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Bruns & Leslie research cybernetic human advancement with New Frontiers Grant

Michael Kwolek — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 21:31:49 +0000

Bruns & Leslie research cybernetic human advancement with New Frontiers Grant Michael Kwolek Tue, 06/17/2025 - 15:31

Michael Kwolek

From implantable devices like pacemakers and brain interfaces to smart wearables, humans are fast becoming more cybernetic than we might realize.

Implanted devices tend to have higher fidelity and functionality than wearables, but require extremely invasive surgery. Smart tech is lower-cost and easy to use, but can be uncomfortable while offering limited functionality.

What if there was a middle ground, a set of technologies that allowed for the best of both worlds? Such solutions could enable people to achieve peak performance in a range of physical and mental activities, simplify ongoing health monitoring, and help those with mobility challenges control the devices that support their daily lives.

Seamless Skin Integration of Brain/Body-Computer Interfaces for Cybernetic Human Advancement

Project: Seamless Skin Integration of Brain/Body-Computer Interfaces for Cybernetic Human Advancement

Planning Phase Award: $50,000

The CU С��Ƶ New Frontiers Grant Program is designed to foster groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research projects with the potential for high impact. “High impact” projects may include the potential for significant advancements in knowledge, problem-solving or innovation that exceeds incremental progress and creates new paradigms of understanding.

With support from the Research & Innovation Office (RIO), the Colleges of Arts & Sciences, Engineering & Applied Science and the School of Education, New Frontiers is open to any eligible CU С��Ƶ faculty member.

A surprising partnership

Researchers at the ATLAS Institute are working on just that through a unique collaboration toward what they call “cybernetic human advancement.”

Carson Bruns, associate professor (ATLAS Institute, Mechanical Engineering), and Grace Leslie, associate professor (ATLAS Institute, College of Music), have partnered to study ways to create the functionality of an implantable device with the ease of a wearable.

The project was kickstarted with funding from CU С��Ƶ’s New Frontiers Grant Program.

This 12-month Planning Phase Award, funded through the Research & Innovation Office (RIO), supports project planning and initial data collection for two lines of inquiry.

Real life sci-fi

Cybernetic humans may sound like science fiction, but such technology is very much a reality. Bruns explains, “When we hear the word ‘cyborg,’ we think of a cyberpunk half-robot. But there are really common examples of body-integrated technology like cochlear implants for the hearing impaired or lens replacements for vision-impaired people or cardiac pacemakers for people who have heart conditions.”

He elaborates, “We're going to continue to integrate our bodies with technology more and more. And we'd like to contribute our own piece to this movement to ensure that it's done in a safe and ethical way, and also because we think it's exciting and there are tremendous potential benefits. So we decided to call this domain ‘human enhancement’ as opposed to ‘cyborg’ or ‘cybernetic.’”

The skin as interface

It’s possible the next generation of wearables will not look like the watches and rings we currently see in the market.

Bruns says, “One of the things I do in my lab is try to use the skin as the interface for these human enhancements. These technologies that we're going to merge with the body, I think the skin is really the best for that because it's the least invasive place to put a permanent implant. You usually don't even need a doctor or a hospital if it's small enough. You can just tattoo it, and that's something that almost anybody can do safely. So it's very convenient if you're going to permanently implant some technology in your body to make it be a tattoo.”

For example, you wouldn’t want to wear an EKG monitoring cap on your head all day, but if you could get tattooed with conductive materials that connect to a simple device, that could allow for continuous brainwave monitoring without ongoing discomfort.

Seeking key collaborators

The core team seeks a few more key members during this initial research phase. Carson details what expertise they seek:

Ethicist: “There are a lot of serious ethical questions about these types of technologies. We are actively looking for somebody to be a part of this and inform our team and do their own research on the ethics of this space.”

Circuits expert: “We would [also] like a circuits expert. They might be an electrical engineer—somebody who really knows how to optimize this kind of hardware. I have the expertise to make a special kind of conductive material to build the device and once you have the signals, Grace is really good at doing stuff with those. But in between those two, we need that person who can take the material and construct the exact circuit we want to get the best signal.”

Performance enhancing tattoos

Leslie is excited about the possibility of applying her expertise in neuroscience to studying wearables to enhance athletic performance. “We want to work with the CU football team to develop this augmented football player concept using control theory to figure out what the best type of feedback would be to get them in the right state. The really quick decision making they have to do for who to pass to and when, and the movements that they take, will all be optimized.”

In lieu of starting right away with permanent tattooing, the team aims to design with an even more common application in mind.

