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CU Sounding Rocket Lab: On a Mission to Space

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 06:00:00 +0000

CU Sounding Rocket Lab: On a Mission to Space Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/18/2021 - 00:00

Anna Christiansen - Team Captain

O-class solid rocket motor static fire test.

Title Photo: The team at a launch in November 2019.

What does it feel like to work on a project for months and have its success or failure determined in an instant? To move through rigorous, painstaking design and analysis and know it comes down to a single opportunity for success? To spend innumerable late nights in the lab with the knowledge that a mistake might mean doing it all again?

This is the experience of the CU Sounding Rocket Laboratory, a student organization at CU Boulder whose mission is to build high-caliber engineers through the pursuit of advanced technologies that can deliver rockets to space.

Currently, only one student rocketry team can claim a vehicle has passed the internationally-accepted boundary of space – the Karman line, at 100km in altitude. Soon, SRL will join this elite group, with three distinct rockets.

SRL’s flagship project is an 18-foot, single-stage solid rocket called Spaceshot, powered by SRL’s own 250-lb R-class solid rocket motor.

Real-World Engineering

Since 2018, SRL’s composite propulsion program has worked to advance the team’s understanding of solid rocket motor design, analysis, and testing. We have tested more than two dozen motors, ranging in size from 4-inch diameter M-class motors to an attempted test of an R-class motor in February 2020.

SRL’s other space-bound vehicles include a two-stage rocket with active aerodynamic control on both stages, requiring robust control software and precise hardware, and a rocket flying SRL’s Reaper engine, a methalox (methane and liquid oxygen) turbopump liquid engine capable of generating over 6,000 pounds of thrust.

The team's structured, project-based development pushes students to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom to real-world engineering problems.

“If there is one thing I’ve learned about engineering at CU SRL over the last few years, it is that learning the theory is by far the easiest part of the engineering process,” says Zach Lesan, SRL’s Lead Engineer and a junior aerospace major. “Developing an intuition for physics and engineering as a whole requires an incredible amount of experience that can only be gained by moving through the engineering process in its entirety.”

The team’s work includes the development of custom solid rocket propellant, designing avionics and advanced software, and a group dedicated to ground support systems and test equipment.

Ambitious and Driven

With over 100 active members, SRL holds opportunities for students of all backgrounds and disciplines, including engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and many others.

The team’s ambition is driven by an energy to learn and grow as future contributors to the aerospace industry.

“SRL has provided hands-on experience and heightened my passion for my majors where the required courses seem to fall a little short. It has given me experience in design, analysis, manufacturing, testing, and more – all important things engineers should be capable of, and experienced in as we move to industry,” said Samantha Honan, an aerospace sophomore.

A successful recovery of a Diamondback rocket.

Career Development

For many members, participation in SRL is a formative experience in their engineering development.

“I came into college having absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. After joining SRL, I know that there is nothing else I would rather do,” Honan said.

Team members have been successful taking the lessons they learn from the club into industry, and applying them to problems at aerospace organizations like SpaceX, NASA, Tesla, and Aerojet Rocketdyne. Lesan will be interning with SpaceX later this year.

“Over the past two and a half years, I have gone from knowing next to nothing about rocket engineering to feeling confident that I can have a solid positive impact on SpaceX’s Starship vehicle at my internship this summer,” Lesan said.

SRL’s work culminates in the opportunity to test technologies at rocket motor static fires and launches. Each event brings a sense of adrenaline and anticipation, as students see the outcome of their work.

Thrill of Victory

Rex Laceby, Chief of Staff at Advanced Space and SRL mentor, was introduced to SRL in November through the launch of Diamondback, a geometric analog and manufacturing testbed for Spaceshot.

“In a foot of snow, on a chilly Saturday morning when other Buffs were skiing, sleeping in, or doing homework, these students were several miles south west of Pueblo, ready to put rockets they built by hand, into the beautiful Colorado sky and eventually reach space,” Laceby said.

