Rachel Sauer

A new (and not extinct) moth emerges from the Florida Scrub

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:20:20 +0000

A new (and not extinct) moth emerges from the Florida Scrub Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/24/2026 - 08:20

Rachel Sauer

After publishing about a moth he’d only seen in collections, CU Boulder researcher Ryan St Laurent travels to Florida and spots the elusive—and previously thought extinct—Cicinnus albarenicolus

On the second of two nights he spent deep in central Florida forests last week—dripping sweat, shrouded in swarms of flying ants and June beetles, well into the 20 kilometers he’d eventually walk monitoring his four traps—Ryan St Laurent saw the thing he’d come, but didn’t really expect, to see.

To anyone who hadn’t spent a dozen years studying it, the sandy brown wisp might have looked like a fragment of autumn leaf or a shred of bark, but St Laurent immediately recognized Cicinnus albarenicolus. He’d just never seen the moth alive before, let alone in the wild.

In fact, until November, St Laurent thought this new species of Mimallonidae, or sack-bearer moth, might be extinct (DNA barcoding of moth specimens in collections had identified it as a new species). Before November, it hadn’t been seen in its extremely limited Florida habitat since the 1960s.

Ryan St Laurent, a CU Boulder assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and CU Museum curator of entomology, traveled to Florida last week to try finding the elusive Cicinnus albarenicolus moth.

When news came that a collector had found one of the presumed-extinct moths in a sliver of white sand scrub in the Florida peninsula, St Laurent, a University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and CU Museum curator of entomology, had just finished writing a recently published paper describing the new C. albarenicolus, comparing it with other Mimallonidae species.

“I had written that it might be extinct, so I had to revise the paper and bring in some additional co-authors,” St Laurent says. Then he learned about an upcoming scheduled burn in one of the very few areas where C. albarenicolus conceivably could be found, so he booked a flight to Florida.

“I don’t think this is the only population in existence, and I don’t think it’s going to get burned up and go extinct,” St Laurent said several days before flying to Florida. “But I want to go out there and at least try to get a couple of tissue samples in the event we can’t find it again.”

Needles and haystacks don’t adequately encompass his aim; he was trying to find a small brown moth in a 450,000-acre forest.

‘These look really cool’

But how does a scientist first steer his scholarship to a little-known and barely studied family of moths, a member of which may or may not have been extinct? For St Laurent, the path began during undergrad at Cornell, where he studied entomology and worked with museum insect collections. The collections manager encouraged him to find something that nobody else was working on, “but there was a lot of competition in butterflies and moths—it’s a popular group as far as insects go,” he explains.

“I remember going through the collection, asking, ‘What am I going to work on?’ when I came across this particular family (of moth). I was like, ‘Well, these look really cool,’ but when I went to try to curate them, I realized there were no resources, no books, no field guides, nothing.”

Perfect, he thought. If nobody was working on that family, he would. He wrote his undergraduate honors thesis then pursued his PhD in charting the phylogeny, or tree of life, of this small group of moths. “Once you have a tree of life, you can start talking about them and you can contextualize them as a member of bigger butterfly and moth groups,” he says.

It wasn’t until St Laurent got to the Smithsonian for his postdoc that he had a chance to order mitochondrial sequencing on one of the Mimallonidae specimens that he’d identified as different from its family members. That sequencing showed it was genetically different from anything else in its family, so when St Laurent came to CU Boulder, he continued the project of sequencing specimens from various collections.

The female Cicinnus albarenicolus moth (left) that flew out of the darkness of Seminole State Forest in Florida last week, and Ryan St Laurent (right) holding the twig on which it perched.

Most of the specimens were many decades old, compounding the challenges of genetic sequencing. St Laurent worked with a Canadian lab that specializes in barcode sequencing—a technique that focuses on short sequences of genes—sending them prepared samples for testing. In one instance, St Laurent sampled the leg of one of the few recent specimens, which he put on a sequencing plate and sent to Canada in January, looking for further evidence that this was, in fact, a new species of moth.

The genes didn’t lie: It was.

A moth flies out of the darkness

As if discovering a new species isn’t a big enough deal, discovering that it’s not extinct after all is enough to drive any researcher from the lab and straight into the Florida thickets.

Among the things that make Mimallonidae interesting, St Laurent says, is they belong to a superfamily with ancient lineage—more than 100 million years old—99% of which live in Central and South America. Only a handful of species in the family occur in North America, but the ones that do are (mostly) quite common.

Ryan St Laurent set up four insect traps with moth-attractant LED lights.

Except, of course, for C. albarenicolus—endemic to small patches of Florida Scrub, made rarer still by habitat loss. “Only 10% of Florida Scrub is left,” St Laurent said before leaving for Florida, “and the scrub that does still exist is super isolated. We don’t know if those little pockets can support this moth at all.”

Through some scientific sleuthing and mapping the locations where collection specimens had been found, St Laurent narrowed possible C. albarenicolus habitat to six sites in the Florida peninsula: eastern Ocala National Forest, Weeki Wachee north of Tampa, Cassia and Cassadaga northeast of Orlando, the Archbold Biological Station on the Lake Wales Ridge in Central Florida and coastal southeast Florida in Port Sewall. Each location has or had the rare Florida Scrub habitat—specifically white sand, open canopy scrub, which C. albarenicolus seemed to favor.

“This particular family of moths, there’s a reason nobody studies them,” St Laurent said before leaving for Florida. “They’re really hard to find and really hard to raise in captivity. I’ve done field work all over the Americas, and I’m lucky if I see one or two a night in Central or South America. I’m very used to not being able to find these things, which is why I do a lot of work in collections.”

Still, he had to try. He flew to Orlando and then drove to the township of Cassia. He had previously seen a specimen in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City that had been found near Cassia in 1964. “I knew about that specimen, I knew the scrub in that area because I went hiking there years ago in grad school and found caterpillars, but I didn’t rear them,” St Laurent says, so that’s where he started.

The first night, he set up four traps resembling tall, narrow tents with a specialized moth-attractive LED inside—the aim being to lure insects to the light. Other insects arrived in the thousands, but no C. albarenicolus.

The second night, he set up at a spot in the nearby Seminole State Forest where the trees open to an expanse of sandy soil and scrubby plants. At 8:49 p.m., “I’m standing there and this kind of pinkish moth comes out of the darkness, and it was very recognizable. Nothing else really looks like that, moth-wise.”

