News

Ten Core Facilities Assistance Grants totaling $200,000 have been awarded to 14 new Core Facility-led projects for the 2023 cycle. The grants are designed to enhance operations within core and shared instrumentation facilities that span disciplines, departments and research institutes across campus.

The Research & Innovation Office has announced that Joe Dragavon, PhD, has been named interim director of Core Facilities and Shared Instrumentation, effective February 1. Since the departure of the previous director, Claudius Mundoma, Dragavon has played an instrumental role in maintaining the momentum of the university’s core facilities community.

A state-of-the-art instrument coming soon to CU Boulder will improve research around quantum engineering and may eventually prove to be a game-changer for interdisciplinary materials and device research in the Rocky Mountain region.

The Materials Science and Engineering 2022 Symposium will bring together the materials research community at CU Boulder and beyond for research presentations by faculty and students, as well as discussion and collaboration opportunities. The symposium will foster a greater sense of community and interdisciplinary cooperation among faculty and students.

The programs, developed and managed by the Research & Innovation Office (RIO)'s Shared Instrumentation Network, are designed to support and grow the university's core facilities and available instrumentation, as well as the cutting-edge research these tools enable faculty to perform.

According to JILA COO Beth Kroger, the funding will pay for much-needed research equipment in the JILA instrument and electronics shops, as well as equipment for CU Boulder’s JILA Keck Metrology and Clean Room Core Facility, which serves the campus and provides important research capabilities.

“The high-resolution, 4D X-ray microscope and the coupled Raman-nanoindentation system are especially unique,” said Srubar, an associate professor of civil and architectural engineering and materials science. “Very few exist along the Front Range, so we are very lucky to have these exceptional resources right here at the University of Colorado Boulder.”

The new $7.8M cleanroom will be operated under the Colorado Shared Instrumentation in Nanofabrication and Characterization (COSINC) – a multidisciplinary core research facility and service center, within the College of Engineering and Applied Science, that provides access to state-of-the-art equipment in the areas of micro and nanofabrication, nanomaterials characterization and metrology.

Capable of achieving spatial resolutions of 70 pm—smaller than the size of an atom—the Thermo Scientific Titan Themis S/TEM, located in the newly-launched CU Facility for Electron Microscopy of Materials (CU FEMM), is now the highest-resolution electron microscope in Colorado.