On that day, Diamondback enjoyed a successful launch to 5,149 ft. and a clean recovery.

However, SRL’s tests and launches don’t always have such favorable results.

In a foot of snow when other Buffs were sleeping in, these students were ready to put rockets they built by hand into the beautiful Colorado sky."

Learning from Failure

In February 2020, the team attempted to test an R-class motor. It would have been the largest student solid rocket motor ever static fired, but instead the 250-lb motor exploded on the Colorado plains.

The motor’s demise represented a near-instantaneous obliteration of late nights, hundreds of hours of manpower, and thousands of dollars. It was a sobering experience that forced the team to examine its engineering processes and learn from the failure, a critical feature of real-world engineering endeavors.

“From a leadership perspective, SRL is a unique organization,” Lesan said. “The work we do here is unpaid, has relatively low levels of funding, is not obligatory, and has no tangible consequence of failure.”

It can be difficult to move past failure and continue to innovate, but it is mettle, forged by failure, that yields resilient, solution-oriented engineers.

The root problem was a thermal lining stripped, leading to a momentary blockage at the motor throat, overpressurizing the system and causing it to explode. In a haste to meet self-imposed deadlines, the team had made small design changes without validation, which ultimately led to the motor's failure.

New Launches

Since then, they have gone back to the fundamentals of composite motor development, focusing on motor and propellant design and manufacturing quality. They successfully built and fired an O-class motor in January and are planning a string of 38mm motor tests to validate additional thermal technologies. They plan to test a new R motor by the end of the Spring 2021 semester.

“I have served on some amazing teams in the U.S. Marines, as a Technical Rescuer in Boulder County and with numerous other organizations, but I would have to say the students of SRL are one of the best I have ever seen,” Laceby said. “SRL is a family, a devoted team that gives me hope for our future.”

SRL’s culture encourages members to embark on difficult projects with one another, unafraid of diving into the deep end and eager to learn.

At SRL, the only requirement for entry is a desire to learn. Rocketry is not easy, and the students of SRL understand this, but there are few better feelings than standing at the launch pad and seeing a rocket roar to life, powerfully ascending into the atmosphere, making a substantial step towards space.

Join the team.

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Faculty recognized with 3 governor’s awards for high-impact research

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 18:46:32 +0000

Faculty recognized with 3 governor’s awards for high-impact research Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/01/2019 - 12:46

The award recognizes 13 people, four of them affiliated with various departments and group at CU Boulder: Greg Rieker, Caroline Alden, Sean Coburn, and Robert Wright. Their colleagues are from NIST and LongPath Technologies.

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$3.2 million NSF grant will help expand TeachEngineering digital library

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 17:25:58 +0000

$3.2 million NSF grant will help expand TeachEngineering digital library Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/01/2019 - 11:25

Josh Rhoten

Students working to create material for the TeachEngineering digital library. The library is run through the ITL Program and made up of over 1,900 educational videos, lesson plans, hands-on engineering activities and maker challenges.

The Integrated Teaching and Learning (ITL) Program recently won a $3.2 million award from the National Science Foundation to increase the impact of the TeachEngineering digital library. It is the largest award in the program’s 25-year history and will propel the K-12 engineering library’s growth well into the future.

The TeachEngineering library is a free, online collection of kindergarten through 12th grade curricular materials that focuses on integrating engineering into science and math learning. The library is run through the ITL Program and is made up of over 1,900 educational videos, lesson plans, hands-on engineering activities and maker challenges.

Much of the original funding to create TeachEngineering was provided by the NSF as well. This new funding will be used to increase the number of annual users on the site and to offer professional development opportunities for teachers across the high school and early grade levels. One specific goal in the award is re-aligning TeachEngineering’s curriculum to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for K-12 teachers and creating new hands-on engineering curricular for teachers in grades K-2. That is important, as K-12 teachers are trying to meet the first-ever NGSS requirement for engineering design to be taught within science curricula.

