The University of Utah Research Foundation has appointed Katharine Ku to its board of directors. Ku recently retired from Stanford University’s Office of Technology Licensing after serving as executive director for 27 years. A world-renowned expert in technology transfer, she developed nine principles for university technology licensing that have been adopted by tech transfer offices […]

University of Utah Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Dan Reed announced that Peter Trapa has accepted an offer to serve as the next dean of the College of Science. Trapa is currently chair of the university’s Department of Physics & Astronomy and previously served as the chair of the Department of Mathematics and special […]

It may not be too long before the skies of Salt Lake City will be buzzing with drones delivering packages, medical supplies, performing mountain rescues or shuttling passengers. When that happens, the last thing anyone wants is an airborne version of Los Angeles traffic jams. So a group of University of Utah students from the […]

Christopher Hacon, McMinn Presidential Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, can now add another honor of a lifetime to his already stellar resume: Election to the Royal Society of London. Hacon, born in England, is one of 50 eminent scientists elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, along with 10 Foreign Members, in […]

April 29, 2019 — Over 11 field seasons, between 1999 and 2010, ornithologist Çağan Şekercioğlu trekked through the forests and coffee farms of Costa Rica to study how tropical birds were faring in a changing agricultural landscape. Through painstaking banding of individual birds, Şekercioğlu asked whether the expansion of coffee plantations is reducing tropical bird […]

Contrary to what you may have been taught, water doesn’t always freeze to ice at 32 degrees F (zero degrees C). Knowing, or controlling, at what temperature water will freeze (starting with a process called nucleation) is critically important to answering questions such as whether or not there will be enough snow on the ski […]

All air-breathing vertebrates have a larynx—a structure of muscles and folds that protects the trachea and, in many animals, vibrates and modulates to produce a stunning array of sounds. But birds, although they have larynges (plural of larynx), use a different organ to sing. It’s low in the airway, down where the trachea branches to […]

The University of Utah’s commitment to undergraduate involvement in research will be on full display on Tuesday, April 9, as more than 500 undergraduate students, representing every college and more than 70 academic departments and schools, present their research projects in the 2019 Undergraduate Research Symposium. “The U strongly supports undergraduate research, with programs supported […]

Have you ever been running on a sidewalk making pretty good time, then hit a hill and slowed way down? If so, you’ve experienced how slope affects travel rates. For most of us, understanding how slope steepness impacts our speed is a matter of fitness. For others, such as wildland firefighters retreating from the fire […]

If a city experiences a major power outage due to a natural disaster or a cyberattack, it is vital to bring back power as soon as possible for first responders and critical infrastructure. University of Utah electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Masood Parvania and his team at his Utah Smart Energy Laboratory (U-Smart) have […]