The Grand Challenge legacy: Transforming campus, benefitting society

As the Grand Challenge wrapped up this year, key contributors reflected on nearly a decade of ambitious, trailblazing programs spanning CU Boulder and beyond that continue to make new discoveries, spin off new entities and address important national and global challenges.

Russ Moore, provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs, vividly recalls a town hall meeting introducing the Grand Challenge nearly a decade ago. With the chosen theme Our Space, Our Future, CU Boulder was answering a national call for research universities and others to identify and pursue the so-called “grand challenges” of the 21st century—the big problems facing humanity—that would encourage ambitious innovations across campus.

Moore urged the audience to “think big,” he said, and not to let their ideas be constrained by anything, including budget. “It really was an opportunity to allow people to be entrepreneurial and innovative,” said Moore. “It was exciting and liberating to those folks who allowed themselves to let go and, for many, it was a cultural breakthrough to be bold and audacious.”

It really was an opportunity to allow people to be entrepreneurial and innovative. It was exciting and liberating to those folks who allowed themselves to let go and, for many, it was a cultural breakthrough to be bold and audacious. —Russ Moore, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

That’s exactly what happened in the months and years that followed, said Emily CoBabe-Ammann, Senior Advisor and Executive Associate Director (Acting), Center for National Security Initiatives, who was recruited to lead the Grand Challenge. Moore’s directive prompted researchers and students to engage in what CoBabe-Ammann called “wild-haired” thinking, often setting aside traditional definitions of success. “I’m a firm believer that you don’t always know where the next best ideas are coming from,” she said. “And that was sort of the beauty of the Grand Challenge—success was defined in lots of different ways.”

What achievement looks like now for CU Boulder’s Grand Challenge is a robust portfolio of three major, influential and self-sustaining initiatives: , Integrated Remote and In Situ Sensing (IRISS) and Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center (SWx TREC)—and five programs spanning campus, including the Space Minor (now the largest minor on campus with an equal split of students from the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences), the Center for the Study of Origins, and the Nature, Environment, Science and Technology (NEST) Studio of the Arts, which broadened CU Boulder’s Grand Challenge to include a broad array of campus participants.

Cross-campus collaborations key to major initiatives

Forging new partnerships that reach across disciplines has been a lasting accomplishment of the Grand Challenge, according to Moore. “It’s given researchers a chance to see how they can work together, which I think has been really important,” CoBabe-Ammann agreed. “One of the core themes of all the Grand Challenge projects was interdisciplinarity,” she said. “Really, it is often at the point of those boundaries do you get emergent solutions to whatever problem it is that you’re trying to solve.”

Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing (IRISS)

CoBabe-Ammann pointed to three of the most influential Grand Challenge initiatives as potent examples of the power of collaboration. IRISS is a multi-disciplinary team leading the design, development and deployment of novel remote and in-situ sensing systems. They’re transforming data collection with technologies including unmanned aircraft to improve climate and weather forecasting and better inform policy-making while preparing the 21st century workforce.

According to IRISS founder and director, Brian Argrow (Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences), “Collaboration has been a hallmark of our work as engineers, working with atmospheric scientists, and that back-and-forth is what makes this really great.” Argrow attributes the university’s initial investment in equipment as enabling his group to cover new ground. “There’s no other group in the country that can do what we do in terms of deploying aircraft,” he said.“And we certainly are making a dent in understanding the grand challenges associated with climate change and weather.”

Argrow is proud of rising to what he called “the grand, existential challenge” of climate change with small, inexpensive, battery-powered drones that have out-performed expectations, even in extreme conditions. “We’ve been beneath thunderstorms, next to tornadoes, and in hail and winds you can barely drive your car in,” he said. “We’ve helped meteorologists to better understand supercell thunderstorms, we’ve been at the North Pole, we’ve been all over the world, and our data are being archived for scientists to study.”

Students with IRISS adjust drones in the field

Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center (SWx TREC)

SWx TREC researchers are also Grand Challenge alums working across multiple departments, colleges and institutes. The group is enabling breakthroughs in understanding solar and space physics principles underlying space weather and its impacts on critical infrastructure systems. The initiative is also breaking barriers with innovative, engaging applications designed to make space weather data accessible, including a suite of that empowers lay users to explore the latest space weather developments. One of SWx TREC’s pioneering, user-friendly resources, the Space Weather Data Portal developed with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), now allows students, researchers and operational forecasters alike to examine space weather events.

Earth Lab

A third, flourishing Grand Challenge endeavor is Earth Lab, a multi-pronged effort to harness the data revolution with research, analytics and education to help society better understand, manage and adapt to a fast-changing environment.

Earth Lab’s founding director, Jennifer Balch (Geography, CIRES), arrived at CU Boulder around the time the Grand Challenge was launched and she knew right away she wanted to pitch her idea for an environmental data synthesis center. “Given that there are so many data wizards, Earth nerds and space geeks in this town, I thought, ‘This is a perfect fit’.” CoBabe-Ammann agreed. “It’s really only through that kind of data synthesis that you’re actually going to be able to make predictions based on observations about what to expect in a changing world,” she said.

Balch envisioned Earth Lab, which is now part of CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences) as a mechanism for both integrating data and bringing together people and ideas from across campus. “One of the huge challenges on our plates right now as a society is we are swimming in environmental data. How do we use that to move from the era of data to the era of insight and knowledge and wisdom?” she said. “It became a real motivator for team collaboration across campus and we touched dozens of departments and institutes,” she said.

Earth Lab has grown from a university-wide resource to one informing countless people in various ways. According to Balch, the sheer number of published papers and successful grant proposals are additional metrics of Earth Lab’s success but there are others–including “inclusive science” which makes their materials around data skills available to a global community. That’s influenced innumerable career trajectories across multiple sectors, both within and beyond CU Boulder. “We now have a large network of people who are doing great things in the environmental data space, and we’re proud to have been part of their journeys,” she said.

Earth Lab’s influence also now extends to two major nationally-funded, CU Boulder-led centers –the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Inclusion Lab (ESIIL), an NSF-funded data synthesis center and the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC CASC), a climate center meeting the changing needs of land and resource managers nationwide with innovative and applied research. “There are lots of things that Earth Lab has done to move the needle on helping create societal resilience to environmental change,” said Balch. “I’ve been super proud of what Earth lab has done–and now ESIIL–and none of it would have been possible without the Grand Challenge. So it’s a good lesson for the university that these large, strategic investments really do return great things.”

Grand challenges, good ideas, lasting impacts

Emily CoBabe-Ammann

As CoBabe-Ammann looked ahead to her retirement in January, she reflected on the accomplishments of the Grand Challenge and her role as an advocate for teams developing individual, strategic directions to a self-sustaining future. “As we look at where the portfolio has landed, I think it’s certainly done what the chancellor wanted and it brought capabilities to campus that we hadn't had before,” she said.

CoBabe-Ammann’s colleagues attribute much of the success of the Grand Challenge’s influential initiatives to her strategic thinking. “Emily is able to see clear pathways that help move everyone’s contributions forward and see how to operationalize good ideas,” said Balch. “I really respect her a huge amount, and I’m very grateful for her guidance and support and her vision for helping Earth Lab be what it is today.”

The Grand Challenge initiatives have been, and will continue to be, highly influential in encouraging the best research and innovation solutions to the world’s most pressing issues, said Moore, and he praised CoBabe-Ammann’s contributions. “Emily had a unique ability to see how many of these projects were interrelated in ways that I think many of us didn’t see,” he said. “She had an uncanny knack for understanding that these projects were really going to be big.”

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