After that first moth, two more came. St Laurent knew he was seeing females, which fly right after sunset, so he collected them and raced them to his colleagues at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Collecting live females means collecting eggs, with the attendant potential of rearing them in the lab. If his colleagues are able to rear them, he says, he will receive progenitors and offspring.

As for seeing a moth that he’d only previously seen as a collection specimen, “I was just like, ‘Wow, I was right! It is here!’ My suspicion is the moth is all over the place in Ocala, but it’s rare and diffuse there. It’s a much more concentrated site in Seminole, surrounded by hardwood hammocks and the St. Johns and Wekiva rivers, so you have a better chance of finding something there.”

The site in the Ocala National Forest is scheduled for a controlled burn associated with Florida scrub jay management, “which is probably good in the overall grand scheme of things,” St Laurent says, “but since we don’t know what the moth eats or when it’s active or its annual lifecycle or habitat requirements, I don’t know if the burning regime is appropriate.

“(The moth is) part of Florida’s multimillion-year history, and Florida is the only place in the world where it occurs. It may not be some top-down species that’s controlling the habitat, but it’s still a very important representative of the one-sixth of its family that’s found in North America, and this one is the only species endemic to the U.S. in this family. It’s a part of Florida heritage and U.S. heritage, and we need to protect it.”

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After publishing about a moth he’d only seen in collections, CU Boulder researcher Ryan St Laurent travels to Florida and spots the elusive—and previously thought extinct—Cicinnus albarenicolus.

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Colorado AG advises Quantum Scholars to be curious in changing times

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:31:40 +0000

Colorado AG advises Quantum Scholars to be curious in changing times Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/22/2026 - 13:31

Rachel Sauer

Attorney General Phil Weiser spoke to Quantum Scholars Tuesday, emphasizing the need for critical thinking in a time when ‘our capacity to govern ourselves is now being undermined by the technologies that we need to govern’

In a roomful of Quantum Scholars, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser began his remarks in the 1860s.

As the students in the room are now, people living then passed through a time of world-changing technological advancement. Then, it was the railroad and telegraph, which fundamentally altered people’s conception of distance, Weiser said.

Today, “we're too close to it to have a full grasp of the changes that are happening in our society, in our economy, but they are profound,” he said. “We're coming off of this transformation of the internet that all of you have grown up with, swimming in the water, whereas Noah (Finkelstein) and I lived in a pre-internet world.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser speaks to Quantum Scholars Tuesday afternoon.

“We know how this world is different, but none of us fully knows how quantum and AI and other emerging technologies will pose yet another transformation. And one of the challenges of this moment that's a little different than even 1860 is our capacity to govern ourselves is now being undermined by the technologies that we need to govern.”

Weiser’s remarks came during a guest lecture Tuesday afternoon to members of Quantum Scholars, a program conceived in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Physics and the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) that offers undergraduate students opportunities to learn about the quantum field, including connections with local industry leaders and introduction to new quantum technology.

The Quantum Scholars program includes undergraduates studying physics, mathematics, engineering and computer science and aims to advance quantum education and workforce development through professional development, co-curricular activities and industrial engagement.

Finkelstein, a distinguished professor of physics who co-directs Quantum Scholars with Professor of Distinction Michael Ritzwoller, noted in his introduction of Weiser that while researchers and innovators in the quantum field have studied its past and keenly look toward the future, “we haven't had folks on policy yet. It turns out that's going to be the third leg of advancing quantum sciences and sciences in general.”

‘How do I know this is true?’

Weiser, who is dean emeritus of the CU Boulder Law School and an adjunct faculty member, noted that “one of the embarrassments of this moment is how deeply dysfunctional and non-responsive national public policy-making institutions are. When you think about social media, when you think about AI, when you think about quantum, there are all sorts of opportunities, there are all sorts of challenges, and we don't have the institutions to meet them.”

He gave as an example Anthropic’s Mythos AI model, which can both detect and exploit software vulnerabilities, and which the company hasn’t released because of threats it could pose to global cybersecurity.

“There are a couple of possible scenarios there,” Weiser said. “One is that they're really good at marketing, and they want to make sure that every single bank and other institution uses the product first to protect it from the product. Could be.

“Or, they're actually trying to be socially responsible, knowing that there's no national governing framework or body that can help manage cybersecurity harms.”

When Weiser worked in the Obama White House in 2009-2010, he and his colleagues were beginning to talk about the challenges of cybersecurity, and how the challenges of technology governance are quite different than the challenges of rural agriculture governance or urban industrialization governance “because technology of the age we're now living in moves so fast,” he said.

Distinguished Professor Noah Finkelstein (right) greets Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (left) before Weiser's talk to Quantum Scholars Tuesday afternoon.

“And sadly, we have a government that's unable to come to terms with this, raising the question, ‘How are we going to govern ourselves in this age?’ You've heard lots of people say things like AI can be as dangerous as nuclear weapons, and we came up with international governing institutions to deal with the threat of nuclear weapons. We may well need some to deal with the challenges and threats of AI. Are we up to that challenge right now?”

In that vein, Saksham Hassanandani, a first-year student majoring in mathematics, asked what he can do to “help and advocate for such changes? And especially if I end up in an industry . . . that may not care for the ethics. What can we do as people to fight for this change?”

Weiser mentioned that he and his team are currently suing Meta for the design of social media—"they designed a product in a way that they knew was harming people,” he said—but nevertheless encouraged Hassanandani and his fellow Quantum Scholars not to “take as a steady state that the company you're going to work for is acting in a way that's unethical. I would start with an aspiration that you're going to be working for a company who cares about its customers, who treats its workers fairly and who thinks about society.”

Should that not be the case, Weiser advised them to be clear on their own ethical boundaries and whether they are willing to advocate internally for change and “ethical capitalism.”

Related to concerns about technology ethics, Grace Kallberg, a third-year student majoring in aerospace engineering, mentioned the growing threat of AI generating misinformation. She asked, “Is there anything that we can do as individuals to kind of help combat that?”

“Everyone here has an extraordinary opportunity as a citizen to think long and hard, and to help others think long and hard, on the following question: How do I know this is true?” Weiser replied. “You are swimming in information that is shared or, as you put it, AI generated in ways that we may not know whether it's true or not. And that is a fundamentally different position than the world that I grew up in. I grew up in a world that had editors who reviewed information before I got to it. You're not in that world.

“And so, what you can all do is wrestle with the challenge that you and others have: How do I know this is true? And then make that discipline part of your habits of mind.”

