Spring 2017

Unwinding the mysteries of protein folding

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 17:41:00 +0000

Unwinding the mysteries of protein folding Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/02/2017 - 10:41

Jeff Thomas

Tom Perkins and JILA team unfold proteins with precise new instrumentation

Unwinding an individual single-molecule composed of a helical string of amino acids stitched through the boundary of a cell—while measuring the force and time that takes—seems to be a fairly tall order in itself. But that wasn’t enough for University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researcher Tom Perkins, who spent the last seven years improving the techniques needed to exactly understand the steps needed to unfold these proteins.

“What we achieved is a 10-fold increase in force precision, and a 100-fold increase in time resolution,” said Perkins, a professor of molecular cellular and developmental biology and also a fellow at JILA, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s partnership with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“Now we can see 14 intermediate steps in the unfolding process, whereas previously measurements only saw two; in short, we were missing about 85 percent of the intermediate steps.”

Of course, creating that precision took a lot of effort to improve the atomic-force microscope used in the research. Specifically, the JILA research team developed modified cantilevers—a microscopic diving-board-like structure—that is used to pull out the helix structure of the protein.

NIST/JILA biophysicist Tom Perkins, also a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder faculty member, used this atomic force microscope to measure protein folding in more detail than ever before. Photo courtesy of NIST/C. Suplee.

However, Perkins’ JILA team, led by co-first authors Hao Yu and Matthew Siewny, apparently pulled out a plum, landing the research – “Hidden dynamics in the unfolding of individual bacteriorhodopsin proteins”—in the March 3 edition of Science.

“We made a set of three improvements to the AFM cantilevers” documented in three previous papers, Perkins said. “What you see in this paper led by Hao and Matt is really a capstone of everything we’ve done.”

These improvements included modifying a commercial AFM cantilever with a tool of nanoscience, the focused-ion-beam mill, to essentially sandblast the cantilever with atoms to modify its shape. Of course, underlying all of it was the team’s firm belief that the research of the last 17 years simply didn’t have the time resolution to document all of the protein dynamics that occur over times much shorter than a millisecond and, hence, were hidden in previous studies.

Essentially, biophysicists look at the forces needed to unwind these proteins to better understand the process of folding. In particular, the researchers studied a membrane protein bacteriorhodopsin, which lives at the boundary between the inside and outside of the cell. When expressed by mRNA, these strings of amino acids are essentially one-dimensional; it’s not until they start winding up into coils, or helices, that they assume their functional three-dimensional form.

Proteins that fail to fold correctly will probably be inactive or potentially toxic to the cell. But Perkins said understanding the complexity of protein folding will also create more useful computer models of membrane proteins and potentially create more efficient drug discovery.

“These types of experiments provide more details on the energetics of the membrane proteins,” he said. “If we do that well, then perhaps our colleagues can better predict how drugs binding on the outside of cells lead to a signal on the inside.” The complexity for membrane proteins is that they fold in an environment consisting of water and oil, a so-called lipid bilayer, similar in structure to a soap bubble.

Despite their efforts to improve the AFM instrument, it remains very difficult to create a strong-enough bond between the cantilever and the protein to make the measurement.

“We’re working on that right now,” Perkins said. “The success rate is about 1 percent of the time, but when it works, it has incredible results.”

Tom Perkins and JILA team unfold proteins with precise new instrumentation, illuminate 85 percent of previously unknown steps.

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Wind power you can bank on

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 22:28:12 +0000

Wind power you can bank on Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/28/2017 - 15:28

Clint Talbott

Incorporating wind energy into today’s electrical grid raises a host of questions about wind forecasting, wind-turbine siting, wind-turbine design in hurricane zones; ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder lab is investigating these and other questions

With costs falling and installations soaring, wind energy has become a power to be reckoned with. But its rise brings a host of new challenges.

Julie Lundquist

Wind-energy companies need more-accurate wind-resource assessments to persuade banks to loan funds to build new facilities; wind-farm firms should understand how best to situate individual wind turbines in a farm to maximize production; utility operators should have a better sense of when, where and how fast the wind will blow up to a day ahead of time so that grid operators can plan to cut fossil-powered plant generation. And offshore wind farms, which the United States is only beginning to install, need to be able to withstand hurricane winds or have risk management mechanisms to ensure their financial viability.

Researchers in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC) at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder are among a growing body of scientists expanding the frontiers of human knowledge in these and related areas.

They presented an array of their recent findings during the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in Seattle this year.

Julie Lundquist is an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder who holds a joint appointment at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden. She and her fellow researchers are striving to help better integrate wind power into the U.S. electrical grid.

Wind energy now composes about 5 percent of U.S. electrical generation, with 76 gigawatts installed by 2016, up from 34 gigawatts in 2009.

Power production you can bank on

Issue: Wind assessments over-estimate how much energy will be produced at wind farms, so wind-farm prospectors get less-favorable-than-desired financing for these projects.
Finding: Long-term wind data analyzed in a certain way yield better results

In every wind-energy conference Lundquist has attended since 2010, experts have discussed a problem: wind-resource assessments tend to over-estimate how much wind power will be generated annually in proposed wind farms.

Financial ratings companies such as Moody’s and Fitch Ratings have noted the discrepancy between initially projected and actually produced wind power. Because of this over-estimation, banks have offered less-favorable financing than wind-farm prospectors seek.

ATOC graduate student Nicola Bodini and colleagues Dino Zardi at the University of Trento and Mark Handschy of the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) worked with Lundquist to probe this discrepancy: “It seemed like there would be an atmospheric connection, so we started investigating,” Lundquist said.

Their analysis of a 62-year data set of wind speeds measured at 60 sites across Canada identified the source of wind-power over-estimation.

The wind-power industry banks on a site’s estimated “P50” value, which defines the middle of the expected range of annual power production—production should exceed P50 in half the years of a wind plant’s life. Analogously, the “P90” value is a production floor that the plant should exceed nine years out of 10.

To understand resource assessment errors you need records that are long compared to the 20-year lifetimes for wind plants. Unfortunately, there are very few long-term measurement datasets. ... Such datasets serve many uses, including providing data that can improve basic weather forecasting beyond energy applications."

Recognizing that the industry’s method of estimating future wind power production at a site relies on statistical methods that assume that there is no correlation in wind speeds from year to year, Lundquist’s team measured the P50 and P90 estimated wind power that would be produced at these 60 Canadian sites.

First, the team studied the potential impact of the record length (number of years of observations) might have on estimates of wind power at the 60 sites. They found that the inter-annual variability of winds increased for longer record lengths, which is not what one would expect if the wind speeds each year were independent of each other.

So the group ran a “control” experiment considering the wind speeds out of chronological order. When the order of the yearly wind speeds was randomly shuffled, there was no increase in inter-annual variability in the estimated power production with longer record length.

The best explanation for this finding is year-to year correlation.

In the “experimental” run (with wind-speeds in chronological order), only 13 (compared to the expected 30) of 60 sites had production beating their P50 value.

The dotted line illustrates the projected P50 energy output from a wind farm, while the actual production appears in the blue bars, indicating that the wind assessment was too optimistic. Image from DNV GL.

