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Sixteen members of a sled hockey team recently visited CU �鶹ӰԺ for what Alena Grabowski, BME faculty member, hopes will be the first in a series of studies aimed at helping sled hockey players improve their performance and minimize injury.

In a new perspective article, a team of engineers from the United States and Canada, including CU �鶹ӰԺ roboticist and BME faculty member Kaushik Jayaram, analyzed data from dozens of studies. In almost all cases, biological organisms, such as cheetahs, cockroaches and even humans, seem to be able to outrun their robot counterparts.

The research is one of the first studies to experimentally tease apart the competing reasons why people over age 65 might not be as quick on their feet as they used to be. The findings could one day give doctors new tools for diagnosing a range of illnesses, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and even depression and schizophrenia, said study co-author Alaa Ahmed, BME faculty member.

Jerome Fox, BME faculty member at the �鶹ӰԺ, has been named a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). NAI senior membership recognizes faculty, scientists and administrators for their contributions to innovation, including patents, licensing, commercialization and technologies aimed at benefiting society.

Assistant Professors Kayla Sprenger and Laurel Hind, Biomedical Engineering Program faculty, are on a collaborative mission to explore solutions for mitigating cognitive decline in individuals living with HIV. This decline can be caused by both the virus itself and the antiretroviral (ARV) drugs used to treat it.

In amusement park-like experiments on campus, aerospace engineers at CU �鶹ӰԺ are spinning, shaking and rocking people to study the disorientation and nausea that come from traveling from Earth to space and back again.

Sixteen teams of University of Colorado faculty, researchers and graduate student innovators competed for a combined $1.5 million in startup funding grants in this year’s Lab Venture Challenge (LVC). Judges from CU �鶹ӰԺ’s entrepreneurial network heard Shark-Tank-style pitches across two nights, one for innovations in biosciences and another for physical sciences and engineering.

�鶹ӰԺ researchers have developed a new way of counting microorganisms that works as much as 36 times faster than conventional methods, cuts plastic use more than 15-fold and substantially decreases the cost and carbon footprint of biomedical research.