Research

Wyatt Shields has been honored with a 2024 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award for his contributions to teaching and research on medical microrobots, self-propelled miniature robots that one day might deliver prescription drugs to hard-to-reach places inside the human body. Eighteen Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars were selected for 2024, and each awardee will receive an unrestricted grant of $100,000. "I am honored to join an impressive community of scholars who are committed to research excellence and teaching at the highest levels, reflecting the core values we share at CU Boulder,” said Shields, a Biomedical Engineering faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder.

In the world of sled hockey, the stick is everything. Players have two sticks, each equipped with a blade on one end and a stainless steel pick on the other that they drive into the ice to propel their sled at dizzying speeds up to 20 mph across the ice. Since the sport’s inception in the 1960s as a way for athletes with lower limb amputations or impairments to play ice hockey, players have debated how long those sticks should be. A new CU Boulder study seeks to find out. Sixteen members of the team recently visited CU Boulder for what Alena Grabowski, BME faculty member, hopes will be the first in a series of studies aimed at helping sled hockey players improve their performance and minimize injury.

The question may be the 21st century’s version of the fable of the tortoise and the hare: Who would win in a foot race between a robot and an animal? In a new perspective article, a team of engineers from the United States and Canada, including CU Boulder roboticist and BME faculty member Kaushik Jayaram, set out to answer that riddle. The group analyzed data from dozens of studies and came to a resounding “no.” In almost all cases, biological organisms, such as cheetahs, cockroaches and even humans, seem to be able to outrun their robot counterparts.

The research is one of the first studies to experimentally tease apart the competing reasons why people over age 65 might not be as quick on their feet as they used to be. The group reported that older adults may move slower, at least in part, because it costs them more energy than younger people—perhaps not too shocking for anyone who’s woken up tired the morning after an active day. The findings could one day give doctors new tools for diagnosing a range of illnesses, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and even depression and schizophrenia, said study co-author Alaa Ahmed, BME faculty member.

Jerome Fox, BME faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been named a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). NAI senior membership recognizes faculty, scientists and administrators for their contributions to innovation, including patents, licensing, commercialization and technologies aimed at benefiting society.

Assistant Professors Kayla Sprenger and Laurel Hind, Biomedical Engineering Program faculty, are on a collaborative mission to explore solutions for mitigating cognitive decline in individuals living with HIV. This decline can be caused by both the virus itself and the antiretroviral (ARV) drugs used to treat it.

In amusement park-like experiments on campus, aerospace engineers at CU Boulder are spinning, shaking and rocking people to study the disorientation and nausea that come from traveling from Earth to space and back again.

Sixteen teams of University of Colorado faculty, researchers and graduate student innovators competed for a combined $1.5 million in startup funding grants in this year’s Lab Venture Challenge (LVC). Judges from CU Boulder’s entrepreneurial network heard Shark-Tank-style pitches across two nights, one for innovations in biosciences and another for physical sciences and engineering.

University of Colorado Boulder researchers have developed a new way of counting microorganisms that works as much as 36 times faster than conventional methods, cuts plastic use more than 15-fold and substantially decreases the cost and carbon footprint of biomedical research.