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In fiscal year 2018, our faculty reached a major research milestone with almost $100 million in research awards. While we should celebrate the arrival of new funding, the publication of major papers, or personal career achievements, the College of Engineering and Applied Science must also strive to broadly communicate the impacts of our work in research when it is complete.

I believe the faculty and staff do a great job of communicating big proposal wins at the frontend, highlighting multi-year projects with big dollar amounts, for example. What we often neglect is conveying the impact of the work in a variety of forms and points in time.  

As experts in the field, we can easily neglect to communicate the impact of our engineering and science discoveries to audiences outside of the college and academia. Our work provides impact to the citizens of Colorado and our nation. Each time a student graduates or we achieve a research milestone, we should reflect and think about who could benefit from this new knowledge. 

Heading into the fall semester with all of this in mind, I wanted to let you know of a new resource to help you communicate with audiences in the college, Boulder, the state of Colorado and nationally about the impact of your research. 

The college has hired Josh Rhoten as a new communication specialist based out of the Research Support Office. He comes from a newspaper background and is a highly skilled storyteller with experience in writing, editing, social media In addition to writing stories for our websites, newsletters and social media feeds, he will also be working closely with the campus wide communications team to help elevate research stories for regional and national media outlets.

I invite you to contact him directly with potential story ideas as they present themselves this semester. Potential topics include updates to ongoing or recently completed awards, the publication of papers, new faculty profilesand collaboration across the Interdisciplinary Research Themes. All of this will be done with an eye toward sharing the potential impact and outcomes of the work described or proposed.

Keith Molenaar is associate dean for research at the CU College of Engineering and Applied Science. He is also the K. Stanton Lewis professor of construction Engineering and Management. For more information about research opportunities in the college, visit the Research Support Office website.