What’s more, the team found that the error in the P50 values gets larger with records longer than four to five years, which is somewhat counter-intuitive, but which again can be accounted for by year-to-year correlation.

Lundquist said the team’s findings help explain the errors in proposed wind-power production. “This analysis is consistent with the complaints from the financial industry that P50 and P90 values fail to represent reality,” Lundquist said.

The research team believes these findings could be used to help develop more-accurate wind-resource assessment techniques.

And Lundquist said the results also underscore the need for long-term measurements of wind, which could help scientists further refine wind-resource assessments.

“To understand resource assessment errors you need records that are long compared to the 20-year lifetimes for wind plants. Unfortunately, there are very few long-term measurement datasets,” she said. “A policy change could address this, perhaps federal policy that requires wind farm developers to make their resource assessment data public as well as maintain their towers over the lifetime of the farm. I understand that European countries have this requirement: Such datasets serve many uses, including providing data that can improve basic weather forecasting beyond energy applications.”

Understanding wakes

Issue: A common weather model does not accurately predict wind "ramps," rapid increases or decreases in wind speed and, hence, generated power.
Finding: Incoporating a wind-farm paramaterization into the model greatly improves forecast accuracy.

Accurately projecting wind power years into the future is one piece of the wind-energy puzzle. Another is that wind turbines themselves alter the characteristics of downstream wind, prompting scientists to study wake effects and their implications for wind-power production.

In a separate research effort, with contributions from ATOC graduate students Jessica Tomaszewski, Rochelle Worsnop and Stephanie Redfern, along with colleague Yelena Pichugina of CIRES, Lundquist discussed the efforts to improve an open-source weather prediction model by including the effects of wind turbines themselves on the atmosphere in and near wind farms.

The effects of wind turbines are seen as wakes, downstream wind-speed reduction and turbulence increase. Wakes are represented in the wind farm parameterization, which is incorporated into the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model.

Using data collected in Wind Forecast Improvement Project-2 (WFIP2), a project led by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Lundquist team compared measurements of the atmosphere, such as wind speed, against modeled values of the same variables.

Graduate students Rochelle Worsnop and Clara St. Martin of Lundquist's research group work on a scanning lidar instrument, used to measure wind speed, direction and veer, in Oregon at a Wind Forecast Improvement 2 site. Photo by Joseph Lee.

The WFIP2 field campaign is being conducted in the Columbia River Gorge, an area with complex (not simple or flat) terrain. Ramps, which are difficult-to-predict large increases or decreases in wind speeds that lead to corresponding changes in power production, are modified by turbine wakes.

The study found that the WRF predicts ramps later than ramps actually occur. The study also found that incorporating the wind farm parameterization reduces this forecast error.

In a related line of study, ATOC graduate student Joseph Lee and Lundquist use observations of wind speeds and known values of wind-power production at a 300-megawatt wind farm in Iowa, collected during the 2013 Crop and Wind Energy eXperiment (CWEX), to verify model results.

As in the previous study, Lee explained, this validation study uses a wind farm parameterization to model the effects of wind turbines on the atmosphere.

However, unlike the WFIP2 study, which uses data collected in complex terrain, the CWEX study in Iowa occurred in flat terrain. Lee explained that the wind power predicted by the WRF model without any wind farm parameterization over-estimated the amount of power that the wind farm would produce by at least 40 megawatts, or 13 percent of the potential power production, on average over the four-day period tested.

This over-estimation reflects a large positive bias in the WRF model. However, wind power predicted by the WRF model with the wind farm parameterization eliminates the positive bias and has only a small negative bias of -5 megawatts, yielding more-accurate estimates of wind power than the WRF simulations without the wind farm parameterization.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researchers make their way through an Iowa cornfield with a wind turbine overhead. Photo courtesy of Julie Lundquist.

Additionally, this study found that models with finer vertical grid resolution (10-meter grids instead of 22-meter grids) yield more accurate estimates of power production. Besides, Lee explained that in high winds, the model with the wind farm parameterization over-estimates wake effects, whereas in low winds, the simulations with the wind farm parameterization under-estimates wake effects.

Lastly, Lee’s study found that the error in power estimates is independent of the number of turbines in a grid cell and also not affected by atmospheric stability, i.e., whether the weather is calm or turbulent. These results suggest that modeling the effects of wind turbines on the atmosphere in and near farms will yield more accurate estimates of how much power will be produced at wind farms.

“The impact of using the wind farm parameterization is remarkable, clearly demonstrating that it provides improved forecasts of energy production,” Lee said.

Like Lundquist, Lee emphasized the importance of more data on wind farms. “We had to work hard to acquire the power data I used in the presentation from the wind farm operator in Iowa, building a trusted relationship over several years” Lee said.

“Usually these data are treated as trade secrets. However, in my point of view, making the data available to the science community can help us to improve forecasting models, reduce wind power-production uncertainty, and hence push renewable energy forward.”

Working with Bodini and Zardi, Lundquist performed another study from the 2013 CWEX project. Bodini and the team used data from a scanning lidar instrument, which takes high-resolution measurements of wind speed and direction to look at the effect of changes in wind direction with height (also known as “veer”) on wakes created by operating wind turbines.

They looked at wakes from front-row turbines, because deeper inside the wind farm, the wakes start mixing with one another. In calm weather, the wakes are easy to detect in lidar data, and the wakes from turbines at the ends of the row differ from wakes from turbines in the center of the row. Further, when there are changes in wind direction, the wakes stretch out.

In turbulent weather, turbine wakes erode quickly by vertical movement of air that is found in unstable conditions. These results can be incorporated into current efforts to optimize the placement of individual turbines within a given wind farm to maximize the amount of power produced by the wind farm, and incorporated into models such as the wind farm parameterization model to increase the accuracy of predictions of wind power production.

“The wind-power sector has incorporated research on turbine wakes into wind-farm layout, but the models now used need to be refined,” Lundquist said.

“Understanding wind turbine wakes is an active area of research, and simple wake models are regularly incorporated into wind farm layout design,” Lundquist said. “Our research shows that wakes are much more complicated than those simple models in ways that regularly impact wind farm operations.”

Like a hurricane

Issue: The U.S. just launched its first offshore wind farm, but wind farms off the U.S. coast could be hit by hurricanes. Finding: Turbines designed by existing standards would likely be damaged by hurricane wind speed, yaw and sheer, and design standards should incorporate these factors.

Until late 2016, all of the United States’ wind farms were on land. With the installation of the first U.S. offshore wind farm near Rhode Island, hurricanes have emerged as a concern.

At present, the strongest wind turbines are designed to withstand 10-minute mean wind speeds of 50 meters per second (about 111 mph) and three-second gusts of 70 meters per second (about 156 mph), although new international design standards are under discussion. But mean winds much weaker than these in Japan and China have toppled turbines there and ripped off their blades. A Chinese wind farm was hit and damaged by hurricane-force winds twice in 10 years.

“Wind farms are generally designed to last 20 to 30 years, so when they are damaged by hurricane winds in such a short time, it can pose a problem for wind-farm operators and their financers,” Worsnop said.

Worsnop discussed her study about the effects of hurricanes on potential offshore wind turbines. Collaborators on this study include George Bryan of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Walt Musial and Rick Damiani of NREL, and Lundquist. Worsnop and the team found that current wind-turbine designs would not withstand the most intense hurricanes, including those known to occur in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Coast south of the Carolinas.

