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The outreach projects of Professor Michael Hannigan and Professor Shelly Miller have been selected to receive funding from the 2018-2019 CU Boulder Outreach Awards. The award is aimed to support faculty-led outreach and engagement projects that reflect public need. Every college and school is represented in these projects and combined award for all projects this year totals $460,000.  These projects impact 19,500 Coloradans through education, community-based initiatives and more.

Professor Shelly Miller is working with Professor Shivakant Mishra of the Department of Computer Science to empower neighboring communities to mitigate I-70 construction impacts. Central 70 (C70) is a project to widen a 10-mile stretch of I-70 through northeast Denver. This construction project will likely result in negative effects on community health, well-being and environmental health. The Elyria-Swansea community contains 7,218 residents with a high number of individuals living below the poverty line, having high unemployment and less than a high school education. The goal of this project is to first understand the impact of C70 on an environmental justice community using participatory research methods and community science data collection for three categories: impact on social relations, impact on wellbeing, and impact on the environment. Data will be used to investigate how physical measurements correspond to community wellbeing and connection. The project will then design and demonstrate new socio-technical tools for collecting and analyzing data and for communication and mitigation of impacts. Socio-technical systems will be developed in collaboration with the community directly affected, engaging community stakeholders as partners in design.

Professor Michael Hannigan and Senior Research Associate Daniel Knight of the Department of Mechanical Engineering are working on outreach in the area of air quality and environmental engineering in underserved rural K-12 schools in Colorado. Their Air Quality Inquiry project (AQIQ) is in its third year of integration into environmental science courses at five schools, adding Greeley West this current school year. Previous assessments results indicate that of underserved populations in engineering, 61% of participants are female, 33% are Hispanic and 41% are first generation in their families to attend college. This project aims to develop educationally impactful student driven air quality research projects that integrate CU Faculty and students. The goals of this project are to prepare air quality tools to provide for K-12 classrooms, prepare CU student mentors to support high school teachers and students in implementing air quality research projects and curriculum, and foster a relationship between CU’s College of Engineering and the Applied Sciences and School of Education to research learning experiences of participants and evaluate the program.