Other activities in the grant include creating new tools, practices and marketing strategies to cultivate an interactive community of practice among teachers, engaging them to help with wider adoption and ownership of the library.

“My co-PIs – Engineering Plus faculty Mike Soltys and Malinda Zarske – and I are supported by a tremendous ITL Program professional team, video-producing engineering students, a user research team at Oregon State University, and a search engine optimization consultant. It takes a multi-disciplinary village to create, support, curate and broadly share the TeachEngineering product with over 3.5 million users annually. And we have a darn good village,” said Jacquelyn Sullivan, the founding co-director of the ITL program and principle investigator on the TeachEngineering NSF award.

While Sullivan and CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Science led the original creation of the library, about 70 engineering colleges (mostly through NSF-funded grants) are partners in developing K-12 engineering curricular materials for the collection.

Sullivan said the overall goal of the collection and the new award is to democratize engineering education – getting it into the hands of K-12 educators and students no matter where they are, from rural communities to underserved schools.

Jacquelyn Sullivan

 “The digital library is full of hands-on, classroom-tested curriculum that is available for free to educators everywhere, with no fees or materials or kits to buy from us, ever. The materials required to teach most of the design-focused curriculum can be purchased at a hardware or grocery store,” Sullivan said.

 This is the eighth round of NSF funding for TeachEngineering, in addition to other significant foundation and private gifts. The digital library has been growing and widely used for 17 years, experiencing 33% growth in users (mostly teachers) in the last year.

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Partnership puts valuable water quality information from Western Slope online

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 18:47:07 +0000

Partnership puts valuable water quality information from Western Slope online Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/30/2019 - 12:47

Josh Rhoten

Ken Nordstrom, the environmental health director for the Delta County Health Department, looks at a physical version of the map.

Results from a new voluntary survey of private drinking water quality on the Western Slope through a partnership between CU Boulder, Delta County and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are available online now.

Prior to this study, there was no data on private drinking water quality in this six-county area, and the findings have proven to be relevant to many residents. Of the 457 wells analyzed in the survey, 11% have arsenic concentrations exceeding the Colorado primary drinking water standard maximum contaminant level. Additionally, 15% of the well water that was tested exceeded at least one primary drinking water contaminant standard from the state.

Residents can explore results through an interactive online map created by Holly Miller as part of her recently completed master’s degree in the Environmental Engineering Program at CU Boulder. The site shows locations for all the tested wells, provides links to request free testing kits and houses detailed water-quality information.

Learn More

View the online database and map Fact sheet on arsenic from the CDC Environmental Engineering Program Office for Outreach and Engagement

Miller’s work was partially funded through a CU Boulder Outreach Award and was a small part of a study funded by the CDC into this issue. That larger project is entering its fifth year and is led locally by the Health Department of Delta County with work being done in Delta, Gunnison, Hinsdale, Montrose, Ouray and San Miguel counties, where about half of the residents are on private wells.

Samples for the survey came from volunteers in those communities. Miller’s work was done under Professor Joe Ryan, who said the database was an important step toward public awareness. That is because water quality is an important factor in overall health, but privately owned wells are unregulated and mostly untested for things like arsenic. Putting the survey results online gives residents, many of whom rely on well water, information about their home’s water quality and that of their neighbors so they can make informed health decisions.

“With the maps she created, you can see if you are in an area that already has problems, or areas you may want to avoid if you are drilling a new well,” said Ryan, who is based in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering.

Arsenic in groundwater can occur naturally, or it can come from human sources like agriculture, where it was used as a pesticide, or mining operations. Ingestion can have short-term effects, including nausea and fatigue, as well as long-term effects like skin thickening and discoloration. Ryan said that more testing was needed, but the source of the higher levels in this case was likely geologic. He added that better understanding of that aspect would be valuable when making decisions about new wells and development needs in those communities.

Ken Nordstrom, the environmental health director for the Delta County Health Department, said that without a healthy drinking water source, you cannot have a healthy community.