The International Electrotechnical Commission sets standards for engineering and design requirements. The most stringent requirements, currently only set for onshore conditions, are those for turbines that could withstand winds associated with a weak Category 2 hurricane (on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale) at turbine hub height (about 100 meters). The international commission does not set standards for turbines that could withstand Category 3, 4 and 5 hurricanes.

At present, the strongest wind turbines are designed to withstand 10-minute mean wind speeds of 50 meters per second (about 111 mph) and three-second gusts of 70 meters per second (about 156 mph), although new international design standards are under discussion. But mean winds much weaker than these in Japan and China have toppled turbines there and ripped off their blades.

Using the Cloud Model Version I (CM1) large-eddy-simulation model to simulate hurricane winds that could occur in the lower part of the marine atmosphere where offshore wind farms are being considered for development, the research team found that mean winds and gusts near the eyewall of a hurricane can exceed current turbine design thresholds.

Rochelle Worsnop

The team also found that changing wind direction at hub height, called shear, can challenge turbines as they try to orient themselves or yaw into the predominant wind direction. Turbines designed by IEC standards typically yaw in 10 minutes, but hurricane-force winds can change directions by 10 to 30 degrees in as little as one minute, making it difficult for current turbine yaw systems to keep up, Worsnop said.

Additionally, Worsnop’s team found that wind turbines in hurricanes would encounter veer, which is wind that changes direction with height. Veer is not considered in IEC design standards, Worsnop said, “But we believe it should be, based on our results.”

The next edition of the IEC design standard will have a typhoon/hurricane-resilient subclass of wind turbines, she added. “I hope that our research will further guide this upcoming design subclass to account for gusts, gust factor, and the changes in wind direction that we see in hurricanes.”

The next steps in the hurricane-related research would be to assess the probability of the occurrence of wind conditions that exceed turbine design standards for different regions off the U.S. coast and to determine the combined effect of waves and hurricane winds on offshore wind turbines, Worsnop said.

At the AMS annual meeting, ATOC graduate student Jessica Tomaszewski won a first-place award for her presentation titled “Do Wind Turbines Pose Roll Hazards to Light Aircraft?” Also, graduate student Joseph Lee won third place for his presentation titled “Improvements in Wind Power Forecasts through use of the WRF Wind Farm Parameterization evaluated with Meteorological and Turbine Power Data.” ATOC graduate student Clara St. Martin, who has defended her Ph.D. and just began a wind-resource-assessment position with GE Renewable Energy, also presented on evaluation of the WRF Wind Farm Parameterization in complex terrain. Outside of the energy conference at the AMS annual meeting, Laura Mazzaro presented a poster on “The Influence of Mesoscale, Under-Resolved Convective Structures on Nested Large Eddy Simulations” that provides guidance for simulations to improve forecasting of winds in the atmospheric boundary layer.

Incorporating wind energy into today’s electrical grid raises a host of questions about wind forecasting, wind-turbine siting, wind-turbine design in hurricane zones; ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder lab is investigating these and other questions.

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If ‘sitting is the new smoking,’ can desk workers snuff out risk?

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 20:45:26 +0000

If ‘sitting is the new smoking,’ can desk workers snuff out risk? Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/28/2017 - 13:45

Clint Talbott

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder research team has found marked health benefits from electric-assist commuter bikes and ‘passive-cycling’; now, the team is studying an under-the-desk cycle that shows similar promise

Desk jobs may be literally killing us, but an emerging area of research suggests that sedentary people can reap big health benefits from even small amounts of physical movement.

The results from studies of electrically assisted commuter bikes and from “passive cycling,” in which people’s legs are moved for them, are helping researchers from the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder determine how sedentary folks could improve their health without having to start running marathons.

William Byrnes, left, and James Peterman with a pedelec electric-assist bicycle, which they found to help improve cardiovascular health and blood-glucose levels. ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder file photo.

Long periods of sitting are linked with obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and even cancer. Those who are sedentary are at highest risk, and regular exercise might reduce but not eliminate the danger.

Some say “sitting is the new smoking,” but identifying the problem is easier than finding a solution. Many jobs require hours of sitting at a desk, plus more sitting during a long commute.

The ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder research team includes James Peterman, a PhD candidate, with Associate Professors Rodger Kram and William Byrnes in the Department of Integrative Physiology.

Last year, the team found that people who regularly rode an electric-assist bicycle attained improved cardiovascular health and better blood-sugar levels. These benefits didn’t require that participants hit the gym.

In that study, the researchers recruited non-exercising volunteers who commuted by car. At least three days a week, the volunteers left their cars at home and rode an electric-assist bike, called a “pedelec,” for 40 minutes per day.

The pedelecs’ electric motors help move the bikes only when riders spin the pedals. This means riders can’t just push a button and cruise to work on an electric scooter; they must engage their muscles, which resulted in improvement of selected markers of good health.

Separately, Peterman and his colleagues have studied passive cycling, in which a motor spins the pedals on a cycle situated near a chair. “You’re not volitionally pedaling,” Peterman observed. The pedals move your legs for you.

While most wouldn’t think of passive cycling as “exercise,” Peterman and his colleagues found that passive cycling doubled the research volunteers’ energy expenditure as compared with sitting. What’s more, passive cyclists’ energy expenditure while passively cycling was similar to that of light-intensity walking.

A number of people have said if you decrease sitting or break up sitting throughout the day, that improves health. Not a lot of studies have actually implemented that into the real world.”

Also, passive-cycling volunteers’ blood-sugar levels improved to a degree similar to what is seen when people get on exercise bikes and ride at moderate intensity, Peterman said.

“We’re thinking it doesn’t take that much activity or intensity to get some of these improvements,” he added. “It’s more of just not sitting.”

Byrnes concurred, noting that the passive-cycling study was the first to demonstrate not only that passive cyclists showed a marked increase in energy expenditure, but also that the energy expended was comparable to what is seen with people using a treadmill desk.

“You get to the same levels as this treadmill desk in terms of benefit,” Byrnes said. “And, yes, it’s not a high-intensity exercise, but the idea is that sitting is the problem, and that you need to activate muscle in order to actually get a protective effect” from extended sitting.

All of this research builds on findings about the benefits of Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT), which is low-level activity such as fidgeting, taking the stairs or parking at the far end of a parking lot. The ill effects of extended sitting are particularly pronounced in people who have low levels of NEAT.

Having established benefits from electric-assist bike commuting and passive cycling, the researchers are conducting an experiment to determine if pedaling a DeskCycle—an under-the-desk bike that can be pedaled so easily that one can still concentrate on work—yields comparable gains in health.

Peterman, Byrnes and Kram are testing the health benefits of using a DeskCycle at work. Photo courtesy of DeskCycle.

The experiment is being done with volunteers from ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder faculty and staff.

“A number of people have said if you decrease sitting or break up sitting throughout the day, that improves health,” Peterman said, citing the research on NEAT. “Not a lot of studies have actually implemented that into the real world.”