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All photos by Patrick Campbell/CU Boulder

Sometimes you just feel like a mango

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:48:12 +0000

Sometimes you just feel like a mango Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/15/2026 - 08:48

Rachel Sauer

In new mid-grade novel Confessions of a Mango, writing team Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow explore the challenges of navigating middle school with a dyslexia diagnosis

Have you ever felt like the mango in a line of lovebirds? Sure, you look like you fit in—same general shape, same red, yellow and green coloring—but, well, you’re a mango and everyone else is a bird.

That’s how Ruby Emmerson feels at Benton Academy, where she’s starting sixth grade with her twin brother, Bryce. But while Bryce is an academic high achiever who likely will excel at the competitive charter school, Ruby’s diagnoses of dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia mean that reading, writing and math are tough for her.

And when she fails her first test at Benton, wow, does she feel like a mango. She even writes a brief blog post about it: “I dont belong at Benton Acadamy. I’m an imposter. I walk beside you in the halls every day. But I’m not smart enuff to stay much longer. Theres so much work. Im failing.”

Nathan Pieplow (left) and Katheryn Lumsden (right) are the authors of Confessions of a Mango, a new mid-grade novel that explores questions of belonging.

Except . . . so many of her classmates relate. Just as readers likely will.

Ruby’s are the confessions in Confessions of a Mango, a mid-grade novel published this week and written by Katheryn Lumsden, a University of Colorado Boulder molecular, cellular and developmental biology alumna, and Nathan Pieplow, an associate teaching professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

But for the purposes of this book, they are Kate and Nate, a writing team with way too many ideas and way too little time, and a shared passion for telling honest stories with humor and empathy.

“This is the first creative partnership I’ve been in that works,” Pipelow says. “We bicker like siblings, but the beautiful thing about writing with Katheryn is she’s an idea factory. She can write 2,000 words in an afternoon, then she sends them to me, and I don’t have to start with a blank page.”

“I’m the sloppy copy,” she says.

“I contribute ideas,” he says.

“He’s the atmosphere and the voice. Ironically, Mango didn’t have my voice until he added it.”

It just works, they conclude.

A writing partnership is born

Pieplow and Lumsden met, unsurprisingly, in a Boulder writing group six years ago. Lumsden, a pharmacist by profession, was a longtime group member who wanted a community of support to help her wrangle her boundless ideas. Pieplow, who had authored two field guides to bird sounds, wanted to delve into fiction writing.

“Everyone was like, ‘Why is he here? He doesn’t have plots,’” Lumsden recalls. “But I didn’t have pretty writing and he does, so I decided, ‘I’m gonna ask Nathan if he wants to meet'—for me it was so that he could teach me how to write better, and for him it was so I could teach him how to plot.”

Author event

Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow will talk about Confessions of a Mango Thursday evening at Boulder Bookstore.

What: Book discussion of Confessions of a Mango

Who: Authors Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow

Where: Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St.

When: 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 16

Reserve a spot

And so, a writing partnership was born. Their first book was a young adult historical fantasy that was good enough to get them their agent, Sarah Fisk, but it wasn’t bought by a publisher. The next novel wasn’t, either.

“If you want to be a fiction writer, you write several (books) and if one doesn’t get published, you move on to the next,” Lumsden says.

“(Confessions of a Mango) is definitely our debut,” Pieplow adds. “The first two were not quite at this level; with our first ones we were playing with form and voice.”

In fact, Fisk told them that the most important thing to get right when writing mid-grade or young adult fiction is the voice, Lumsden says, “and fortunately, voice has always been one of the things I do well.”

The idea for Confessions of a Mango germinated from many seeds. Lumsden grew up in Boulder with a twin brother who, like Bryce, was considered the “smart” one. Lumsden struggled with reading, and their mom, not wanting to make Lumsden feel bad, took both of them for dyslexia testing, explaining it away with “people are interested in twins.”

She did learn to navigate dyslexia, however, so when she was 12, her mom brought home a cake as a sort of “Congratulations for outgrowing dyslexia!” celebration. “Except it wasn’t until much later that I found out you don’t actually outgrow dyslexia,” Lumsden says.

She also read Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz and ideas began percolating. So, when Pieplow went on a birding trip for a month, Lumsden grew impatient waiting for his return and started writing a book.

Making it realistic and relatable

“Part of it was that I was so angry,” she explains. “So often, these kids (diagnosed with dyslexia) don’t know how smart they truly are, and that’s so unfair. Plus, they never see themselves in books because dyslexia just isn’t something that gets written about in mid-grade fiction.

Confessions of a Mango tells the story of Ruby Emmerson, a sixth grader at Benton Academy whose diagnoses of dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia make her feel like she doesn't fit in at the competitive charter school.

“So, when Nathan got back, I sent him what I’d started and he was like, ‘This is actually very good.’”

Lumsden had an advantage because when the two began writing Confessions of a Mango three years ago, her son was 10 and her daughter was 12—she had a front-row seat to the joys and concerns of children entering and navigating middle school.

Pieplow says it was important to them to write a book that was realistic and relatable: The parents may be occasionally clueless, but they want what’s best for their kids. The teachers and administrators at the school are supportive, and the other kids may be squirrelly sometimes, but they’re otherwise normal, decent kids.

“I grew up in Boulder and my husband and I are raising our kids in Boulder, and the parents here are fantastic, but sometimes there can be this feeling of life or death if you don’t do well (in school),” Lumsden says. “There isn’t a lot of room to fail, and people sometimes won’t even say the word ‘fail’ to kids. But it’s important that kids know sometimes they’ll fail and it’s not the end of the world.”

When Fisk began pitching their draft to publishers—after suggesting they excise this chapter and add that chapter, and put in more about Ruby’s quirky best friend, Thea—Little, Brown was the first to make an offer and was the publisher they ultimately chose.

Part of that decision, they say, was the kindness that Little, Brown staff showed them throughout the publishing process—how included they felt in every step and how Little, Brown representatives embraced the dyslexia angle of their story. In fact, Confessions of a Mango is printed in the Lexend font, which improves reading performance and reduces visual stress for people with dyslexia.

They even had a significant say in the vibrant book cover, which shows a girl seated in the shadow of a huge mango with a lovebird perched on its leaf. When they and artist Andy Smith settled on two cover finalists, they asked Lumsden’s son and his friends to vote for their favorite one.

Now, in publication week, a three-year process is finally tangible with the book in readers’ hands. It’s a book close to their hearts, Lumsden says, and they’re proud of the story it tells and the children to whom it gives a literary voice.

