phd student

Utility Research Lab develops award-winning sustainability tech for 3D printing

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 22:11:29 +0000

Utility Research Lab develops award-winning sustainability tech for 3D printing Michael Kwolek Wed, 04/23/2025 - 16:11

Michael Kwolek

Over 460 million metric tons of plastic are created each year and only about 9% is recycled. This has led to ever-growing problems with waste disposal, litter, water contamination, microplastics and a host of other issues.

What if we could rethink our approach to plastics upstream in the manufacturing process before these problems manifest?

Michael Rivera, assistant professor and director of the Utility Research Lab, is doing just that, along with lab members Xin Wen, PhD student, and S. Sandra Bae, PhD candidate.

One of the challenges in recycling is that several types of plastic parts may be used to assemble a single item. These multi-material objects are more difficult, and in some cases near-impossible, to recycle because different plastics need to be processed independently, but cannot be easily separated.

A dissolvable solution

To improve sustainability in 3D printing, Rivera and his team propose using dissolvable interfaces between parts during assembly to simplify their separation for recycling at end-of-life. These interfaces can be made with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), polyvinyl butyral (PVB), high impact polystyrene (HIPS) or other materials.

Dissolvable materials like PVA are used as support structures, labels and other elements in 3D printed objects. The team goes further by printing PVA in objects themselves to simplify disassembly and recycling. To do so, they developed a computational design algorithm that automates the process of generating and cutting dissolvable interfaces in multi-material 3D-printed objects.

This idea is inspired by the concept of design for disassembly (DfD), “the consideration of ease of disassembly in the design process, aiming to enhance the efficiency of disassembling products by evaluating factors such as time, tools, and effort required for disassembly.”

For their work, the team has been awarded Best Paper (Top 1%) at CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Yokohama, Japan, for Enabling Recycling of Multi-Material 3D Printed Objects through Computational Design and Disassembly by Dissolution.

Sustainable benefits

The team won the Innovation award at ��ɫ��Ƶ’s 2025 Campus Sustainability Summit Student Ideas Showcase

The team has also found that their technique can improve the strength of bonds between different materials in a 3D-printed object. Wen notes, “We ran a bunch of tensile and shear tests that show that varying the parameters of the interface joints can increase the attachment strength” compared to standard multi-material printing.

Alternative manufacturing processes using lego-like building blocks can make reuse and recycling easier, but require more time to build and take apart. The Utility Research Lab’s techniques simplify both of these processes.

Results show their technique can allow for ~90% of the total mass of their designed objects to be recycled. The remaining 10% consists of dissolved material that also has potential for recyclability.

They note in their paper that “recycling 3D printed plastics is a key way to reduce their environmental impacts. Life-cycle assessment has shown recycling 3D printed objects made from PLA and PETG back into printing materials can reduce environmental impacts by more than 50%.”

Wen elaborates, “There are a couple ways you can recycle” these plastics. “There are some DIY recycling machines that you can buy or build off open source designs and there are companies like Printerior that recycle sorted and separated pieces.”

Currently, the team’s technique requires more time to print than conventional multi-material 3D prints due to increased complexity of printing requirements. But they believe with ongoing advancements in printing technology, much of that can be overcome.

For their efforts, the team work won the Innovation award at ��ɫ��Ƶ’s 2025 Campus Sustainability Summit Student Ideas Showcase.

Winner: Best Paper (top 1%) at CHI 2025

Designs for impact

The team has filed a provisional patent. Rivera explains, “We'd like to be able to license to existing CAD software companies and build an extension inside current 3D printing slicers” by PRUSA and other brands.

They also plan to engage with a local recycling facility this summer to connect the research they are doing in the lab to real-world applications by understanding the logistics and methodologies of plastics recycling at scale.

Looking even further, Rivera sees opportunities in applying this research in the much-larger injection molding industry, a common manufacturing process where molten materials like glass, plastic and metal are injected into a mold to create a form. A pen for example may have separate injection molded parts for the shaft, clip and rubber grip.

Rivera details, “Our algorithm does not really care about the [manufacturing] process per se. If we were to move to injection molding, we would do a multi-stage [process] where you mold the first material, inject the dissolvable on top, and then do another one.”

The team is optimistic for the future of this research.

For those in the maker community, they have developed a plug-in for Grasshopper, a visual programming language in Rhino used for design and fabrication. It is available upon request for non-commercial use.

As for next steps, Rivera says, “For us to have long-term impact, we need the people who run the companies that make the tools. Our conversations with people doing injection molding will be enlightening.”

Recycling is extremely difficult for things built with more than one type of plastic. Michael Rivera and the Utility Research Lab team have developed a novel way to disassemble 3D-printed objects for easy recycling.

