Research
Assistant Professor Nicole Xu first became fascinated with moon jellyfish more than a decade ago because of their extraordinary swimming abilities. Today, Xu has developed a way to harness their efficiency and ease at moving through the water in ways that could make some types of aquatic research much easier.
Associate Professor Nathalie Vriend is leading a research effort exploring how sand dunes evolve over time, shifting and surging across the landscape. Her team ultimately wants to answer a pressing question: Can humans efficiently shift or even halt the flow of the planet’s largest dunes?
The Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering welcomes two new faculty members in Fall 2025. Meet Assistant Professors Laura Sunberg and Zhi Li—and see why we’re so excited to have these talented scholars on our team.
The study, led by civil engineering PhD student Daniel Donado-Quintero, shows that setting carbon benchmarks can encourage asphalt producers to lower emissions—for example by using more recycled materials or optimizing production processes—supporting Colorado’s Buy Clean Act and CDOT’s efforts to reduce embodied carbon.
Researchers at CU ¶¶Òõ´«Ã½ÔÚÏß have developed a new bioimaging device that can operate with significantly lower power and in an entirely non-mechanical way. It could one day improve detecting eye and even heart conditions.
See is advancing new technologies to boost the performance of future sustainable batteries.
Pioneering research institute led by the ¶¶Òõ´«Ã½ÔÚÏß launched in 2020 to explore how classrooms could become more effective and engaging learning environments.
In a new study, a team of computer scientists and engineers from the ¶¶Òõ´«Ã½ÔÚÏß created nearly 2,300 original sudoku puzzles, which require players to enter numbers into a grid following certain rules, then asked several AI tools to fill them in.
A gecko-inspired technology developed by the Shields Lab, in collaboration with doctors at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, uses a specially designed material that adheres to tumors inside the body and steadily releases chemotherapy drugs over several days—potentially allowing for fewer but longer-lasting therapies.
Anthony Straub is making revolutionary advances in water purification for life on Earth and in space. Using nanoscale membranes—thinner than 1/100th the width of a human hair—Straub has developed a...