The DeskCycle study takes the research into the real world. Peterman, Byrnes and Kram will recruit up to 25 people who will pedal a DeskCycle at least 15 minutes an hour on a low-resistance setting. Before and after four weeks of this routine, researchers will test the volunteers’ health.

The research team hopes the DeskCycle could produce positive results similar to those of the pedelec and passive-cycling studies. The DeskCycle is an attractive intervention, Byrnes and Peterman say, in part because it’s not as bulky or noisy or disruptive to concentration as a treadmill desk.

Because research volunteers have to volitionally move their legs on the DeskCycle, they should expend more energy than those who passively cycled. “We would anticipate, since we saw benefits with the passive cycle, that benefits with the DeskCycle would be greater, or the same at least,’ Byrnes said.

An increasing body of evidence shows that when people increase their low-level, or NEAT, activity, they have an improvement in health risk factors for chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease, which has significant implications for health-care costs, Byrnes said, emphasizing how a little effort can mean a lot:

“We’ve established that important health gains are possible in going from slug to something. Yes, going from slug to marathon runner would be better, but that’s not realistic for many people.”

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder research team has found marked health benefits from electric-assist commuter bikes and ‘passive-cycling’; now, the team is studying an under-the-desk cycle that shows similar promise.

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Let’s (not) talk about sex

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 20:26:05 +0000

Let’s (not) talk about sex Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/28/2017 - 13:26

Clay Bonnyman Evans

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ sociologist’s book examines society’s mixed messages to teens about sex

In the small, rural Ohio town where Stefanie Mollborn grew up, the prevailing message to teenagers about sex was straightforward: Don’t do it, because it’s morally wrong.

In wealthier, liberal places like Boulder, the message tends to be different: Don’t do it, because you might jeopardize your bright future.

And in conservative, wealthy communities, the message differs yet again: Parents may say one thing in public, then make more pragmatic decisions for their children in private.

Stefanie Mollborn

Meanwhile, society at large runs rampant with mixed messages: You shouldn’t have sex — but if you do, wear a condom; Don’t have an abortion — but don’t have a baby; Be nice to teen parents — but judge them.

“People throughout society are spending a lot of energy communicating message to teens about sexuality which are inherently mixed,” says Mollborn, associate professor of sociology at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder.

Mollborn conducted in-depth interviews with more than 50 college students from across the United States, as well as 75 teen mothers and fathers in the Denver metro area, in researching her new book “Mixed Messages: Norms and Social Control around Teen Sex and Pregnancy,” due from Oxford University Press in March.

Although the teen-pregnancy rate in the United States has been declining for the past two decades, it remains higher than for any other developed nation, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The U.S. rate for 2011 was 57 pregnancies per 1,000 girls and women aged 15-19, compared to the next highest, New Zealand, at 51 and England at 47, and the lowest, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Singapore, all at 14.

Mollborn, whose husband is Swedish, has spent time in Sweden, where parents tend to be more accepting of the idea that teenagers are going to have sex. Consequently, conversations tend to focus less on prohibition than on waiting until teens are ready and becoming sexually active in a way that doesn’t interfere with family life or schoolwork.

“What that can lead to is sex happening during a sleepover with mom and dad in the next room,” Mollborn says. “There is a sense of, ‘Well, we want this relationship happening in a monitored space.’”

In the United States, the message tends to differ according to two variables: socio-economic status and the prevalence of religion in a community. But whether the content emphasizes practical or moral concerns, the messages typically are efforts to control teen sexual behavior.

People often think of inner-city communities when they think about teen pregnancy. But the rate is also high in white-dominated rural communities.”

“That control isn’t very effective, but it leaves teens very afraid of social punishment,” Mollborn says. “It backfires, for example, when they don’t use contraception.”

“In the U.S., we tend to dramatize teen sex, with talk of ‘raging hormones’ and boys ‘wanting only one thing,’ and drawing a line of shame between being a ‘good girl’ and a girl who has a sexual self,” Amy Schalet, author of “Not Under My Roof,” said in a 2011 interview. “Dramatization drives not only teen sex out of the home, but also the conversation about (sex).”

The message in wealthier, educated American communities focuses on avoiding potential outcomes — becoming pregnant, contracting a sexually transmitted disease — that can undermine a teenager’s future plans. Parents are more likely to emphasize contraception, even as they may try to skirt the issue.

For example, Mollborn found that some families put daughters on birth control for stated reasons other than preventing pregnancy, such as controlling acne or the menstrual cycle.

“That represents a continuing conspiracy of silence for teens and parents, a kind of don’t ask, don’t tell,” she says. “Parents are trying to communicate about sex, but everyone is avoiding by a mile the question, ‘What are you, teenager, actually doing sexually?’”

For teens growing up in poorer communities where prospects for the future are fewer, the message sometimes focuses more on moral or religious concerns. But while such messages don’t necessarily stop teens from engaging in sex, they do reduce the chance that they will use contraceptives consistently.

“People often think of inner-city communities when they think about teen pregnancy,” she says. “But the rate is also high in white-dominated rural communities.”

And when — to the surprise of many Americans who thought it a settled question — more politicians began attacking contraception over the past decade or so, many conservative, religious parents simply stopped talking about it.

“They just went silent, skipping right to, ‘sex is morally wrong,’” Mollborn says.

But one nationally recognized ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ program has provided potent evidence that acknowledging sex and promoting contraception works. After teenagers and poor women were offered free intrauterine devices or implants to prevent pregnancy, the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ teen birth rate plunged by 40 percent, and the abortion rate by 42 percent, from 2009-2013.

Mollborn uncovered a more nuanced message, most notably in communities that were both conservative and wealthy, where parents may publicly hold moral positions that do not necessarily translate into private action.

“They may be anti-abortion, but they may not live by their anti-abortion beliefs if their daughter gets pregnant,” she says.

The bottom line? Nobody is talking enough, or frankly enough, about sex.

Teenagers, if anything, may be more appalled at the prospect of such discussions than their parents. But they suffer the most from living in a vacuum. Girls, in particular, still suffer considerably greater stigma, and are forced to assume more responsibility, than boys, not just for becoming pregnant, but simply for having sex.

Teen mothers are often assumed to be “sluts,” Mollborn notes, despite the fact that being in a long-term sexual relationship actually increases the chance of pregnancy. And when she and her team interviewed teen mothers, many were surprised to even be asked questions about the babies’ fathers.

“Boys and girls hear the same messages, but girls are held to it and punished” — socially and otherwise — “if something goes wrong,” she says.

Given that around two-thirds of American teenagers engage in sexual activity by the end of high school, Mollborn sees attempts to simply control behavior as ineffective.

“We’re trying so hard to control them,” she says, “but what we really want is for teens to think straight and make smart decisions. … We need to break down the taboos. The Netherlands went, in a single generation, from a morally based message discouraging sex to a more pragmatic approach, with parallel, radical improvements in public-health outcomes related to teen sexuality.”

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Scholars eye freedom in reverse

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 20:00:46 +0000

Scholars eye freedom in reverse Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/28/2017 - 13:00

Clay Bonnyman Evans

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researchers win USAID grant to examine backpedaling democracies

President John F. Kennedy signed the Foreign Assistance Act in 1961, for the first time separating federal budgets for defense and non-defense spending and creating the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Andy Baker

“The amount of money that is involved in the nonmilitary areas are a fraction of what we spend on our national defense every year,” Kennedy said, “and yet this is very much related to our national security and is as important dollar for dollar as any expenditure for national defense itself.”

