Ventures putting people first at ñ
Students gathered around an installation of Science on a Sphere® (SOS) developed at NOAA and CIRES (photo courtesy of SOS).
The ñ actively incubates and supports nonprofit and for-profit ventures with broad societal impact, from far-reaching educational and wellness tools to vaccine accessibility and water security.
(ñ Physics Education Research) and colleagues have been successfully broadening the reach of ñ’s for over two decades. In that time, she’s fielded accolades from around the world on the game-changing impacts the simulations have had on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students and teachers.
But one note stands out, from a teacher in an under-resourced school in Texas. She couldn’t buy the items she wanted to teach a course on electrical circuits and was grateful for PhET’s free and stimulating online simulations. “We can’t buy the batteries, lightbulbs and wires to bring these lessons to life for students, so you don’t know how much [PhET] means to us,” she said. Reflecting on the note, PhET director Perkins said, “It’s really energizing and touching to know our work has that level of impact.”
PhET, which originally stood for “Physics Education Technology,” continues to grow and now boasts over 170 open-access simulations in math, science and statistics. It has what Perkins calls “the largest global footprint of any outreach project at ñ.”
Since Nobel laureate Carl Wieman (ñ Physics) launched the project in 2002 with the hope of boosting scientific exploration at all levels, users have run over 1.7 billion online simulations, and many more offline.
When using simulations in his lectures, Wieman noticed how engaged his audience was and how memorable the lessons were. “I was struck by the fact they were quite effective for very different audiences. I could use the same simulations talking to a bunch of physics professors as I could talking to middle schoolers,” he said. “I knew enough about education to know that was just unheard of, that it was unprecedented to have something that could reach so widely.”
The influential project has expanded and been updated within the university to maximize its impact—an unusual setup, according to Bryn Rees, senior associate vice chancellor for innovation and partnerships. “If the university was solely focused on monetizing that tool, there’s no doubt the accessibility wouldn’t be what it is today,” he said. “When you think about what PhET’s done for K-12 education and STEM, the impact has been broad-reaching, lining up with a core value and educational goal of the university.” Despite knowing how impactful simulations can be, said Wieman,“[PhET’s] gone so far beyond my expectations.”
“Ensuring maximum social impact”
PhET is just one example of many innovations emerging from ñ that prioritize social good. With its supportive innovation ecosystem, the university fosters nonprofit and for-profit ventures across multiple departments and programs with a focus on positively influencing society. Other socially conscious ventures the university has incubated and supported in recent years include several focused on vaccine technology, mental health, clean water and carbon credits, and planetary science. “Economic development impacts are important, but we also can and do prioritize social impact,” said Rees, who also leads Venture Partners at ñ, the campus' commercialization arm.
VitriVax, co-founded a decade ago by (ñ Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology) and (ñ Chemical and Biological Engineering), is a mission-driven biotechnology company that developed a new way to stabilize and deliver vaccines.
The one-shot, thermo-stable (resistant to heat and not requiring refrigeration) system maximizes effectiveness and global accessibility to critical vaccines, preventing disease and saving lives.
That technology was born of a chance conversation in the corridor of ñ’s BioFrontiers Institute, according to Garcea, whose interest in developing innovative vaccines came from years devoted to studying viruses and caring for patients. From there, Garcea, Randolph and colleagues worked tirelessly to improve the vaccine delivery system. “One of the aims of BioFrontiers is to get the technology out of the laboratories and into use,” he said. “This is a good example of how that can happen. We’ve gone basically from the bench to somebody’s arm.”
Garcea credits the university with supporting both their research and spinout efforts. Helping the specially designed vaccines reach those most in need required an atypical licensing model, according to Rees. “The university came up with a creative licensing structure where we’re essentially waiving our royalties that we would normally charge the company for distribution of the product in countries below a certain wealth index,” he said.
Evan Thomas and doctoral student Whitney Knopp work together in the Mortenson Center lab with Virridy's "Lume" device for detecting water contamination (photo courtesy of the Mortenson Center).
With a similar desire to improve the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable people, (ñ Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering) founded, a company focused on water security and environmental resilience. The company invented and deploys satellite-linked sensors on water pumps in East Africa to monitor them remotely—greatly improving access to clean drinking water. That’s also critical to the region’s crops and livestock, and it reduces the carbon-intensive process of burning wood or fossil fuels to purify drinking water.
“Our most important accomplishment is that over five million people have received clean water for over 10 years. So about 50-million-person years of clean water because of the methodologies that our team developed starting over 15 years ago,” said Thomas,now director of the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering & Resilience.
“We’re very proud of that.” Virridy and the Mortensen Center are currently on track to support another five million people with clean water in East Africa by 2030, he said.
That clean water also comes with a carbon-reduction twist, which is critical as climate change intensifiespressure on water systems worldwide. In addition to commercializing some of its water monitoring technologies, Virridy is also bringing to market some of the Mortensen Center’s carbon credit business models, which generate revenue to fund clean water projects by reducing emissions from boiling water. “ñ 45 million carbon credits have been issued since 2010, using our methodology,” said Thomas.
