News

A paper posted online last month has reignited a debate about one of the oldest, most startling claims in the modern era of network science: the proposition that most complex networks in the real world — from the World Wide Web to interacting proteins in a cell — are “scale-free.”...

CU Boulder researchers have discovered the first known molecular evidence of obligate symbiosis in lichens, a distinctive co-evolutionary relationship that could shed new light on how and why some multicellular organisms consolidate their genomes in order to co-exist. The new study, which was published online today in the journal Molecular...

For billions of years, the battle between cells and viruses has been a primary driver of evolution. University of Colorado Boulder researcher Dr. Sara Sawyer has dedicated her career to this relationship, combining methods from virology and molecular evolution to investigate emerging human and animal viruses. Sawyer, an Associate Professor...

The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) named two CU Boulder faculty members to its class of fellows for 2017. Distinguished Professor Marvin Caruthers of CU Boulder’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was honored for his pioneering contributions to the chemical synthesis of DNA and RNA, making it possible to decode...

More than 23.5 million Americans suffer from autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma and lupus, in which an overzealous immune response leads to pain, inflammation, skin disorders and other chronic health problems. The conditions are so common that three of the top five selling drugs in the United States aim...

Leslie Leinwand has won the American Heart Association's 2017 Distinguished Scientist award for outstanding contributions to the field of heart health The usage of fats from python hearts on mammals and the cardiovascular differences between females and males are at the core of research by a University of Colorado Boulder...

Just as flu season swings into full gear, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Texas at Austin have uncovered a previously unknown mechanism by which the human immune system tries to battle the influenza A virus. The discovery sheds new light on how the virus —...

To the Editor: Today’s hyper-competitive environment makes it easy to forget that academe wasn’t always organized around measuring and rewarding merit. In fact, the simple idea that merit could be assessed from publications, and that scholarship should be published at all, was, as Andrew Piper and Chad Wellmon have recently...

The canonical story of faculty productivity goes like this: A researcher begins a tenure-track position, builds their research group, and publishes as much as possible to make their case for being awarded tenure. After getting tenure, increased service and administrative responsibilities kick in and research productivity slowly declines. But now,...

For 60 years, studies of everyone from psychologists to biologists to mathematicians have shown the same remarkably similar academic research trajectory: Scientists publish prolifically early in their careers, peak after about five years, get tenure and begin a long slow decline in productivity. But a new CU Boulder study published...