More than six decades later, USAID provides more than $20 billion annually — less than 1 percent of the federal budget — about a quarter of it to non-governmental organizations working in Asia, Africa, Latin America and beyond in its efforts to “end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the money doesn’t always achieve desired results. In fact, it tends to promote moderate political participation through formal mechanisms such as voting only in democratic societies where institutions already are working well, says Carew Boulding, associate professor of political science at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder and author of “NGOs, Political Protest, and Civil Society,” published by Cambridge University Press.

“My research has shown that where historically aid allocation is assumed almost always to lead to more democratic engagement, the evidence has shown that a lot of that engagement is really contentious,” Boulding says.

“That’s certainly not what (USAID) expected. The assumption is that they are giving to NGOs to help build civic engagement in a moderate, institutionalized way.”

Now, Boulding and Associate Professor of Political Science Andy Baker have been awarded a USAID grant to find out why. With help from five graduate students, they will conduct a massive literature review to examine what happens to citizen engagement when previously liberal democratic nations become more repressive.

Carew Boulding

“The paradigmatic case is Russia,” Baker says. Former President Boris “Yeltsin established a nascent democracy, now (President Vladimir) Putin has put heavy restrictions on media, there are allegations of voter fraud, and arrests” of journalists and political opponents. He also cites Turkey, where a coup occurred in 2016, resulting in the mass firing of civil servants, academics and opposition leaders.

The researchers hope to get a clearer idea of what citizens can do in such scenarios. Are there spaces for them to express themselves via the internet? How do they vote when elections continue but are highly restricted? How do they engage when protest activity is heavily regulated?

The review will focus on cases from the 20^th and 21^st centuries, from the collapse of Weimar Germany to recent backsliding in countries such as Venezuela and Ecuador. The researchers will locate appropriate literature from academic journals and annotate some 200 articles. Boulding and Baker will write a summary focused on three questions:

What enables civic and political participation in countries where civil liberties have been lost?
How do forms of civic and political engagement in such contexts differ from forms of engagement in contexts in which civil liberties are protected?
Are some forms of civic and political engagement generally more tolerated in newly repressive contexts than others? How do civic actors adapt their engagement tactics to achieve their objectives?

This project is looking at the ways in which democratic freedoms can be undermined even in seemingly stable systems like the U.S."

“For years academics have been telling policy makers and practitioners that they need to listen to academics, read the research, and distribute aid in a way that recognizes best practices, what works, what doesn’t work, and follows the cutting edge of the most rigorous research,” Baker says.

“This is USAID putting its money where its mouth is.”

China, while infamous for its repression of protest and citizen engagement, doesn’t make the researchers’ list because it is a “stable authoritarian” nation lacking recent history as a democracy. But China does provide insight into just how difficult it is for governments to control information flow and protest, Baker notes.

“The internet is like a giant sieve; there is only so much dictators can control what is said and done there,” he says. “China has had some success, but they have tens of thousands of people whose job it is to sit at a desk all day and troll the internet and be the speech police. That level of repression is very costly.”

A quarter-century later, it’s clear that political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history” following the collapse of communism, and “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” was premature.

Even in the United States and Europe, liberal democratic ideals once considered the foundations of Western society have been weakened, particularly in the post-9/11 era.

“It’s easy to believe that democracy is just naturally stable,” Boulding says. “This project is looking at the ways in which democratic freedoms can be undermined even in seemingly stable systems like the U.S.—and the ways in which citizens can push back.”

With help from five graduate students, two ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professors will conduct a careful study of what happens to citizen engagement when previously liberal democratic nations become more repressive.

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Why Mendelssohn (Moses, not Felix) matters

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 19:50:23 +0000

Why Mendelssohn (Moses, not Felix) matters Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/28/2017 - 12:50

Clay Bonnyman Evans

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professor makes a case for the contemporary relevance of an Enlightenment superstar

Google the name Mendelssohn, and you’ll have to click the “next page” button to find references to anyone other than the famous 19^th-century German composer, Felix.

But only a couple branches away on the composer’s family tree you’ll find his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, a man who, as the father of the 18^th- and 19^th-century Jewish Enlightenment, also significantly impacted Western thought and culture.

“He is one of the most prominent Enlightenment philosophers of the 18^th century,” says Elias Sacks, assistant professor of religious studies and Jewish studies at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder. “On the Jewish side, he is the founder of modern Jewish thought. He is the first person to give an account of why Judaism matters in the modern world.”

Elias Sacks

Moses Mendelssohn was born to a rural Prussian Jewish family in 1729. After an early education aimed at cultivating a rabbinical career, he learned mathematics, Latin, French, and English, and became self-taught in German literature and philosophy, as well as current thought among other European philosophers such as John Locke. Mendelssohn went on to write numerous works of criticism, on religion and civil society.

In his new book, “Moses Mendelssohn’s Living Script: Philosophy, Practice, History, Judaism” (Indiana University Press), Sacks shakes up long-held conventional wisdom that Mendelssohn was, for the most part, a thinker for his times not especially relevant to today’s political, cultural and philosophical concerns.

“Traditionally, he is viewed as having a very ahistorical view of the world, and as seeing ideas as timeless truths that stand outside history,” Sacks says. “I make the claim that Mendelssohn was fundamentally interested in history, that he understands us as living in a world that is constantly changing—in a world where philosophical and scientific models are changing, where society is changing. What he was trying to do was create a vision of Jewish tradition that allows people to live in that kind of world.”

Other researchers in the field seem to agree that Sacks has thrown down the gauntlet where Mendelssohn is concerned.

“Scholars will take issue with this or that in Sacks’ arguments, but they will not be able to ignore his work,” says Michael A. Meyer, Adolph S. Ochs professor of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College and author of “Judaism within Modernity.” “It forces a rethinking of Mendelssohn's thought at a time when attention is again being focused on this Jewish thinker.”

“For me, he’s interesting because he in many ways represents the first Jewish encounter with many of the things we associate with the modern world,” says Sacks, who grew up in New York City and earned degrees at Harvard, Columbia and Princeton before coming to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder in 2012.

“He is the first Jewish philosopher to think about what it might mean to live in a diverse state and political community, with people coming from different religious backgrounds… Mendelssohn is interested in why it’s important for the state not just to tolerate, but to be inclusive toward diverse religious communities.”

Though openly admired, Mendelssohn was often publicly challenged to convert to Christianity — a sign of his society’s ingrained anti-Jewish sentiment. His nomination to a prestigious intellectual organization was vetoed by the king simply because he was Jewish, and it was widely believed that Prussian Jews did not possess sufficient character to be full members of society.

Mendelssohn’s concerns as a philosopher were broad, but his works include such titles as, “Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism,” which promoted and led to greater tolerance.

“He’s so brilliant, so tolerant, so significant that many of his non-Jewish contemporaries can’t believe he’s really so committed to Judaism. That he is a hugely influential Enlightenment philosopher who produces important works on beauty, music, morality and God, but also prominently identifies as a Jew is utterly bewildering to many of his contemporaries,” Sacks says.