Off

Traditional

White

��ɫ��Ƶ further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 20:03:22 +0000

��ɫ��Ƶ further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program Michael Kwolek Wed, 04/16/2025 - 14:03

��ɫ��Ƶ ranks number 11 among public university peers for its engineering graduate programs according to U.S. News and World Report Best Graduate Schools rankings for 2025-26.

Off

Traditional

White

Biodegradable nails make manicures more sustainable

Michael Kwolek — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 16:30:54 +0000

Biodegradable nails make manicures more sustainable Michael Kwolek Thu, 04/03/2025 - 10:30

ATLAS researchers developed press-on nails that are biodegradable, colorful and endlessly customizable with open-source technology and low-cost biomaterials for a more sustainable fashion moment.

Off

Traditional

White

ATLAS PhD Kate Starbird wins PECASE award for research on crisis informatics and disinformation

Michael Kwolek — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:50:44 +0000

ATLAS PhD Kate Starbird wins PECASE award for research on crisis informatics and disinformation Michael Kwolek Mon, 02/03/2025 - 10:50

Michael Kwolek

The ATLAS community is excited to learn that Kate Starbird, PhD (Technology, Media and Society ‘12) was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

The PECASE Award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. The awards are conferred annually at the White House following recommendations from participating agencies.

Now associate professor at the University of Washington in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, Starbird came to ATLAS on the recommendation of Bobby Schnabel, Computer Science department external chair and professor. She had a BS in computer science and a desire to broaden her expertise. The ATLAS Technology, Media and Society program (now Creative Technology and Design) seemed the perfect fit.

Schnabel recalls, “I was fortunate to meet Kate in summer 2006 connected to a visit to Seattle for the National Center for Women & Information Technology. Kate had just finished her professional basketball career and was exploring options for grad school, and from our discussion it was clear the multidisciplinary ATLAS PhD was a great fit for her interests. We were thrilled that she chose to enroll at CU, where she was a star student, and her career has blossomed ever since.”

Starbird began her research career with Leysia Palen, professor, founding faculty, Department of Information Science, who was conducting pioneering research in crisis informatics. They studied the use of social media during crisis events and developed mapping techniques to make the data useful to those affected, officials and volunteers. Together, they published the paper Working and sustaining the virtual "Disaster Desk" in CSCW 2013.

Over the years, Starbird found that rumors and misinformation spread on social media had become a bigger part of crisis events. Originally much of this was accidental, but in time it became clear that intentional disinformation was sinking into the infrastructure of social media. This has since become the greater focus of her research.

Palen was effusive in describing Starbird’s impact: “Kate demonstrated early on in her PhD degree that she is not only a gifted scholar, but a generous one. I saw it then and I see it today: as the leading pioneer in disinformation research, Dr. Starbird offers the fruits of her talents in ways that are intended to protect and improve our society. She is beloved and needed.”

Starbird notes the importance of the interdisciplinary nature of her work. “We're blending this understanding of technology, this understanding of media—and media is vastly reconfigured by internet technology and how it's been used in the last 15 to 25 years—and then the impacts, not just individually, but on society at large.”

This overlap of disciplines is signature of what makes ATLAS special. Our community members apply elements of engineering, design, and the humanities to analyze problems and develop sophisticated responses to them.

Design thinking is a key aspect of this approach. Starbird notes, “There are all sorts of folks that come into the space of studying mis- and disinformation from political science or other [disciplines]. I'm looking at what it is about the design of these information spaces and how people are using [them] that are shaping not just how information flows, but all of these other broader phenomena. So I do think design is critical in my work.”

Many of us can feel overwhelmed or even hopeless when it comes to navigating the current media landscape. From her perspective as a leading expert in the field of mis- and disinformation, Starbird offers some advice for staying engaged and informed:

I would approach information spaces right now with a lot of humility in the sense of not being overconfident about what you're seeing. We all have a tendency to think that the problem is someone else, and yet we know that there's a lot of misinformation out there. There's a lot of propaganda out there that individuals play a role in spreading. Sometimes that's aligned with where you want the world to go and then also in some cases, we become pawns in somebody else's political game.
In terms of how we approach information spaces, try not to tune everything out—I don't think that's a good idea. We need to be aware of what's happening. Definitely take breaks—there's a lot coming out. It can be really depressing at the moment for some of us and understanding that you don't want to be spending 24/7 in some of these information spaces, but do spend half an hour, spend an hour and be intentional about it.
I also don't want people to be too skeptical because [if] we get too skeptical of everything, then we tune out. Focus on learning what we can trust rather than not trusting anything. Try to build up a set of sources that you really feel you can trust. Look them up, look at who funds them. Where did they come from? How long have they been around? Spend some time with those.
When you go to social media, you don't get to determine what comes at you, especially if you're on TikTok and some of these algorithmic [platforms]. Be critical there, but also learn to find information sources that you can trust.