Impactful programs, built on science and expertise
Students hear a presentation at an installation of Science on a Sphere® (SOS) developed at NOAA and CIRES (photo courtesy of SOS).
Other university efforts prioritizing social good include , a six-foot diameter globe onto which planetary data is projected. The crowd-pleasing educational tool for all ages was developed at in collaboration with nearly two decades ago. “It was originally created by a scientist for scientists, and they quickly realized that it was great for outreach, and so that shifted our focus,” said Beth Russell, SOS senior program coordinator at CIRES’ Center for Education, Engagement and Evaluation.
Since its debut at ñ's Fiske Planetarium, SOS is now installed in over 200 museums, universities, government facilities and private companies with an annual audience of over 67 million people. SOS brings to life over 600 data sets with animations of often-complex environmental processes, including climate change.
“Climate can be a really hard topic to engage the public in, but being able to show climate models and how things are changing, and looking at different scenarios playing out over time has been really useful,” said Russell. “Our climate models are really impactful.”
When people first see SOS in action, said Russell, “Awe is the main reaction. We find that with a captivated audience, we really can teach someone more than with just a PowerPoint presentation on the same data sets.” In addition to its room-sized display, which can’t fit in the average classroom, researchers havedeveloped a flat screen version called SOS Explorer, available as a desktop application and a free mobile app, which has already been downloaded over 25,000 times.
When Russell joined the SOS team 18 years ago, the project seemed like a fun, short-term one. “Inever thought that it was going to go and go, and it’s still expanding and growing,” she said. “We’re always pushing to inform more people. We just want everyone to be showing this scientifically accurate content out in the world.”
That mission is also critical to the impactful programs being developed at the Renée Crown Wellness Institute, according to its director, Sona Dimidjian. “A key part of the Crown Institute research commitment is to collaboratively design and study programs that have a strong scientific evidence base and have the potential for real-world impact in people’s lives,” she said.
The Crown Institute’s work is built on multiple collaborations, both with the deep expertise of ñ researchers and with the communities for whom the research is designed, said Dimidjian, whois also a professor in theDepartment of Psychology and Neuroscience.
“It’s a different way of doing research, and we think that’s a big part of the impact that we’ve had in the first five years, reaching many thousands of kids and young people, educators and schools and families.” According to Dimidjian, institute programming so far has reached over 30,000 kids and young people, 2,000 educators and 5,000 parents and family members.
An interactive exhibit of InsideU (photo courtesy of the Renée Crown Wellness Institute).
Three of its major initiatives revolve around emotional learning and regulation. is a learning tool aimed at improving mental and emotional wellness, inspired by Disney/Pixar’s characters from the animated film Inside Out and developed with their digital design experts. The Crown Institute officially launched their collaboration with Pixar Animation Studios in 2020 alongside child and clinical psychologists, the mental health team at Boys and Girls Clubs of Metro Denver, and youth participants in its clubs. On the benefits of InsideU, one child remarked, “When you’re sad, you can express your feelings…and it’s better to express your feelings because then people know what’s happening and then when you say it, they can help you every day and to go through it together.”
Another online program, , is based on learning and employing mindfulness to reduce prenatal and postpartum depression, which occurs in 20 percent of women. It was adapted from the Mindful Mood Balance program, where Dimidjian and colleagues studied several hundred adults in partnership with Kaiser Permanente. "We found that people who participated in this mindful mood balance program online relative to usual care had significant reductions in their residual depression symptoms,” said Dimidjian. The Crown Institute is now adapting that program for college students with histories of depression and suicidal ideation.
A third initiative, “Compassion and Dignity for Educators,” has focused successfully on how developing the skills of compassion for self and others can protect the passion that brought K-12 educators to their profession while reducing stress and burnout. Dimidjian said the response to the program has been extremely positive. After taking the course, one elementary school teacher commented, “…I am less reactive, I have strategies to help bring me back to the present moment, there is more time spent reflecting on and considering the perspective of others, I am more patient… I reflect on gratitude each day, my heart feels more open to the world and the beauty that is within it.” The institute now hopes to expand that model to K-12 educators in Colorado and higher education.
The Crown Institute has worked with Venture Partners to make their programs free, scalable and widely accessible, said Dimidjian. “Part of what we can do together is expand the boundary of what it means to be a researcher at ñ, which means that one’s work doesn't have to stop at publishing papers or speaking to one's academic colleagues,” she said. “Part of the research enterprise is also working collaboratively, envisioning how the kinds of innovations that are discovered within one’s academic research can live more fully and more stably in the world.”
She added, “ñ brings a strong spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship, which motivates us. We can powerfully enact those principles to build a future that is brighter than our current reality. And that ambition has always been at the heart of the scientific and scholarly enterprise.”
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