“CU Boulder has helped us develop this resource for individual homeowners to ensure that they have a healthy drinking water supply,” he said.

Holly Miller

Miller has since gotten a job with the state of Nevada. She also presented her findings from the project at the American Geophysical Union’s 2018 Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C. Since then, other counties have contacted her for advice on setting up similar databases she said.

“Collaborating with Delta County has been a great asset for my professional career. I gained valuable research and outreach skills, which ultimately created the foundation for my current position where I work as the project manager for my program’s geographical information systems database used to map information about abandoned mine-land sites across the state,” she said.

The project is nearing completion, and sample kits have now been sent to approximately 1,000 volunteers. From that group, results have been returned to over 750 of them. Miller said the plan is to update the interactive map by the end of the year, and the Delta County Environmental Health Department staff is planning to survey residents in the counties to identify the impacts this project has had on helping private well owners keep their water safe.

Ryan said this type of work was just as important for students in his lab starting their careers as it is to the communities they are serving.

“This type of work is important because I can bring students into it – but it isn’t just having them take samples and analyzing them. It's a good case where we are getting them into a mode where they are trying to find out the client’s problem and the best way to address it,” he said. “This kind of work provides extra opportunities for students and real benefits to communities we work with.”

Results from a new volunteer survey of private drinking water quality on the Western Slope through a partnership between CU Boulder, Delta County and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are available online now.

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Vets2STEM career expo connects veterans to national labs

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 21:35:06 +0000

Vets2STEM career expo connects veterans to national labs Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/24/2019 - 15:35

Matthew Goodman

CU Boulder is co-hosting a unique opportunity for military veterans on Nov. 8. Vets2STEM is a career expo hosted at the Colorado School of Mines in partnership with Mines and Colorado State University. The event is open to all Colorado veteran students.

Vets2STEM will introduce veterans to employment opportunities available at national defense and energy laboratories. It will also be a great chance to learn about the programs available at all three universities that can serve as pipelines into those STEM careers. These programs, which are varied at each institution, focus on technical skills that are well suited to the national labs.

Nine of the national labs will be in attendance on Nov. 8. The event will include special guest speakers, veteran panels, tech demonstrations and lab exhibits.

This is a rare opportunity for veterans to get acquainted with the long-term benefits of working at one of the 17 Department of Energy labs spread across the nation. Colorado is home to over 400,000 Veterans, one national lab, and many defense contractors, all of which allow Colorado to play an important role in filling current and future employment needs. 92% of the Department of Energy occupation codes are technical, while 62% combine some level of STEM training. Our veterans are strongly positioned to fill jobs within these labs. Programs in engineering, advanced manufacturing, circuitry, welding, advanced technology, etc. are all key to said lab positions.

Bill Doe, research development manager in the College of Engineering and Applied Science and an Army engineer veteran, said the energy sector – particularly renewable energy – is a career field that fits very well with skills people acquire in the military. ”Renewables are on the rise within the military sector, both operationally and at military installations,” he said. “As such, many veterans already have hands-on experience with these technologies and understand their importance to long-term energy security for the nation. The solar and wind energy sectors have been very supportive of hiring veterans.”

The importance of connecting the veteran community to these national labs will continue to grow as national labs look to fill thousands of high-wage STEM positions over the next five years.

Attendees are highly encouraged to bring their resume. The event is free, and lunch and a T-shirt will be provided.

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Popovic’s time in Spain fosters new research collaborations

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 14:26:45 +0000

Popovic’s time in Spain fosters new research collaborations Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/24/2019 - 08:26

Josh Rhoten

Popovic with colleagues and graduate students in Spain (middle). Her host, Prof. Luis Enrique Garcia Munoz from UC3M is third from the right.

Distinguished Professor Zoya Popovic recently returned from Spain, having lived there as part of a Chair of Excellence Program with the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M).