Leslie continues, “We're thinking of this being almost like a temporary tattoo. Printing a whole circuit board onto that sticker and then any components that we need to add. So it becomes this all-in-one [device] on the surface of the skin. It would be a combination of, on Carson's side, the ability to think of a completely different form factor for a circuit that involves the skin—it isn't just some standalone device that we then try to attach to the human. And then from my lab’s side, the idea of how you can provide meaningful stimulus and feedback in a way that doesn't require a screen.”

Getting into the flow

Leslie hopes to apply her background in music and audio to create novel sensory stimuli like sounds and haptic feedback (little vibrations similar to what is used in a mobile phone) in place of a screen to help guide people toward achieving a “flow state” of peak performance in a range of activities.

Leslie says, “Haptic feedback is the educational tool that helps you learn what that feels like to be in that state. The principle of biofeedback [is] that eventually if you've practiced it enough, you can reach it without the feedback and then it creates lasting changes.”

Big ideas from new connections

The initial idea for this project started when ATLAS PhD students Joshua Coffie (in the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab) and Daniel Llamas Maldonado (in the Brain Music Lab) found mutual interest in their respective research areas. Llamas Maldonado explains, “We were in the Research Methods class together, and I thought his research was really cool. We just started talking and thinking we could do something together.”

This spark speaks to the importance of fostering opportunities for cross-pollination on campus that can be supported by RIO grants.

From there, the conversation expanded to Leslie and Bruns, who catalyzed the idea by applying for the New Frontiers Grant program. This spark speaks to the importance of fostering opportunities for cross-pollination on campus that can be supported by RIO grants.

With concurrent lines of research, the key will be to focus the research in this initial phase. Leslie concludes, “It's easy to think of science fiction scenarios, but the hard part is coming up with concrete experiments to run that will be really self-contained and controlled, and that are going to prove the things that we need to prove to build the larger concept. And that is also the fun part.”

Nanomaterials and neuroscience researchers aim to build brain/body interfaces that enhance performance, improve health monitoring and support mobility.

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Image source: Adobe stock

Bruns explores nanotech that turns plastic into fertilizer with RIO seed grant

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 16:27:46 +0000

Bruns explores nanotech that turns plastic into fertilizer with RIO seed grant Michael Kwolek Wed, 06/11/2025 - 10:27

Michael Kwolek

Plastic Fertilizer: Toward Sustainable Waste-Stream Plastics with Low Carbon Content and Cost

PI: Carson J. Bruns, ATLAS Institute + Paul M. Rady Dept. of Mechanical Engineering

Co-PI: Merritt R. Turetsky, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) + Dept. of Ecology

“We must replace the ubiquitous 'forever plastics' with sustainable plastics that (i) degrade fast and harmlessly in the wild and (ii) minimize emissions by combining high recyclability with low carbon content.”

Plastics are a problem. They are made with petroleum, are rarely recycled, and turn into microplastics over time—an increasingly intractable global environmental and health concern.

Current bio-based alternatives have yet to see widespread adoption for a number of reasons. Carson Bruns, associate professor (ATLAS Institute, Mechanical Engineering), aims to change all that with a new line of research in his Emergent Nanotechnology Lab focused on turning agricultural materials into bio-based plastics that can be more easily recycled, composted or even used as fertilizer.

Bruns was recently awarded a 2025 Research & Innovation Seed Grant from CU С��Ƶ’s Research and Innovation Office for this work.

We discussed the thinking behind this research and possible applications (interview lightly edited for clarity):

What are the challenges with bio-based plastics?

The biggest challenge that everybody is dealing with in sustainable plastics right now is that the current options for bio-based and compostable plastics are not actually very good. They don't compete with the oil-based plastics in terms of how tough and flexible they are, so people don't like to use them as much because they crack and they're brittle.

And in reality, you cannot throw such plastics onto your backyard compost pile. They need special conditions to properly break down. You need a composting facility that heats the compost up to 60°C and it has all these fans and equipment to circulate it, and even then, it still doesn't work that well. [Note: This is one of the reasons why A1 Organics, С��Ƶ, Colorado’s main composting partner, stopped accepting these biodegradable plastics.]

Bruns and his team have partnered with Merritt R. Turetsky, Director of Arctic Security; Professor, Ecology, for key elements of this research.

How did the collaboration with professor Turetsky come about?

We've been working on sustainable alternative materials to oil-based plastics for almost the whole time I've been at CU. But the collaboration with Professor Turetsky came when we started trying to characterize the biodegradability of the materials we've been making in the lab.

