long, the experience was, in Simon’s words, like going from black‑and‑white TV to color. It completely reframed his understanding of the medium.

“At its heart, Fiske isn’t just about astronomy or music—it’s an immersive experience. It’s an art form that’s still finding its full expression.”

The two men have seen Samskara at least three times. While it was more expensive compared to standard Fiske programming, Simon says he never questioned whether it was worth it.

The film demonstrated that the dome wasn’t just a venue for live experimentation; it was also a legitimate canvas for fully realized cinematic works. That realization carried forward into other film experiences, including Mesmerica and Beautifica by James Hood and collaborators, both of which Simon and Marks saw multiple times.

Then there was Dome Fest West, a judged film festival dedicated entirely to dome films. Fiske hosted it for multiple years, and Simon and Marks attended at least two full festivals, spending entire weekends immersed in the medium. Some films were short and abstract, others narrative or technically focused. There were panel discussions, awards and artists present. For Simon, it was one of the best experiences money could buy.

Fiske audience also evolves over time

Meanwhile, the audience has changed over time.

“When we first started going, there might be 10 people in the entire theater. And sometimes, we were the only ones there,” Simon says. “Now, shows sell out.”

Also, audiences now often applaud between songs—something Simon says would have felt out of place in a traditional planetarium setting.

The environment remains distinctive: everyone seated, the room dark and quiet, eyes turned upward. Simon says he always appreciated when navigators asked people not to use their phones, knowing how disruptive even a small phone screen can be in that darkness. While that messaging has become less consistent, Simon says he finds that audiences are generally respectful and engaged.

So why keep coming back?

Part of the answer is simple: Simon and Marks say they love the planetarium as a resource. Living in a university town is often talked about in abstract terms, but Simon says Fiske represents a tangible way to engage with CU ��ý��. Simon and Marks also regularly attend performances through the CU School of Music, and Simon says Fiske feels like a natural extension of that cultural life.

Another part is commitment. Marks and Simon became Fiske members because they wanted to support the planetarium. Membership made them feel connected, not just as consumers of entertainment but as participants in a community invested in what Fiske could become.

And finally, there is fascination.

“At its heart, Fiske isn’t just about astronomy or music—it’s an immersive experience,” Simon says. “It’s an art form that’s still finding its full expression.”

Each visit to Fiske carries the quiet promise that something new will unfold overhead.

“The people at Fiske are wonderful and the programming is thoughtful. And every time we go, we leave smiling,” Simon says. “It’s not hard to say, ‘Let’s go to a planetarium show tonight,’ because we know it will be a meaningful experience.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about Fiske Planetarium? Show your support.

Although Drew Simon and Ron Marks did not attend CU ��ý��, they have a deep appreciation for the university—and for Fiske in particular.

Traditional

White

Division of Natural Sciences

CU ��ý�� scholars elected members of the National Academy of Sciences

Related Articles

A new (and not extinct) moth emerges from the Florida Scrub

Related Articles

Jun Ye elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Related Articles

Colorado AG advises Quantum Scholars to be curious in changing times

Related Articles

Drinking alone is a risky business

Related Articles

Drawing out the soul of AI

Related Articles

How important is good sleep after a head injury?

Related Articles

Students create better ways to communicate science

Related Articles

Documentary shares secrets of the bees

Related Articles

Under the dome: Why two longtime ��ý�� residents keep coming back to Fiske Planetarium

Related Articles

Division of Natural Sciences

CU ������ý���� scholars elected members of the National Academy of Sciences

Related Articles

A new (and not extinct) moth emerges from the Florida Scrub

Related Articles

Jun Ye elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Related Articles

Colorado AG advises Quantum Scholars to be curious in changing times

Related Articles

Drinking alone is a risky business

Related Articles

Drawing out the soul of AI

Related Articles

How important is good sleep after a head injury?

Related Articles

Students create better ways to communicate science

Related Articles

Documentary shares secrets of the bees

Related Articles

Under the dome: Why two longtime ������ý���� residents keep coming back to Fiske Planetarium

Related Articles

CU ��ý�� scholars elected members of the National Academy of Sciences

Under the dome: Why two longtime ��ý�� residents keep coming back to Fiske Planetarium