Welcome to the Rocky Mountain Regional Student Conference - April 5-6, 2019
Hosted by The Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO |
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A Brief History of Mines
Golden, first known as Golden City, was established in 1859 and served as a supply center for miners and settlers in the area. By 1866, Bishop George M. Randall arrived in the territory and, seeing a need for higher education facilities in the area, began planning for a university which would include a school of mines. In 1870, he opened the Jarvis Hall Collegiate School in a building just south of the town of Golden. In 1873, Mines opened under the auspices of the Episcopal Church and in 1874 the School of Mines became a territorial institution and has been a state institution since 1876 when Colorado attained statehood.
The first Colorado School of Mines Board of Trustees meeting was held in 1879, the first formal commencement for two graduates was held in 1883, the first international student graduated in 1889, and the first female student graduated in 1898. Courses offered to students during the early years of Colorado School of Mines included chemistry, metallurgy, mineralogy, mining engineering, geology, botany, math and drawing. The focus of the early academic programs was on gold and silver, and the assaying of those minerals. As the institution grew, its mission expanded to focus specifically on understanding the Earth, harnessing energy and sustaining the environment. |
Chemical Engineering at Mines
From its inception at Colorado School of Mines in 1952, the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department has focused on education and basic and applied research aimed at problems of national interest. Our undergrads pursue degrees that are consistently shown to have some of the highest lifetime returns on investment for a public US university.
The Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at Colorado School of Mines has a comprehensive research program and counts among its faculty seven NSF CAREER Award winners and one PECASE Award winner. |
CBE faculty have strong ties with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (Sumit Agarwal, Andrew Herring, Colin Wolden, J. Douglas Way), located just 10 minutes from Mines, as well as other regional federal laboratories involved in energy research and development. The Colorado Fuel Cell Center (Anthony Dean, Herring) is dedicated to improving the efficiency of chemical energy conversion, as well as adapting fuel cell technology for compatibility with emerging biofuels.
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The department houses the world’s foremost center dedicated to understanding the critical role of hydrates in energy production as well as their potential for energy storage and CO2 sequestration (Carolyn Koh, Amadeu Sum). The department also hosts the Colorado Institute for Energy, Materials and Computational Science (CIEMACS), which focuses on problems at the nexus of energy, materials and scientific computing. Another core strength of the department is in the applications of membranes and catalysis to carbon capture (Jennifer Wilcox), fuel cells (Herring), hydrogen purification (Way), as well as the design and synthesis of novel materials (Moises Carreon, Diego Gomez-Gualdron) for these applications.
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Faculty with expertise in bioengineering (Nanette Boyle, Kevin Cash, Melissa Krebs, David Marr, Keith Neeves) have research programs in biosensors, drug delivery, tissue engineering, lab-on-a-chip devices,and metabolic engineering. Much of this research is done in collaboration with regional medical institutions such as the Children’s Hospital of Colorado. The Mines Polymers and Complex Fluids (MPAC) group includes members of CBE (Marr, Neeves, Joseph Samaniuk, Ning Wu) and the Chemistry Department who focus on fundamental and applied research in soft matter.
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