We've worked with a number of different things—rubbery materials, hydrogels, elastomers, and adhesives [as] alternatives to oil-based rubbers and adhesives. If you want to characterize how biodegradable something is, there are different types of experiments you can do. We approached professor Turetsky to get her advice on how we could go about doing that.

Over the last two semesters, we've had an undergraduate student named Roan Gerrald. He did his honors thesis on this work with advice from professor Turetsky and Aseem Visal, my graduate student. He's done our first compostability experiments on some of the plastic alternative materials that we've already made that are not the ones we proposed in this project, but ones that we have in the lab.

Carson Bruns

What materials are you testing to make these new polymers?

The recipe is [a key] innovation. In general, what you do when you're trying to make a sustainable plastic is you buy some very high-purity materials from a chemical supplier and that makes your science easy to do because you know exactly what you have.

Just buying this molecule in a gallon drum is economically not at all competitive with petroleum. So how do we make something that is cost-competitive?

The idea is to try to recover these molecules as starting materials from waste so that they're not so expensive. You're a potato chip or french fry manufacturer, and you have to wash all of your vegetables, or even at intermediate stages you're soaking them in water or washing them with water, and then that water waste goes somewhere. But it has valuable stuff in it like starches and proteins from the vegetables. So we'd like to recover those valuable substances from the wastewater.

You're using these different materials that happen to be fertilizers in themselves.

The problem with using carbon for plastic is that even if it is highly recyclable, even if it is compostable, It's still going to turn into carbon dioxide at the end of its life.

"Agricultural fertilizer doesn't have carbon in it—it has nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and sulfur and things like that. So let's make our plastics out of that stuff, so that we don't have carbon in the air at the end."

We choose elements that plants need so that we avoid the carbon but still maintain compostability or biodegradability. But we can't get rid of the carbon completely—it's more of a carbon minimization than a carbon avoidance or removal in order for it to still behave as a plastic and have that kind of flexibility.

So if we can make a plastic that has not very much carbon, but it has a lot of other stuff that is good for soil, then you can use it as a fertilizer instead of as compost, because agricultural fertilizer doesn't have carbon in it—it has nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium and sulfur and things like that. So let's make our plastics out of that stuff, so that we don't have carbon in the air at the end.

What do you hope to accomplish at the end of the initial 18-month grant?

I hope that we have at least one material that has good properties and that we show fertilizes soil. That's a very ambitious goal to have in 18 months, but we're going to try.

What sorts of products might be possible with this plastic alternative?

We want to make packaging plastics, something that you could cover your steak with at the grocery store or something like Styrofoam. But these are soft and flexible, and because of that they're a little bit harder to make from these low-carbon elements.

So I would predict that it will be harder for us to make those things, but if we can make the kind of flexible, more stretchy ones, then we can look to things like packaging, plastic bags, Ziploc bags, Saran Wrap, stuff like that. But if we can [only make] brittle things, then it's gonna be more like forks and cups and plates.

How might this research come to life in the real world?

Maybe in the future if it worked really well, there could be a reuse or recycling stream where you put it in your mixed-stream recycling and then they sort it and send it to somebody who is going to turn it into fertilizer.

But the other option is that you throw it in your at-home compost and it can degrade there and that would be great, too.

The Emergent Nanotechnology Lab team has begun research to develop new bioplastics made to be used as fertilizer at end-of-life.

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Utility Research Lab develops award-winning sustainability tech for 3D printing

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 22:11:29 +0000

Utility Research Lab develops award-winning sustainability tech for 3D printing Michael Kwolek Wed, 04/23/2025 - 16:11

Michael Kwolek

Over 460 million metric tons of plastic are created each year and only about 9% is recycled. This has led to ever-growing problems with waste disposal, litter, water contamination, microplastics and a host of other issues.

What if we could rethink our approach to plastics upstream in the manufacturing process before these problems manifest?

Michael Rivera, assistant professor and director of the Utility Research Lab, is doing just that, along with lab members Xin Wen, PhD student, and S. Sandra Bae, PhD candidate.

One of the challenges in recycling is that several types of plastic parts may be used to assemble a single item. These multi-material objects are more difficult, and in some cases near-impossible, to recycle because different plastics need to be processed independently, but cannot be easily separated.

A dissolvable solution

To improve sustainability in 3D printing, Rivera and his team propose using dissolvable interfaces between parts during assembly to simplify their separation for recycling at end-of-life. These interfaces can be made with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), polyvinyl butyral (PVB), high impact polystyrene (HIPS) or other materials.