But, well, on to the next. They already have several books in progress, and “one of the things I love about working with Katheryn is that eventually we’re going to write something in every genre, because of the exploration of (writing) and how it’s like travel,” Pieplow says. “I love seeing new places, and that’s what I’m doing through the books we’re writing.”

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In new mid-grade novel Confessions of a Mango, writing team Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow explore the challenges of navigating middle school with a dyslexia diagnosis.

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‘A home for the humanities, a home for the liberal arts’

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:55:07 +0000

‘A home for the humanities, a home for the liberal arts’ Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/10/2026 - 16:55

Rachel Sauer

Hellems Arts and Sciences building reopens Friday following an almost three-year renovation that enhanced its accessibility, sustainability and role as the heart of the arts and humanities at CU Boulder

A while back, third-year student Natalie Cleary was on her way to a Shakespeare class in the Engineering Center when she bumped into a friend—an engineering major—who was perplexed by her presence and asked her, “What are you doing here?”

It’s not that she wasn’t welcome, but she’s an English creative writing major, and she was far from the Hellems Arts and Sciences building—the heart of arts and humanities at the University of Colorado Boulder. In a way, she was far from home.

"For most students, Hellems is literally where their CU Boulder journey begins," said Daryl Maeda, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Friday afternoon, then, was a homecoming, as Hellems officially reopened following an almost three-year renovation that saw the 105-year-old building become more accessible, more sustainable and more welcoming and expand its role as “a home—a home for the humanities, a home for the liberal arts and for the unending work of understanding the human experience,” said Daryl Maeda, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, during a reopening ceremony on the steps in front of the Hellems main entrance.

“We do live in a moment that sometimes questions the value of a liberal arts education and the profound thinking that this building represents. I want to say very clearly that the questions explored here have never been more important: How do we understand our history to help us navigate our future? How do we find common cause across cultures and languages? How do we reason thoughtfully about what is right and what is true and what is ethical and what has integrity? These are the questions the world urgently needs answered, and Hellems is where CU Boulder says, ‘We believe in these questions, we invest in them and we honor the people who ask them.’”

More than just a building

Hellems’ reopening Friday was imbued with particular significance because it happened during CU Boulder’s 150th-anniversary year, a time to celebrate the university’s past and to envision its future. Hellems plays a significant role in both.

When it opened in 1921, it was the first campus building designed by architect Charles Klauder in what has become the university’s signature—and iconic—Tuscan vernacular style, which has aesthetically defined the university for a century. It was named in honor of Fred Burton Renney Hellems, who served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for 30 years, beginning in 1899.

Maeda noted that about 85% of undergraduate students take at least one class in Hellems during their time at CU Boulder, and 56% of all first-year students take a class at Hellems during their first semester, “so for most students, Hellems is literally where their CU Boulder journey begins. It’s a shared experience that unites students and alumni across many generations.”

Chancellor Justin Schwartz observed that there are moments on a university campus when a building reopening feels like something much more. Hellems, he said, is not just where a student's experience at the university begins, “but where the ideas of the university take root, where perspectives are challenged and where intellectual confidence begins to take shape.”

Schwartz praised the state of Colorado, whose leaders committed 40% of the funds for the $105.2 million total renovation cost. That public investment, he said, affirms that the humanities and the liberal arts are a public good, essential to civic life, economic vitality and a society that is capable of making thoughtful, informed decisions.

The Hellems renovation "demonstrates that we can honor the character of a place while dramatically improving how it performs for the future,” said Chancellor Justin Schwartz.

Further, Schwartz praised the renovation’s significant improvements in sustainability, which reduce the building’s energy use by 68% while still adding air conditioning for the first time in its history. The renovation also preserved more than 80% of the building’s original clay roof tiles, which “demonstrates that we can honor the character of a place while dramatically improving how it performs for the future,” Schwartz said.

“Taken altogether, these choices reflect something larger than just a renovation. They reflect our commitment to stewardship—stewardship of the public investment that made this happen, stewardship of this historic space that all of you who had a class in here previously can reflect on and stewardship of our core academic mission that defines CU Boulder. It also reflects a clear belief that the significance of a building isn’t just the building; it’s what happens within it.”

Schwartz noted classrooms designed for flexibility, shared spaces that invite students to stay and greatly increased accessibility that reflects a commitment to dignity, independence and ensuring that everyone can participate in the life of the university. “This is a renovation guided by the idea that we put students first,” he said.

‘A home away from home’

As the center of arts and humanities on the CU Boulder campus, Hellems is home to the departments of history, English, linguistics and philosophy, as well as the Anderson Language and Technology Center and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. In fact, Klauder returned to campus in 1938 to design the building wings framing the courtyard that’s home to the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre, where Colorado Shakespeare Festival performances happen.

The Hellems renovation also reflects a commitment to the arts in the four commissioned works of original art now on display.

For Cleary, “Hellems has been the breath of fresh air I needed on campus this semester,” she said, adding that before it reopened, her study spots were growing stale, and she was zig-zagging all over campus to attend classes and meet with professors. Now, she said, she’s at home in the building’s wide-open spaces and natural light and is there most days—often making a beeline for the cozy new study booths.

“Hellems is a home away from home,” she said, “and the heart of the College of Arts and Sciences is beating stronger than ever.”

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�鶹��Ժ create better ways to communicate science

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:58:11 +0000

�鶹��Ժ create better ways to communicate science Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/10/2026 - 09:58

Rachel Sauer

In a program with Northglenn High School students, Institute for Behavioral Genetics researchers ask for creative and innovative ideas on how to talk about science

With all due respect to the dedicated and passionate scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder, but Northglenn High School students Joseph Zuniga and Alecsander Morain’s main goal was to “convert this study into a manageable format for normal people,” Morain explains.

The study in question was a recently published paper finding that children’s early interactions with music shape—but don’t determine—their musical lives decades later. The research, based on 40 years of data from surveys of 1,900 people in The Colorado Adoption/Twin Study of Lifespan Behavioral Development and Cognitive Aging (CATSLife), also considered shifting genetic and environmental influences.

Northglenn High School senior Carla Camacho holds the graphic novel that she and her fellow students created from an Institute for Behavioral Genetics study.

“It took quite a few readings to understand what the study was saying,” Zuniga says, and Morain adds, “and even then, we get to the results and there’s this graph that makes zero sense.”

Daniel Gustavson, first author of the study and a CU Boulder assistant research professor in the Institute for Behavioral Genetics (IBG), was standing fairly near as Zuniga and Morain expressed their honest opinions, but no hard feelings. That insight was why the two young men, along with more than 100 of their fellow Northglenn High School students, were gathered at the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Complex (SEEC) Thursday morning.