In North America, I can think of one English-language book written on him in the last 30 years. I want to recover him for people in diverse fields — Jewish studies, religious studies, political theory, philosophy. We need to recover his voice and let him speak again.”

Mendelssohn is not generally taught in college courses surveying Western thought, reflecting the long-held view that he was somewhat parochial in his interests.

“He is generally seen as someone who doesn’t have much to offer us. He’s seen as a product of his era who meant very well, but ultimately didn’t quite make a persuasive claim,” Sacks says.

But having dug deeply into the philosopher’s work, including lesser-known texts written in a challenging, scholarly Hebrew, Sacks argues that Mendelssohn is indeed relevant to modern problems.

“He gives us helpful ways of thinking about the ways in which religious rituals function, the way religious traditions develop and change over time, and how religion can play a role in political life,” he says.

Much of Sacks’ teaching at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder focuses on the relevance of religion in the 21^st century, including such tantalizingly titled classes as “Religion and Contemporary Society,” “God and Politics” and “Love & Desire in Judaism and Christianity.”

In the first course, “we look at hot-button social issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, torture and climate change, and how they play out across diverse religious traditions,” he says.

Sacks is now engaged in research he hopes will help re-establish the importance of another Jewish thinker, the 19^th-century Ukrainian philosopher Nachman Krochmal.

“Everyone in Jewish studies knows his name and cites him as an important eastern European thinker, but nobody reads him, especially in North America,” Sacks says. “In North America, I can think of one English-language book written on him in the last 30 years. I want to recover him for people in diverse fields — Jewish studies, religious studies, political theory, philosophy. We need to recover his voice and let him speak again.”

Elias Sacks, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder assistant professor or religious studies, makes a case for the contemporary relevance of an Enlightenment superstar.

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ scholar brings innovative hands-on teaching approach to English

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 19:11:42 +0000

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ scholar brings innovative hands-on teaching approach to English Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/28/2017 - 12:11

Craig Levinsky

Transforms media theory classroom into fine arts lab, students into publishers, curators and webmasters

Accolades such as “groundbreaking” or “revolutionary” are rarely garnered for achievements in teaching. University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder English Assistant Professor Thora Brylowe, however, brought an especially innovative approach to the plainly titled course, “ENGL 2036: Introduction to Media Theory in the Humanities,” which she taught last fall.

Applied styles of learning can be an effective means to engage students and achieve positive outcomes-driven results, meaning knowledge that can be measured quantifiably, demonstrated by a skill or set of skills, and applied toward the creation of a capstone project, or in Brylowe’s case, three of them. But how does one design an effective, applied learning-based course for the English classroom, or in content-driven, typically essay-heavy courses?

Enter Brylowe. In the ENGL 2036 section that she taught this past Fall, she aimed to explore “the history of media and mediation, from the early modern period to the present, with an emphasis on hands-on project-based learning.” The course, so far, sounded uncommon, but not exactly groundbreaking.

Then she told her students they’d complete three separate projects of significant scope over the course of the semester, each in collaborative fashion. The results would be experienced by the public in three distinct media formats: books, pictures and the internet.

First, she told her students, they’d create, from start to finish, a hardcover book – from the early phase of selecting content, to the final stage of being able to pick it up and read it, like any book in the library. Next, they’d comb through a collection of early modern prints donated to the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Art Museum, choose visual content, and curate an exhibit there with the help of Hope Saska, curator of collections and exhibitions. Last, they would partner with a class at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, to create an online special-collections exhibit and archive using material from Special Collections in Norlin Library.

Thora Brylowe gives a tour of the early modern prints exhibit curated by her students for the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Art Museum. At the top of the page, Brylowe showcases a the student-published Songs of Inexperience, by William Blake, while discussing her “Introduction to Media Theory in the Humanities” course. Photos by Craig Levinsky.

She wanted to lead her students on an investigation of “the historical development of knowledge technologies, focusing on print and digital modes,” wrote Brylowe in her syllabus. To that end, she pledged to “depart from the lecture/discussion format and put into practice the tools and techniques we study.”

“I’m a historian,” said Brylowe, though her field is British Romanticism. “I want to think about the initial occasion for producing a piece of literature. Who were its readers? Who cared about it and why? And why do we keep holding onto it? In order to do that, you have to look at the original material form. So that’s where I take this idea of embodied practice, where you can have some sense of people’s lived experience by doing the labor that they did.”

To tackle the first and perhaps heftiest endeavor of producing a book, a custom anthology of William Blake, Brylowe first spent two weeks teaching the poet’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, chosen by Brylowe since Blake, himself, was a printer, engraver and Romantic writer.

The students selected the pieces they wanted to anthologize, and with the help of the nonprofit Book Arts League in Lafayette, Colo., which provided the facility, printing press, mentorship and time, designed the layout and set the type by hand. Many of the volunteer staff at the Book Arts League work at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s Norlin Library. The students then printed, bound and cased the book.

Holding up the finished book, a beautiful, blue, clothbound, hardcover, Songs of Inexperience, by William Blake, titled by her students both as a tribute to the original text studied in class and as a “signal to their lack of knowledge at the start of the project,” Brylowe added, “now my students can say, ‘If you look in the library catalog, Special Collections actually has this book with a call number. I made a book which is now housed there.’ I wanted that to be something the students could have.”

I want my students to understand that mediation has a history. That what we do on a word processor has some kind of history to it involving a tremendous amount of labor on the part of human backs and hands. That’s what makes literature possible.”

For the second project, the museum exhibit, her students first looked at a set of prints from the early modern period, which were donated by a benefactor and housed in the special collections, and chose the ones they found interesting.

“They researched them,” said Brylowe, “and came up with an idea for a cogent exhibit about how prints mediate narration. Some of the prints depict historical events, and some of them are literary,” she said of the images dating from around 1550 to 1820.

“They wrote labels and summaries,” she explained. “The works were framed. The exhibitions manager explained what he did and how you manage crumpled up pieces from the 17^th and 18^th centuries that had been in a drawer, and before that a book, and were not in great shape, and explained the various ways that people frame archival material. Then the labels went through the museum’s rigorous copyediting and regulation process,” said Brylowe. “It went up on the wall, and we had a catered opening. They made a professional museum exhibit.”

Like the Blake book, her students can now visit the museum catalog today, view the entries they wrote for their exhibit and declare, “‘This is my original research,” said Brylowe, “‘and it’s in the world now.’”

Had Brylowe not received a call that summer from fellow Romanticist Miranda Burgess, however, who’d be teaching her own media theory course that coming fall at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Brylowe’s class may have never gotten off the ground. Burgess asked Brylowe if she were interested in a class collaboration using web, distance-learning technology and Skype. “I signed on immediately,” said Brylowe.

Together, Brylowe and Burgess formulated the cooperative project that became the third assignment for Brylowe’s course. The two professors arranged viewings of the special collections archives on their separate campuses for their classes. Then, nations apart, the students selected pieces, photographed them, shared their selections with each other and agreed on a cohesive collection.

Brylowe and Burgess taught their students the academic research process and set up a website template on Wordpress. The two classes, thereafter, co-produced an online exhibit titled “First Impressions: Books and Papers from the Hand-Press Period.”