Dissolvable materials like PVA are used as support structures, labels and other elements in 3D printed objects. The team goes further by printing PVA in objects themselves to simplify disassembly and recycling. To do so, they developed a computational design algorithm that automates the process of generating and cutting dissolvable interfaces in multi-material 3D-printed objects.

This idea is inspired by the concept of design for disassembly (DfD), “the consideration of ease of disassembly in the design process, aiming to enhance the efficiency of disassembling products by evaluating factors such as time, tools, and effort required for disassembly.”

For their work, the team has been awarded Best Paper (Top 1%) at CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Yokohama, Japan, for Enabling Recycling of Multi-Material 3D Printed Objects through Computational Design and Disassembly by Dissolution.

Sustainable benefits

The team won the Innovation award at CU С��Ƶ’s 2025 Campus Sustainability Summit Student Ideas Showcase

The team has also found that their technique can improve the strength of bonds between different materials in a 3D-printed object. Wen notes, “We ran a bunch of tensile and shear tests that show that varying the parameters of the interface joints can increase the attachment strength” compared to standard multi-material printing.

Alternative manufacturing processes using lego-like building blocks can make reuse and recycling easier, but require more time to build and take apart. The Utility Research Lab’s techniques simplify both of these processes.

Results show their technique can allow for ~90% of the total mass of their designed objects to be recycled. The remaining 10% consists of dissolved material that also has potential for recyclability.

They note in their paper that “recycling 3D printed plastics is a key way to reduce their environmental impacts. Life-cycle assessment has shown recycling 3D printed objects made from PLA and PETG back into printing materials can reduce environmental impacts by more than 50%.”

Wen elaborates, “There are a couple ways you can recycle” these plastics. “There are some DIY recycling machines that you can buy or build off open source designs and there are companies like Printerior that recycle sorted and separated pieces.”

Currently, the team’s technique requires more time to print than conventional multi-material 3D prints due to increased complexity of printing requirements. But they believe with ongoing advancements in printing technology, much of that can be overcome.

For their efforts, the team work won the Innovation award at CU С��Ƶ’s 2025 Campus Sustainability Summit Student Ideas Showcase.

Winner: Best Paper (top 1%) at CHI 2025

Designs for impact

The team has filed a provisional patent. Rivera explains, “We'd like to be able to license to existing CAD software companies and build an extension inside current 3D printing slicers” by PRUSA and other brands.

They also plan to engage with a local recycling facility this summer to connect the research they are doing in the lab to real-world applications by understanding the logistics and methodologies of plastics recycling at scale.

Looking even further, Rivera sees opportunities in applying this research in the much-larger injection molding industry, a common manufacturing process where molten materials like glass, plastic and metal are injected into a mold to create a form. A pen for example may have separate injection molded parts for the shaft, clip and rubber grip.

Rivera details, “Our algorithm does not really care about the [manufacturing] process per se. If we were to move to injection molding, we would do a multi-stage [process] where you mold the first material, inject the dissolvable on top, and then do another one.”

The team is optimistic for the future of this research.

For those in the maker community, they have developed a plug-in for Grasshopper, a visual programming language in Rhino used for design and fabrication. It is available upon request for non-commercial use.

As for next steps, Rivera says, “For us to have long-term impact, we need the people who run the companies that make the tools. Our conversations with people doing injection molding will be enlightening.”

Recycling is extremely difficult for things built with more than one type of plastic. Michael Rivera and the Utility Research Lab team have developed a novel way to disassemble 3D-printed objects for easy recycling.

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CU С��Ƶ further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program

Michael Kwolek — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 20:03:22 +0000

CU С��Ƶ further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program Michael Kwolek Wed, 04/16/2025 - 14:03

CU С��Ƶ ranks number 11 among public university peers for its engineering graduate programs according to U.S. News and World Report Best Graduate Schools rankings for 2025-26.

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Biodegradable nails make manicures more sustainable

Michael Kwolek — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 16:30:54 +0000

Biodegradable nails make manicures more sustainable Michael Kwolek Thu, 04/03/2025 - 10:30

ATLAS researchers developed press-on nails that are biodegradable, colorful and endlessly customizable with open-source technology and low-cost biomaterials for a more sustainable fashion moment.

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Bruns & Leslie research cybernetic human advancement with New Frontiers Grant

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Bruns explores nanotech that turns plastic into fertilizer with RIO seed grant

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Utility Research Lab develops award-winning sustainability tech for 3D printing

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CU С����Ƶ further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program

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Biodegradable nails make manicures more sustainable

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CU С��Ƶ further solidifies ranking as top 20 graduate engineering program