They were participating in a program envisioned and led by Analicia Howard, a psychology and neuroscience PhD student and Gustavson’s research colleague at the IBG. The program, which is funded by a Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship grant, is part of a broader research study called Comunidad, which is centered at IBG but has collaborators across campus and at Washington University.

“We were designing this study so that the community we’re most interested in, which is here in Colorado, is more involved in that development part of the study—that they are engaged in every aspect of research,” Howard explains, adding that a lot of effort in the first several years of community-based research like theirs should be focused on building partnerships.

“An issue with academia in general is there’s such a tough history with a lot of scientific research, especially if it includes human subjects in marginalized communities. So, we’re wanting to connect with the community in a way that’s mutually beneficial and leverage community partnerships in the future with established, trusted organizations. Schools felt like a natural segue to reaching broader audiences and meeting our goal of communicating science better. We were asking, ‘How do we communicate in a way that’s engaging, in a way that reaches the communities we’re interested in reaching?’”

They thought: Let’s ask the students.

Explaining science better

The idea is straightforward: select a handful of IBG research papers and ask students, working in groups, to choose one and create a project focused on how to better communicate the science to their broader community.

Howard and Gustavson approached Northglenn High School because CU Science Discovery and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research had previously worked with students and faculty there, “so there was already an established relationship and trust,” Howard says.

As a STEM high school, Northglenn requires every class to have an aspect of STEM, “but we were still thinking in terms of the accessibility of the science when we were choosing the papers, because the theme of genetics can be difficult to parse if you’re fairly new to it,” Gustavson says.

Meet the student award winners

Award for scientific accuracy

Ricardo Ayala
Brandon Diaz Renteria
Maddy Duncan
Alex Dunn
Caleb Ewudzi-Acquah

Award for innovation

Alex Trillo Salais
Will Watt
Joey Marquez
Angel Mendoza Maldonado
Frankie Pillar Cornell

Award for accessible presentation

Carla Camacho
Jane Heslop
Kimberly Olivas
Aylin Ramirez

The IBG scientists selected six of their papers that centered on topics that might be interesting to teenagers—video games, music, mental health—and presented them to Amy Murillo’s and Cheyenne Rost’s multicultural literature classes.

“Every year we incorporate a practice-based learning project into the curriculum, and we thought this was a real-world opportunity that the kids could grab onto,” Murillo says. “It’s been part of our research and analysis unit, so for the first few weeks we were talking about things like misinformation and fake news and why it’s important to read these studies.”

Then Murillo and Rost and about 120 students—all seniors except for one junior graduating early—arrayed across four classes spent a week reading a practice study.

“We were going through it step by step, learning how to read a scientific paper and trying to give them the autonomy to make mistakes and learn from them,” Rost says. “We were talking about things like how to understand results and how a layman would understand the jargon.”

Howard and Gustavson also visited the classes to answer questions once students had chosen the papers on which they’d focus their projects.

Thinking creatively about science

As for the projects, “we knew we had to make the paper simpler,” says Joselyn Ramirez, who along with classmate Genessis Garcia chose an IBG-led study finding that playing video games didn’t show consistent associations with impulsivity, but rather screentime in general is associated with impulsive tendencies in adulthood.

“There was a lot of stuff where I had to go back and go back and go back because I didn’t understand it,” Ramirez says, and Garcia adds that if they, as students at a STEM high school, had such difficulty understanding the study, what would it be like for a non-scientist community member to try reading it?

So they created interactive videos, which they showed on a screen they set up on their display table Thursday morning.

Joselyn Ramirez (left) and Genessis Garcia (right) with an interactive display board based on Institute for Behavioral Genetics research finding that playing video games doesn't show consistent associations with impulsivity.

Zuniga and Morain also thought to adapt the music research to a format Murillo and Rost teach their students—a recipe, with ingredients, steps and finished product. �鶹��Ժ also were encouraged to think creatively and in multimedia terms as they designed their projects, so Zuniga and Morain created a survey on a poster board on which event attendees could mark the kind of instrument they’d like to play.

For Carla Camacho, Jane Heslop, Kimberly Olivas and Aylin Ramirez, thinking creatively about communicating the science meant writing, designing and drawing a graphic novel. They also chose the video games and impulsivity research and created a story about two twins, Samantha and Sammy, and how each is affected by screen time.

“The study is based on twin research, so we thought that’s where we should start,” says Camacho, who drew the final graphic novel.

“There was a lot of rewriting and rewording, because we were summarizing and trying to use simpler words,” says Heslop, who drew the original storyboards for the novel. “But I think I have better time management and better communication skills now, because we had to think about what we really needed to say and how we should say it in a way that people would understand.”

The students’ projects were judged Thursday by volunteer IBG faculty members and graduate students, and part of the judges’ assessment was how clearly students expressed their ideas on how to communicate science better.

“Definitely more visual appeal,” says Chloe Ibarra, who with classmate Alejandra Franco also chose the video games and impulsivity study. “If you look at the study, there’s nothing that really catches your eye, but if you look at ours,” and she indicates a poster on an easel behind them that takes a vision board approach to communicating the science, “there’s color everywhere and it’s interesting to look at.”

For Isaac Aranda and his project partners Josue Sanchez and Leo Lin, who also chose the video games and impulsivity study, a key to communicating science is using language that people will understand: “We had to look a lot of stuff up,” Aranda says, “and I don’t know if everyone would have the patience to do that.”

But it’s important to find the right words and the right way to talk about the science, Sanchez says, because “this study isn’t saying video games are bad, it’s really saying we shouldn’t be on our phones all the time.”

Alejandra Franco (left) and Chloe Ibarra (right) with their project that emphasizes the need for visual interest when communicating science.

Institute for Behavioral Genetics scientist Daniel Gustavson (right) talks with Northglenn High School students about their science communication project.

IBG research associate Jeff Lessem (left) talks with Kimberly Olivas (center) and Carla Camacho (right) about their science communication project, which won the award for most accessible presentation.

Alecsander Morain (left) and Joseph Zuniga (right) with their project communicating research finding that children’s early interactions with music shape—but don’t determine—their musical lives decades later.

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In a program with Northglenn High School students, Institute for Behavioral Genetics researchers ask for creative and innovative ideas on how to talk about science.