For more information on Kate Starbird’s work, refer to her page on the University of Washington website.

Photo credit: Doug Parry / University of Washington Information School

Kate Starbird (ATLAS PhD) was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the U.S. government’s highest honor for early-career researchers. Now an associate professor at the University of Washington, Starbird’s groundbreaking research in crisis informatics and disinformation highlights the value of interdisciplinary engineering and design.

Off

Traditional

White

Students collaborate on NSF NCAR exhibit that highlights surprising climate science

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 21:45:27 +0000

Students collaborate on NSF NCAR exhibit that highlights surprising climate science Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/07/2024 - 15:45

Michael Kwolek

It’s one thing to study how the relief and albedo of the ice sheets affected weather patterns during the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago. And it’s a whole other thing to develop an interactive, engaging museum exhibit on the subject for general audiences. But that’s just what teams from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR), NOAA and ATLAS managed to do.

Millennia ago, ice sheets formed over huge swaths of North America that were nearly as tall as some of our continent’s highest mountains. They were so massive that they essentially created their own weather.

Former CIRES postdoc Dillon Amaya (now at NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory) studied these weather phenomena along with Kris Karnauskas, CIRES fellow and associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, with NSF funding.

Researchers long hypothesized that the ice’s massive scale during the Last Glacial Maximum was enough to block the jet stream and change weather patterns sweeping in from the Pacific Ocean. For example, back then the area around what is today Southern California was much wetter while the Pacific Northwest was relatively drier. Today that is reversed.

Through advanced computer simulations, the CIRES team discovered that albedo creates a cooling effect that alters atmospheric circulation in ways that cannot be explained solely by the sheer size of ice sheets. Albedo is a measure of the amount of light reflected off of a surface—and ice sheets reflect a lot of sunlight, significantly impacting wind patterns. The research showed the Pacific Ocean was the driver behind the changes.

Translating Complex Research
In spring 2022, ATLAS offered a class called Design a Science Exhibit for ATLAS and Computer Science students. It centered on designing approachable museum exhibits that translate hard science for everyday people. Led by ATLAS director Mark Gross and adjunct faculty member Wayne Seltzer in collaboration with Eddie Goldstein from the Denver Nature and Science Museum, student teams partnered with researchers and museum specialists to prototype exhibitions that incorporated coding, materials selection, fabrication and storytelling.

Gross notes, “We should be teaching our engineers to communicate with broad audiences, particularly around climate change. We might do good science and engineering, but we’re not always good at communicating it to the public.”

A team of ��ɫ��Ƶ students formed a group to translate the CIRES ice sheet research into an exhibit prototype, including, ATLAS PhD student, David Hunter; Natasha Smith (MS Environment, Environmental Policy); and ATLAS undergraduate students Caileigh Hudson, Logan Turner and Julia Tung.

Seltzer explains, “The research paper that inspired this exhibit is not all that accessible to readers who are not climate scientists. The students focused on what they decided was essential knowledge—the factors that result in an ice age and how computer models can help us predict climate change.”

Experimenting with Form
The team originally conceived of a sandbox as the project medium. As you moved the sand around to build different topographies, visual projections overlaid from above would show how weather patterns change. The idea made sense in theory, but practical stipulations (sand can be challenging to manage in a museum space) pushed the team in a different direction.

Hunter details this evolution, “We made little blocks that represent [topographic features], and then you could put the blocks on top of each other so you could sculpt [a landscape.] As a team, we went about designing and building the whole rig and had a prototype by the end of the semester, and we got to show it alongside everyone else's work at NCAR.”

NSF NCAR science educators were so impressed with the prototype that they invited the team to work on a permanent installation.

Making it Real

The biggest challenge then became orchestrating all the different people and components involved in developing a functional exhibit that could live for the long-term with as little ongoing maintenance as possible. Hunter notes, “There’s the digital prototype building, but then there’s the physical make-this-real part as well as the education part and ensuring visitors would get the right message.”

After two years of iterative collaboration with scientists, curators, coders, fabricators and educators, the exhibit is now officially on permanent display at the Mesa Lab Visitor’s Center. Thousands of guests each year will be able to explore how massive ice sheets can alter the climate in surprising ways.

Amaya related, “This was probably one of the most gratifying experiences of my scientific career. It's not often that a piece of research like this leads to such tangible educational outcomes, so I'm super proud of our team for seeing it through! It's my hope that this exhibit can help illustrate some of these exotic climate interactions so that visitors can leave with a better physical intuition for how and why things were so wildly different.”

If you go:

NSF NCAR Mesa Lab Visitor’s Center
1850 Table Mesa Drive
Boulder, CO

Free Admission

Hours:
Monday - Friday: 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. MT
Saturday, Sunday & Holidays: 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. MT

An interdisciplinary team transforms complex research into an interactive museum exhibit on how ice sheets influenced weather millennia ago.