Since there were no papers to measure, final grades for Brylowe’s students were determined largely by peer and self-assessment and by a jury of members of the campus community, including Dean Steven Leigh and Associate Dean Valerio Ferme from the College of Arts and Sciences.

It’s exciting to see faculty conceptualize their courses so imaginatively. Her and her students’ dedication to the class, and the joy they had taken from it, were evident.”

“Professor Brylowe’s class was a great example of how we can apply the resources we have on campus to the classroom, such as the art museum and the personnel in the Norlin Library,” said Dean Leigh. “It’s exciting to see faculty conceptualize their courses so imaginatively. Her and her students’ dedication to the class, and the joy they had taken from it, were evident.”

“My work is about practice,” said Brylowe. “I’m interested in the process of mediating creative work and the idea that there’s labor involved. I want my students to understand that mediation has a history. That what we do on a word processor has some kind of history to it involving a tremendous amount of labor on the part of human backs and hands. That’s what makes literature possible.”

“There are different ways to understand knowledge literary transmission, other than one author begets another author who begets another, and we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, so I’m interested in the material transmission of that, and in the cost involved in terms of both resources and biopower.”

“I think the students were happy,” Brylowe admits. “They learned how to do ‘this stuff.’ But it was the process of research,” which, as she explained to her students, she engages in every day, comparing their experience to her work on her current project, a book about paper in the Romantic period.

“I have to figure out how to determine the content of paper. I have to think about my archive. What is the sample I’m going to use to complete this project?” she said. “So here are these research questions. Here’s this archive,” much like the prints her students exhibited in the museum, online, and in the Blake compilation.

“I said to my students, here’s a bunch of stuff. Do something with it,” said Brylowe. “I knew they could do it. They complained at the beginning, but I told them, ‘This is research. There’s nothing difficult here. It’s about doing it.’ So I trusted them, and they did well. They have great ideas, and they do things in unexpected ways. If you let them, the collaboration will unfold.”

Asked what she’s up to next, Brylowe said she received a grant from the English department with Associate Professor Lori Emerson, who runs the Media Archeology Lab. They plan to purchase printing and engraving presses for a Media Ecology Archeology & Technology Lab affiliated with the MAL. Next fall, Brylowe will teach a first-year seminar called “Saving the World” that addresses the central question, what does it mean to curate?

Thora Brylowe told her students they’d complete three separate, significant projects during the semester, each in collaborative fashion. The results would be experienced by the public in three distinct media formats: books, pictures and the internet.

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Humanitarian, lifelong student of people, politics memorialized in scholarship

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 01:45:27 +0000

Humanitarian, lifelong student of people, politics memorialized in scholarship Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/27/2017 - 18:45

Clint Talbott

Humanitarian, lifelong student of people, politics memorialized in scholarship

It’s no surprise that Tracey Kreps enjoyed a successful career in the financial sector. As a boy, he was so good at Monopoly that he played proxy to his parents and other siblings, advising them on how to best invest their real-estate porfolios. To him, winning was less important than helping others succeed.

“From very early on, he had an aptitude for economics,” says Jennifer Brundage, Kreps’ wife. He also had a lifelong desire to help others and a passion for political science.

Political science is the degree that Kreps earned from the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder in 1993. And it’s for that interest which Kreps, who passed away last April at the age of 45, is memorialized in the newly renovated Ketchum Arts and Sciences Building.

Tracey Kreps and Jennifer Brundage got married at Sunrise Amphitheatre, overlooking the Flatirons, on Sept. 1, 2001. At top of the page, Kreps is seen at Assateague Island in Virginia in 2006. Photos courtesy of Jennifer Brundage.

After his death, Kreps’ friends and family raised funds to name a Ketchum office in Kreps’ memory. The funds themselves established the Tracey Kreps Memorial Scholarship, which will support students who show wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and great academic promise.

The beneficiaries will be much like Tracey Kreps himself, Brundage notes, adding that establishing the scholarship is a fitting way to memorialize a man who went—or rode—the extra mile to help others, mentoring younger colleagues, volunteering at food banks, joining charity bike rides.

She graduated from ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder with a degree in French in 1991, then lived abroad for a year. When she returned, she took a job in the scheduling office of the University Memorial Center.

There she met Kreps, then a member of student government, a choir singer and a leader of the debate club. As Kreps scheduled rooms for a debate series, he quizzed Brundage about topics its members should debate.

From the beginning, she found him to be “scary smart” and very generous. Soon, Brundage was on the “best first date I’ve ever had in my life.” During the evening, Kreps got his ear pierced, and the couple visited a grocery store’s produce aisle, where Kreps showed off his “party trick”: juggling, in this case green peppers.

After graduation, Kreps worked in the Washington, D.C., office of former U.S. Rep. David Skaggs, a Democrat from ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s 2^nd Congressional District, and later the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission.

The scholarships will go to those whose research and work in the program exhibit the drive, interest and curiosity Tracey Kreps embodied as a political science major at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ and as an alum."

Those were not lucrative jobs, and work in Washington, D.C., can be intermittent. Kreps and Brundage moved to New York, and he began working on Wall Street. In 2009, he earned an MBA from Georgetown University, and he worked his way into a role that suited his strengths: analyzing companies and markets from the “biggest-picture context way,” she observes.

He retained his deep interest in politics and was an omnivorous consumer of news—from The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, China Daily and Fox News—striving to understand issues from many perspectives. During long walks, he listened to podcasts from the Economist.

The knowledge he gained from this pastime, along with his abiding interest in people, helped him strike up conversations with strangers worldwide.

When the couple visited the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, Kreps stayed outside while Brundage checked out the museum shop. When she emerged after a half-hour, Kreps was surrounded by women, many of them gesticulating enthusiastically.

Tracey Kreps, seated at left, is surrounded by women from Iran who forged a quick friendship with him when he and Jennifer Brundage were visiting Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey. The American and Iranians agreed they had more in common than they had in differences. Photo by Jennifer Brundage.

Kreps told Brundage, “You have to meet my new friends. They’re visiting from Iran.” The American and Iranians agreed they had more in common than they had in differences. He “friended” them on Facebook and invited them to visit when they came to Washington, D.C.

Similarly, when the couple attended company parties, Kreps gravitated toward the employees who worked the phones as opposed to the movers and shakers who might have been viewed as Kreps’ peers.

“That was a great lesson that he taught me,” Brundage says. “He was so democratic in the way he dealt with other people.”

He eagerly served as a mentor to younger professionals around the world, from China, Mali, England and beyond. “He thrived doing that and was great at it,” Brundage observes.

He and Brundage shared a love of the outdoors and of pushing themselves physically while outside. He was a cyclist and joined many fund-raising rides. Shortly after taking up running, he ran the Bolder Boulder 10K footrace, then a half-marathon.

They climbed ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ fourteeners and sought out the toughest, scariest trails from Acadia National Park to Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia.

Tracey Kreps completed his first running race, the Bolder Boulder, in 2015.

After his death, friends and family chose to memorialize Kreps with a scholarship and a room named in his honor. Noting the difficulty in undertaking such a project in the wake of a spouse’s death, Brundage also acknowledges satisfaction:

“It’s the kind of thing he would have done. He was a very, very generous soul.”