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Top image: Northglenn High School students explain their science communication project to IBG judges. (All photos by Arielle Wiedenbeck/PACES)

Praise the Lord and plan the family

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:20:01 +0000

Praise the Lord and plan the family Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/06/2026 - 11:20

Rachel Sauer

In new book God Bless the Pill, CU Boulder scholar Samira Mehta delves into the often-forgotten history of how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America

A little more than 100 years ago, the Episcopalian stance on birth control was this: “We utter an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of contraception, together with the grave dangers—physical, moral and religious—thereby incurred, and against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens the race.”

Even acknowledging “abnormal cases” in which birth control might be necessary, Episcopalians were just one of many Protestant denominations that, in the early 20th century, “reacted to contraception on a continuum from skeptical to disapproving,” writes Samira Mehta, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of women and gender studies and director of the Program in Jewish Studies.

This aligns with commonly held ideas about how contraception—specifically the pill, which received FDA approval in May 1960—became broadly available in the United States: that first- and second-wave feminists pushed for accessibility, policy change and social revolution while religious leaders erected roadblocks and preached against it.

CU Boulder scholar Samira Mehta's new book, God Bless the Pill, explores how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America.

Except this doesn’t actually tell the whole story.

In her new book God Bless the Pill, scheduled for publication April 14, Mehta details the often-forgotten history of mid-20th-century Protestant, Jewish and Catholic leaders and believers who embraced birth control as part of God’s plan. In fact, many denominations that were “skeptical to disapproving” in the early 20th century came around to supporting and advocating for birth control and family planning.

“In a society that overtly thought of sex as something inside of marriage and that was inappropriate outside of marriage, the way that birth control becomes something that is covered by insurance and a part of respectable medicine lay in reshaping it from a tool for sexual liberation and turning it into a tool for creating properly structured American families,” Mehta says.

“This didn’t happen because (as a society) we care about women but because children have a better start if their mother doesn’t die in childbirth, if their family doesn’t have more children than the parents can provide for. The goal was to create healthier families—to use birth control to create healthier families—not just a healthy mother. And there’s concern that if you have more children than you can afford, you become dependent on the state. This is the United States, where we don’t want you to need a school lunch program, so you can’t have more kids than you can afford to give lunch to.”

The role of liberal religion

The idea to research what became God Bless the Pill, Mehta says, germinated from a desire not to lessen the significant influence that first- and second-wave feminism had on making birth control broadly available to women, but to understand what, if any, influence liberal religion had on the accessibility of birth control.

Book release and Q&A

What: A reading from God Bless the Pill by author Samira Mehta, followed by a Q&A facilitated by Phoebe Young, chair of the CU Boulder Department of History

Where: Waldschänke Ciders + Coffee, 4100 Jason St. in Denver

When: 6-8 p.m. Monday, April 13

Who: All are invited to this free event.

Reserve a spot

Mehta was inspired by social historian Elaine Tyler May’s America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, in which May assesses how access to the pill did and didn’t fulfill utopian dreams of liberating women, eradicating global poverty and supporting stable and happy marriages.

Mehta understood that the history of contraception is not simply a feminist history and found herself wondering what “that story would look like if one fully included religion in the narrative? I hoped and assumed that, as in May’s title, the promise and liberation might outweigh the peril. I also saw in May’s narration the assumption that religion was always conservative and opposed to birth control,” she writes in God Bless the Pill.

But what about liberal religious congregations? Where were they in the aftermath of oral contraception becoming broadly available in 1960?

Mehta took that question to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, where she found documentation of her childhood minister, the Rev. Al Ciarcia of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Bridgeport in Connecticut, publicly supporting birth control during the Griswold v. Connecticut debate—a landmark 1965 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the court found that a Connecticut statute forbidding contraceptive use violated the right of marital privacy.

This decision came 25 years after the American Birth Control League, formed by Margaret Sanger in 1921 and renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942, assembled a national clergymen’s committee.

“These clergy talk about the importance of sex in a marriage and how a marriage that is sexually dynamic is less likely to result in divorce,” Mehta says. “The rhetoric around sex and marriage starts changing, and clergy members start talking about the sacred nature of a marriage bond and how sex is part of that bond through which two become one—regardless of literally becoming one in the form of a new person.

"The way that birth control becomes something that is covered by insurance and a part of respectable medicine lay in reshaping it from a tool for sexual liberation and turning it into a tool for creating properly structured American families," says Samira Mehta.

“They also advocate for marriages that are economically stable, and more kids can strain the economics of the household.”

Making the moral choice

Though Mehta begins the narrative in God Bless the Pill during World War II, the story of religion and contraception really gathers steam after the war’s end and the Cold War’s beginning. During this time, the value and sanctity of the American family was touted as one of the best weapons against the communist menace.

“There’s talk about Soviet women who have to go out and work in factories and put their kids in daycare,” Mehta says. “But a family that can control how many kids they have—where the mother can stay home and the father’s income is enough to support the family—can control their discretionary income. They can get a KitchenAid stand mixer, they can replace the dishwasher when a new and better model comes out. Limiting the birth rate becomes a way of increasing capitalist consumption.”

Messages highlighting capitalism as a way to defeat communism often occurred in the same breath as messages of moral behavior: “It’s the idea that if you can’t control something, it’s not moral,” Mehta explains. “Nobody wants to argue you should be celibate in marriage, so liberal religion begins framing birth control as a tool that allows us to make moral choices about how to structure our families.

“These clergy members believe that you can lay out the evidence for a compelling moral choice and then everybody will want to make a compelling moral choice. They were arguing that this is an access problem and an education problem, and they thought people would see that the best choices for their families are these choices (the clergy members) are suggesting.”

Mehta notes that even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that people would make the moral choice if it was presented to them—arguing that big families may be appropriate for the farm, but they work against African Americans’ self-interest in the city. “He laid out the argument that African Americans have a right to these tools as well to lift themselves out of poverty.”

Ultimately, Mehta adds, there was and continues to be backlash on both the right and the left, with the right not anticipating the feminist potential of contraception and the left questioning whether birth control is a tool of liberation rather than of racial and patriarchal oppression.

“And then the center isn’t necessarily super comfortable with prolific non-marital sex,” Mehta explains. “They may be OK with married-like relationships, but they’re generally not OK with an emotionally unencumbered and mutually satisfying one-night stand. And the center wasn’t on board with men needing to pull their weight at home and women being in the workforce and kids being in daycare. We’re still seeing a course correction from the center.”

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In new book God Bless the Pill, CU Boulder scholar Samira Mehta delves into the often-forgotten history of how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America.