“It was a really wonderful experience, especially because I was not aware of many of the interesting Spanish customs before I actually lived there,” said Popovic, who is the Lockheed Martin Corporation Endowed Chair of Radio Frequency Engineering in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. “I learned a lot about their history and politics, but also built a lot of connections with students and faculty. These are already proving beneficial through student exchanges and project partnerships.”

During her time at UC3M, Popovic was part of the Department of Signal Theory and Communications. Her research with that group focused on improving sensitivity of room-temperature microwave and millimeter-wave detectors, with applications in radio-telescope receivers for cosmic microwave background observations, high-frequency field measurements, imaging and quantum technology. Popovic said that this research area is not her main research direction at CU Boulder and therefore provided a nice change of pace.

Zoya spent six months in Madrid. During that time she traveled frequently to give lectures and seminars at many universities across Spain. She said the visit has also resulted in a lot of cross-collaboration with researchers she met in the form of papers and faculty exchanges.

This year, she is hosting two faculty from Spain through Fulbright and Spanish Fellowships and will host several students and postdocs at CU Boulder through research projects. Her CU Boulder students already have several joint papers with students she co-advised in Madrid. She will also receive an honorary doctorate from UC3M in 2020.

The Chair of Excellence program at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid is awarded by nomination and in partnership with Banco Santander, a Spanish multinational commercial bank. To date there have been 11 public calls for candidates, each with a budget between €950,000 and €1,200,000 co-financed by both institutions. This has allowed 10 to 20 researchers of international prestige to spend periods of six months to a year at UC3M. Previous researchers have come from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Cambridge University, to name a few.

Distinguished Professor Zoya Popovic recently returned from Spain, having lived there as part of a Chair of Excellence Program with the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M).

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Schools of molecular ‘fish’ could one day improve display screens

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 14:59:48 +0000

Schools of molecular ‘fish’ could one day improve display screens Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/23/2019 - 08:59

Scientists at CU Boulder are using a type of material called liquid crystals to create incredibly small, swirling schools of “fish,” according to a study published recently in the journal Nature Communications.

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Research group advances perovskite solar technology

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 15:47:38 +0000

Research group advances perovskite solar technology Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/21/2019 - 09:47

In a new research paper published in Nature Energy earlier this month, Professor Michael McGehee and his research team demonstrate how to dramatically improve the stability of tin-containing perovskite material used in stacked solar cells, allowing for up to 30% power conversion efficiency.

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Creating the internet of living things

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 19:32:30 +0000

Creating the internet of living things Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/18/2019 - 13:32

Josh Rhoten

Associate Professor Gregory Whiting and Research Associate Nikolaus Setiawan discuss electrical measurements. Photo credit: Cameron Douglas

Aerospace engineering undergraduate student Charlotte Bellerjeau working in the Whiting Lab

Farmers struggle to track, shape and understand the composition their soil in real-time.

They know how much fertilizer they spread, or how much water they used, but they don’t necessarily know how those inputs change over time and space. That information just isn’t available with current technology. But what if they had a sensor that was small enough to be out of the way and cheap enough to be tilled under when the season changed? What if that sensor was one of hundreds spread across a field, uploading information to the cloud for exact daily – even hourly – actionable updates on soil conditions? What if the sensor was inside the plant itself?

That kind of interdisciplinary technology could solve massive problems related to food supply and energy conservation. Work at the College of Engineering and Applied Science could make it a reality through several new projects from the USDA and National Science Foundation.

It all starts with faculty and students in the Multifunctional Materials Interdisciplinary Research Theme who came together last year through seed funding to explore issues and share ideas related to printable electronics – a growing strength in the college and research interest across campus.

Printed electronics is a broad term for various methods of mass-producing electronics, from 3D to inkjet printing. When low cost, distributed systems are needed these printing methods present an advantage over traditional methods in computer chip manufacturing, for example, where cleanrooms and trained workers are needed, upping costs and production time. They also allow for flexibility and customization, both of which are key reasons why such approaches are becoming important in the fields of medicine and communication.

