Campus News Briefs — Winter 2018

CU Engineering: More and More Women

The first-year class in the College of Engineering & Applied Sciences is 40 percent women in 2018-2019, an all-time high and major milestone in Dean Bobby Braun’s march toward gender parity among students in the college, CU Boulder’s second-biggest. On average, women make up about 20 percent of students in U.S. engineering schools, despite constituting well above 50 percent of all college students.

Heard Around Campus 

As our antibiotics work less and less, we risk essentially going back to a period 200 years ago when even a minor infection could mean death.”

— CU scientist Corrie Detweiler, whose team is exploring compounds that can rejuvenate existing antibiotics.

Drones to the Rescue

When disaster strikes, it may be the drones that save us.

Armed with a $4.5 million federal grant, CU Boulder and partners will test themselves against six other teams in a national competition to develop advanced search-and-rescue drones. The winning team walks away with $2 million.

In an initial mock rescue, drones guided by the CU Boulder team’s software will zoom through miles of steam tunnels seeking disaster survivors.

Later they’ll audition in tunnels like those of the New York subway system and in caves.

Called the Subterranean Challenge and sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the competition ends in 2021. The CU team includes CU Denver and Boston-based Scientific Systems Company.

Get more details.