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Documentary shares secrets of the bees

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:21:04 +0000

Documentary shares secrets of the bees Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/03/2026 - 08:21

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder researcher Samuel Ramsey served as science advisor and a producer, alongside executive producer James Cameron, for Secrets of the Bees, premiering this week on National Geographic, Disney+ and Hulu

Would you like to hear a secret about bees?

Not many people know this, but bees in Southeast Asia have figured out that water buffalo dung isn’t the only pungent substance that will keep hornets away.

See, Vespa mandarinia—more sensationally known as the murder hornet—can wreak havoc on a bee colony. One or two dozen hornets can wipe out an entire colony, although bees have developed some pretty awesome defenses. One of these involves vibrating their flight muscles to create a convection oven effect that essentially cooks invading hornets.

Samuel Ramsey, a University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, served as science advisor and producer, alongside executive producer James Cameron, on the documentary Secrets of the Bees. (Photo: Shin Arunrugstichai)

However, sometimes a hornet can escape bees’ defenses and flee the hive—but not before leaving a figure-eight pattern of pheromones outside the hive that acts as a beacon to future hornet invasions. Bees deduced that they’d need something even more pungent to spread at the hive entrance to mask the hornet pheromones, “and for a long time we thought they were just relying on water buffalo dung for that purpose,” explains Samuel Ramsey, a University of Colorado Boulder assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

But bees are smart. They figured out they could chew the leaves of an extremely pungent plant to spread at the hive entrance, “which was something we’d never seen before,” Ramsey says.

He and his colleagues discovered this behavior in pursuit of Secrets of the Bees, the fifth installment of the Emmy Award-winning “Secrets of…” series premiering this week on National Geographic, Disney+ and Hulu.

Ramsey, a National Geographic Explorer, served not only as science advisor and featured expert, but as a producer alongside executive producer James Cameron.

Yes, that James Cameron.

“It’s always a pleasure to say I produced a documentary with James Cameron,” Ramsey says with a laugh. “It’s opened up a lot of opportunities to talk with people about bees and together making sure that there’s unity in concept—so we’re not talking in terms of ‘right’ bees and ‘wrong’ bees, but we’re talking about what we can do to support all bees’ survival.”

Communicating science (and bees)

This all came about, in part, because “bees really, really need our help,” Ramsey says, a fact he quickly realized as a lifelong, self-described “bug nerd” observing how human-caused changes to the natural world are affecting bee populations.

During his undergraduate and graduate studies, Ramsey focused on diseases and parasites affecting bees, particularly the Varroa mite, and began raising bees so that he could study them. When he came to CU Boulder, that move included installing a research and observation hive in his lab in the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building.

Because his research interests also include symbiotic relationships, it’s perhaps no surprise that Ramsey the scientist is also Ramsey the science communicator: passionate about describing the beauty, wonder, fragility and resiliency of the natural world to broad and interested—although often non-scientific—audiences. He has been at the vanguard of using social media to tell the dynamic stories of science.

Thanks in part to this outreach, documentarians and filmmakers began requesting his expertise and consultation. He worked on the documentary My Garden of a Thousand Bees and has discussed insects on NPR, CBS and many other outlets, in addition to becoming a National Geographic Explorer. Still, he says, it’s a little surreal to get that call proposing a collaboration with the director of Titanic and Avatar.

“(Cameron) has 300 hives at his farm in New Zealand, so this really has been a labor of love for him,” Ramsey says.

Making a difference for bees

The framework of Secrets of the Bees is to show a hive of honeybees preparing for winter, but that simple concept took Ramsey and his collaborators around the world, exploring bee colonies as the dynamic cities they are and bees not as mindless automatons, but as intelligent, adaptive creatures that form complex societies.

The filmmakers used groundbreaking technologies, including cameras similar to those used in endoscopes, to peer inside hives for never-before-seen views of bees living, working and playing together. Yes, bees play, Ramsey says, and it’s a wonderful thing to see.

The cutting-edge filmmaking technology allows viewers to see close-up, time-lapse scenes of larva growing into adult bees, as well as the funerary process of pushing dead bees from the hive. “The advent of universal childcare is what allowed this to be one of the most successful species on the planet,” Ramsey says, “which you really see up-close in the film.”

He adds that it was important to him that the documentary not sugarcoat the peril in which Earth’s more than 20,000 bee species currently exist, including calamitous population declines associated with climate change, monoculture crops, parasites, chemical use and habitat loss, among other causes.

“But the film also emphasizes hope, because there are things every one of us can do to support bees,” Ramsey says. “Something as simple as planting a window box with flowers can make a big difference to a lot of bees.”

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CU Boulder researcher Samuel Ramsey served as science advisor and a producer, alongside executive producer James Cameron, for Secrets of the Bees, premiering this week on National Geographic, Disney+ and Hulu.

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Scientist lives by the Serengeti Rules

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:17:06 +0000

Scientist lives by the Serengeti Rules Rachel Sauer Mon, 03/16/2026 - 20:17

Rachel Sauer

Author, filmmaker and scholar Sean B. Carroll, formerly a CU Boulder postdoctoral researcher, will deliver the Rose M. Litman Memorial Lecture in Science April 7

When Sean B. Carroll came to the University of Colorado Boulder in 1983, right out of graduate school and newly hired as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of molecular, cellular and developmental biologist Matt Scott, he was somewhat indifferent to Drosophila melanogaster, better known as the fruit fly and Scott’s research focus.

“I was coming from an immunology background, working with furry animals, and my attitude was that studying fruit flies wouldn’t teach us anything general,” Carroll recalls. “It wouldn’t have anything to do with humans or important things, or so I thought. But that was a really narrow view, because it turns out that all these genes that build fruit fly parts are in us—they build parts in us—so fruit flies became a passport to the whole animal kingdom.”

Scientist, author and filmmaker Sean B. Carroll, a former CU Boulder postdoctoral researcher, will deliver the Rose M. Litman Memorial Lecture in Science April 7.

And with that passport, Carroll has roamed the planet as an evolutionary developmental biologist and award-winning author and filmmaker, observing life from individual cells to continent-spanning populations. Through his observations and experiences emerged what he came to call “The Serengeti Rules,” based on the idea that everything in the living world is regulated.

He will discuss the discovery of The Serengeti Rules, on which he elaborates in his book of the same name, during the Rose M. Litman Memorial Lecture from 4-5 p.m. April 7 in the CASE Chancellor’s Hall Auditorium.