Using these relatively new methods, devices such as sensors can be manufactured quickly and cheaply and linked together easily, ushering in an era of connectivity today known as the internet of things. Researchers in the Multifunctional Materials Interdisciplinary Research Theme, however, are taking that idea in a new direction with what they call the internet of living things.

Think of the smart thermostat in your house. It can talk to other devices through the Wi-Fi and react in real time to your commands no matter where you are. Now think about having that ability housed in a plant. You could get detailed soil readings based on what it is pulling from the ground or have the plants release a chemical in unison across the field to protect from incoming predators.

Associate Professor Gregory Whiting is leading the work at CU Boulder. He said that print processing allows his team to make electronics that fit in with the natural environment and a variety of demands. Fertilizer or water use, he said, is a perfect example of the ideas at play.

New and ongoing partnerships in this area

“SitS NSF-UKRI: Phytoelectronic Soil Sensing" – The $800,000 CU funding for this project comes from the National Science Foundation with additional support from the United Kingdom Research and Innovation in partnership with the University of Cambridge. CU Boulder investigators are Professor Robert McLeod, and Associate Professor Gregory Whiting.
“SitS USDA_UKRI: Detecting soil degradation and restoration through a novel coupled sensor and machine learning framework” – The $800,000 CU funding for this project comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture with additional support from the United Kingdom’s Natural Environment Research Council for collaboration with the Lancaster and Manchester Universities in the UK. CU Boulder investigators are Professor Jason Neff, Associate Professors Evan Thomas and Whiting.
“Precision Agriculture using Networks of Degradable Analytical Sensors (PANDAS)” – $1.6M of funding for this project comes from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E). This project is carried out in collaboration with Colorado State University and the University of California Berkeley. Whiting is the principal investigator for this project.
“Precision AGricultural and Ecological Sensing (PAGES)” – Funding for this project comes from the Multifunctional Materials Interdisciplinary Research Theme. CU Boulder investigators include McCleod, Whiting and Assistant Professor Tam Vu.

“If you build sensors in the conventional way to address these needs, you would likely have thousands of devices spread out over a field that would likely be very expensive, require significant maintenance and would potentially create a lot of electronic waste” he said. “By using printed sensors based on materials and structures that can be readily integrated into the soils or plants, you get a more appropriate solution in equilibrium with the surrounding environment. It would not have been possible to get to this point without building from the work in Robert McLeod’s lab developing organic electronics that could be used for sensing in human tissue.”

McLeod, a professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, gave credit for the idea and application to Whiting and the connections forged in the interdisciplinary theme. He said he had never gone from great idea to significant funding so fast, noting that it was more than just having coffee with potential collaborators.

“The theme let us address these calls from a systems wide level, which is rare in proposals. It also let us chew on this idea and get feedback from a lot of people to really refine it before getting a little seed funding,” he said. “It is also rare for a materials guy like myself to be involved in the other end of the process, or to work with computer science researchers on problems like getting the data off the sensors. That kind of early collaboration helps the idea become really strong.”

Environmental Studies Program Professor Jason Neff is working with McLeod and Whiting in this area through an award related to the development of new sensors to monitor soil degradation.

“The combination of cutting-edge approaches in engineering and material science and campus wide capabilities in the environmental sciences is something that is really unique to CU Boulder" said Neff, who is the director of the Sustainability Innovation Lab at Colorado.

McLeod said the applications of this work could go beyond agriculture. It could be applied in natural ecosystems or places where humans have had an impact as well.

Researchers in the Multifunctional Materials Interdisciplinary Research Theme are trying to create the internet of living things.

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ATLAS Institute Research Showcase set for Friday

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 20:48:57 +0000

ATLAS Institute Research Showcase set for Friday Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/16/2019 - 14:48

Research and creative work exposition, laboratory and studio tours, demos, poster presentations, and discussion with faculty members and graduate students.

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