Off

Traditional

White

Colorado-based Computer Graphics Professionals Make Their Mark at SIGGRAPH 2024

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 16:30:29 +0000

Colorado-based Computer Graphics Professionals Make Their Mark at SIGGRAPH 2024 Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 08/02/2024 - 10:30

ATLAS community members, including professor Ellen Do and PhD student Ruhan Yang, presented at this year's conference in Denver.

Off

Traditional

White

ATLAS PhD student deploys papercraft to make engineering tangible and fun

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 19:50:41 +0000

ATLAS PhD student deploys papercraft to make engineering tangible and fun Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/30/2024 - 13:50

ATLAS PhD student Ruhan Yang blends papercraft and circuit design to make engineering more tangible, accessible and fun for tinkerers of all ages.

Off

Traditional

White

Public-private partnership drives attention for ATLAS research in augmented and mixed reality

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 16:41:59 +0000

Public-private partnership drives attention for ATLAS research in augmented and mixed reality Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/18/2024 - 10:41

Michael Kwolek

Partnerships between universities and industry can yield important research and commercial breakthroughs. ATLAS professor Ellen Do has worked to cultivate relationships between ��ɫ��Ƶ and industry players, including as a member of the Pervasive Personalized Intelligence (PPI) Center, to support graduate students and enhance opportunities for commercialization of ATLAS research.

The PPI Center, which recently concluded its tenure, was founded “with a mission of bringing industry and university talent together to solve the intelligence challenges faced by software and computer engineers in Internet of Things systems." It operated under the supervision of the National Science Foundation and included members from NEC, Intel and Trimble.

“It’s been such a good experience. We’ve learned a lot. Ellen Do and her team have helped to expand our thinking and encouraged us to explore new areas.” - Dr. Haifeng Chen, Head of Data Science Department at NEC Laboratories, and his colleague Kai Ishikawa, Principal Researcher (PPI Center event recap)

The PPI Center’s Spring 2024 Industry Advisory Board Meeting in Portland, OR, included a research poster session, and ATLAS students were honored with three of the four awards industry attendees voted on at the event.

Suibi Che-Chuan Weng, PhD student, won "Most Industry Ready" for Editing Reality: Empowering Users to Manipulate Reality through Addition, Erasing, and Modification with Speech to Prompt in Mixed Reality.
Rishi Vanukuru, PhD student, won "Most Impactful" for Asynchronous spatial guidance using mobile devices and Augmented Reality.
Ada Zhao, MS student, won "Most Impactful" for The WizARd and Apprentice: Augmented Reality Expert Capture for Training Novices.

2 more ATLAS PhD students participated: Krithik Ranjan presented PuppetGuide: Tangible Personalized Museum Tour Guides using LLMs and David Hunter presented Tangible Interaction with Object Detection and Large Language Models.

As for the experience participating in the PPI Center, Do says, “it is good to know that the industry is interested in supporting research and considers our research relevant.” She sees ways ATLAS could form partnerships within several industry sectors on a range of themes due to the multidisciplinary nature of the research conducted here.

Since their involvement in PPI started, Do and her team have had a series of meetings with mentors from global technology firms, discussing collaborative research opportunities.

Vanukuru is currently doing an internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge focused on spatial computing in its VR/AR group. Weng and Zhao are working on research in the ACME Lab this summer, extending the Editing Reality (and PuppetGuide), and WizARd and Apprentice projects with interns from the CU SPUR program. Zhao is also conducting a pilot study, interviewing laser cutter operating experts about how they would demonstrate operations and how they can annotate their demonstration using the WizARd prototype for novice learners. Hunter has embarked on an internship with Trimble this summer, while he and Ranjan are also working in the ACME Lab.

ACME Lab members built relationships with industry players through the Pervasive Personalized Intelligence (PPI) Center by collaborating on solutions to challenges in building Internet of Things systems. Three ATLAS PhD students took home awards from the PPI Center's Spring 2024 Advisory Board Meeting.

Off

Traditional

White

Could AI be the next college teaching assistant? Some Colorado professors believe so

Anonymous — Thu, 16 May 2024 17:07:17 +0000

Could AI be the next college teaching assistant? Some Colorado professors believe so Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/16/2024 - 11:07

Some innovative classrooms, including the Generative AI class at ATLAS, are experimenting with ways to apply new AI tools in learning.

Off

Traditional

White

How will AI shape the next generation?

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 16:50:04 +0000

How will AI shape the next generation? Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/10/2023 - 09:50

The Center for the Brain, A.I., and Child researches how ChatGPT influences parenting, how students use AI for creative expression and what culturally sensitive AI development means.

Off

Traditional

White