David S. Brown, professor and chair of political science at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, says the memorial scholarship “honors a man who had an insatiable intellectual curiosity and a generosity to help those around him develop their own thirst for knowledge.”

Each year, the scholarship will be given to one or two undergraduates in the department’s undergraduate-fellows program.

“The scholarships will go to those whose research and work in the program exhibit the drive, interest and curiosity Tracey Kreps embodied as a political science major at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ and as an alum,” Brown observes.

“This is a model of education we want to pursue as a department: engaging our students so that they can explore their interests and passions while developing important skills for a lifetime of inquiry and engagement,” Brown says, adding, “The scholarships are the kind of resources the department needs to provide our students with those skills.”

To learn how to support scholarships at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, click here or contact Laurie Loughrin at laurie.e.loughrin@colorado.edu or 303-541-1451.

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Former kid from Levittown boosts education, the great leveler

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 01:12:30 +0000

Former kid from Levittown boosts education, the great leveler Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/27/2017 - 18:12

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Christopher Eagan’s faith in education leads to $30K gift to Miramontes program

To Christopher Eagan, growing up in Levittown, N.Y., America’s first and most famous suburb, was nirvana.

In Levittown, which was developed to provide homes for returning World War II veterans and their families, “everybody was the same age, the parents were all the same age. Everybody was young, everything was new, and there were throngs of kids,” says Eagan, 66.

But after 18 years there, Eagan was ready for a change, and he knew just where he wanted to go: the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder.

“I loved skiing as a kid, and we took two trips out West. I loved it,” he says. “My freshman year I logged more than 50 days skiing.”

Somewhere in that time he did a little studying, too, graduating with a degree in geology in 1973. He later went on to earn a law degree from Fordham University, and most recently stepped down as partner in the global law firm Bryan Cave LLC, where he specialized in banking.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ, but that was common then. It was much more about getting a solid arts-and-sciences education,” Eagan says. “The assumption was I would be getting a job. I had no idea what it would be, or where, but there was never a fear that I wouldn’t get a job.”

Christopher Eagan. Photo courtesy of Christopher Eagan. At top of page, students work with ceramics in the pottery lab as part of the Program for Excellence in Academics and Community (PEAC) in MASP.

Eagan’s roots in Levittown and his lifelong belief in the importance of a well-rounded education recently inspired him to make a gift to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program, which supports “motivated, traditionally underrepresented or first generation students who want to be part of a diverse academic community in the College of Arts & Sciences.”

MASP, as it’s known, provides community, space and awareness of academic opportunities through a summer program for incoming freshmen, and requires coursework of its participants.

“We have a pretty diverse set of scholars from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, many of them first-generation college students,” says MASP director Celeste Montoya. “This is a very competitive program and these are bright, high-achieving, talented students.”

The Eagan Family Endowed Scholarship Fund will provide a $1,000 scholarship to a MASP student and $5,000 toward an endowment over five years.

Eagan wasn’t aware of MASP when he contacted the Office of Advancement about making a gift. But he strongly believes that institutions know best where support can have a maximum impact.

“I try to be realistic. I reach out and say, ‘You tell me what’s important.’”

When Eagan learned about MASP, he thought it was a perfect fit. So many of the kids he grew up with in Levittown would become their families’ first college graduates, and he believes in the value of mentorship.

“My father was a great believer in education and I’m a great believer. From a post-World War II perspective, education is what transformed this country, increased income throughout this country, and made us a leader in the world,” he says.

“MASP really fits in with my conception of education as the great leveler—it both evens the playing field and expands opportunities. The concept of mentorship, that you’ve got someone to go to, to help you find your way, is important. It opens a door, reaches out a hand and says, ‘Come on in, it’s cold outside. Come on in.’”

As fondly as he looks back on the kids’ nirvana that was Levittown, Eagan credits ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder for not only expanding his mind, but exposing him to a far greater diversity of people than he’d ever seen in his first 18 years. He’s pleased to support a program like MASP, which continues that tradition in even more depth.

“What ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ is able to do, partly because of the beauty of its location, is attract people from around the country and around the world, so when you go there you are exposed to so many different cultures,” he says. “That’s a really terrific story about the school that was important to me and remains important to students.”

To Christopher Eagan, growing up in Levittown, N.Y., America’s first and most famous suburb, was nirvana. But after 18 years there, Eagan was ready for a change, and he knew just where he wanted to go: the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder.

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The College of Arts and Sciences charts the course ahead

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 00:43:51 +0000

The College of Arts and Sciences charts the course ahead Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/27/2017 - 17:43

Steven R. Leigh

The College of Arts and Sciences will be embarking on a vital initiative this semester by undertaking a comprehensive strategic planning process. This is an important time for our college, with tremendous opportunities before us. Strategic planning will enable us to find ways to further strengthen our academic capacities, improve our academic quality, and position us for even greater successes.

Steven R. Leigh

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ 10 years ago, our campus developed a comprehensive strategic plan, the Flagship 2030 Strategic Plan. That plan received national recognition for its ambition and boldness, and it has guided us well through the last decade. Importantly, Flagship 2030 has received continual attention from our campus, and this year, our campus has undertaken a significant updating. For example, the campus is placing strategic emphases on shaping tomorrow's leaders, being the top university for innovation, and seeking ways to help humanity. With these notions in mind, the college has a unique opportunity to pursue its own planning process to help guide us into the future.

In addition to the recent evolution of Flagship 2030 at the campus level, the College of Arts and Sciences recently revised its core curriculum. Strategic planning in the college will help us make the most out of our new curriculum, helping us advance our overall academic mission, both in research and education.

Several guiding strategic themes have already emerged as we begin this process. We have opportunities to lead nationally with our research prominence across a remarkable breadth of academic disciplines. Similarly, we need to take advantage of our collaborative abilities to break new paths in emerging interdisciplinary fields. Indeed, we have opportunities to define these new fields. We also have a significant international presence and expertise, providing pathways for the college to lead the campus, the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ system, state government and industry in forging international collaborations and increasing our global impact.

In addition to examining ways in which we can accelerate our academic achievements, the process will address issues such as how we can deliver a top-quality education at undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels. We must be able to recruit the world's top students at all levels, contributing significantly to the state and nation by educating future generations of citizens. We need to support both research and educational missions through better infrastructure. We expect to undertake a broad and visionary renewal of buildings in the college to position us for the next 150 years of academic accomplishment. Finally, we should seek to enhance the ways in which we contribute directly to the artistic, economic, social and cultural vitality of our state and region.

The effort represents a collaboration between the college and our college faculty governance body, the Arts and Sciences Council, which is composed of faculty from all of our academic units. The committee will be chaired by highly accomplished political scientist Dr. David Brown, chair of our Political Sciences Department, who will be joined by representatives from across the college, including faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students. I invite all those with ties to the College of Arts and Sciences to provide input for and engage with this important process so that we cast the broadest net possible for ideas from the tremendous talent pool on our campus and beyond, ultimately setting a firm foundation for attaining even loftier goals for our future.

The College of Arts and Sciences will be embarking on a vital initiative this semester by undertaking a comprehensive strategic planning process.

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