The Serengeti Rules, as he describes them, are ecological rules that regulate the numbers and kinds of animals and plants in any given place, and how they are being applied to restore some of the greatest wildernesses on the planet.

“Every cell contains a society of molecules, every organ a society of cells, every body a society of organs, every habitat a society of organisms,” he writes in The Serengeti Rules. “Understanding the interactions within each of those societies are the primary aims of molecular biology, physiology and ecology.”

Diversity in the animal kingdom

Before he had roamed the globe as a scientist and filmmaker, however, Carroll was the kid growing up in Toledo, Ohio, flipping over rocks to see what was under them. “I have a love for the entire animal kingdom,” he explains, which guided him to a bachelor’s degree in biology from Washington University and a PhD in immunology from Tufts University.

During his graduate studies, he became very interested in the question of how animal bodies evolve—in understanding how all the diversity in the animal kingdom came about. So, he hatched a plan to solve the mysteries of development.

“Changes in development are what lead to changes in form,” Carroll says. “The whole diversity of the animal kingdom is rooted in development, so we had to crack the black-box mystery of development to get any traction in understanding how the physical diversity of the animal kingdom evolved.”

Thus, the fruit flies. He wagered that studying them could be a key to unlocking the diversity of the animal kingdom—and the genes that govern development—and came to CU Boulder determined to pick the lock on that black box.

If you go

What: 2026 Rose M. Litman Memorial Lecture in Science—The Serengeti Rules: The Regulation and Restoration of Biodiversity

Who: Sean B. Carroll

When: 4–5 p.m. Tuesday, April 7, with reception to follow

Where: Chancellor’s Hall Auditorium, Center for Academic Success & Engagement (CASE)

Learn more

“During this time, 1983, oh my god—how an egg turns into a complex creature was a mystery,” he says. “It was a spectacular pageant we could watch from the outside, but we didn’t know what was going on inside. We needed to identify the genes that are necessary for that process, figure out what the genes did.

“It’s hard to overstate both how deep the mystery was but how thrilling these clues were as they started to unfold. Those days were incredibly exhilarating and intense, the lab was a beehive, people worked all days and nights and weekends because, first of all, we were fascinated. Also, we felt we had a shot at some really fundamental discoveries. Looking back, these times don’t happen very often in science where you really have a black-box mystery, and it breaks open—and it broke open partly because of what we did in Matt’s lab and partly because of what our peers around the world did.”

One eureka moment from Carroll’s time in Boulder came about 18 months into his research. He had taken on the task of seeing genes in action inside developing fruit fly embryos, working every day in the lab, trying this technique and that technique until his bag of tricks was almost empty; he was no closer to understanding which genes caused wings to grow, for example, or determined their shape.

He remembers a particular time when he took his samples down to a borrowed microscope, flipping on an ultraviolet light because he was looking at fluorescence, “and the best thing I can say is that it was a ‘holy sh^t!’ moment. I remember looking down, and I saw these embryos that had these beautiful green rings circling them, which is the mark of a gene that turns on every other segment.

“That’s the day when the dam broke, the door blew open, the clouds parted. It’s almost overwhelming because now so many things are possible. I went from having nothing to show anybody to essentially having the tools that would allow me to really untangle this puzzle.”

During his April 7 lecture, Sean B. Carroll will discuss the Serengeti Rules, the ecological rules that regulate the numbers and kinds of animals and plants in any given place, and how they are being applied to restore some of the greatest wildernesses on the planet.

A discovery of wings

After completing his CU Boulder postdoc, Carroll joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he continued studying the genes that control animal body patterns and play major roles in the evolution of animal diversity. There he “saw something in the microscope that nobody had ever seen before,” he remembers.

He and the other researchers in his lab isolated the handful of genes that are activated in caterpillars to become butterfly wings. This discovery, published in the journal Science, garnered a feature in The New York Times, an interview on PBS News Hour and an invitation to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

From there, Carroll built a career that marries both research and discovery with science communication—as an investigator and vice president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and head of the HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, where he executive produced or was executive in charge of more than 30 documentary films, including the Oscar-nominated and Peabody-winning All That Breathes. He has won three Emmys and been nominated for an additional five.

During that time, “I decided, ‘I’m telling the same story again and again, so I probably should write this down,’” he says. “So, I wrote a book, then I wrote another book.” He has written six books, including Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species, which was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award for nonfiction, and The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters, which will be the foundation for his CU Boulder lecture.

Carroll, who is a distinguished university professor and the Andrew and Mary Balo and Nicholas and Susan Simon Chair of Biology at the University of Maryland, credits the depth and success of his career in large part to the collaborations of which he’s been a part. “I like to think my toolkit has grown over the years, but it doesn’t happen all at once and it doesn’t happen alone. I didn’t write a full-length book until I was 45 and truly an expert in my field.

“I think people might look at my portfolio and say the science portfolio is pretty good, the external indicators are good; the writing career, there’s been a fair amount of output; the film career has been good. But in no way could I have done it alone. Science is a hugely collaborative thing; filmmaking’s even more collaborative. An individual like me gets a lot of credit for a body of work owned by an enormous community.”

Through it all—from his extensive travels through the Serengeti to the red carpet at the Academy Awards to the quiet moments in the lab—the joy of discovery and mystery-solving has never ebbed, he says. “I love science because I love nature and I love trying to figure out how nature works. I love the privilege and thrill of peeking into that box and going, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s how it is.’”

About the Rose M. Litman Memorial Lecture in Science

The Litman Lecture celebrates the legacy of an exceptional scientist and educator with a lifelong passion for research and a firm commitment to keeping rigorous inquiry at the heart of university life.

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Author, filmmaker and scholar Sean B. Carroll, formerly a CU Boulder postdoctoral researcher, will deliver the Rose M. Litman Memorial Lecture in Science April 7.

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Don’t just explain the science, dance it

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:14:04 +0000

Don’t just explain the science, dance it Rachel Sauer Thu, 03/12/2026 - 10:14

Rachel Sauer

Asia Kaiser, a bee researcher and ecology and evolutionary biology PhD candidate, is named social sciences category winner in the international Dance Your PhD contest sponsored by the journal Science

There’s a lot going on with bees right now. Because it was an unseasonably warm winter, queens may be emerging from hibernation and beginning to lay the eggs of their first broods. And since queens can choose the sex of their offspring, they are now or soon will be producing daughters.

It’s fascinating information about one of the planet’s most complex and charismatic insects, but how to convey it in dance?

PhD candidate Asia Kaiser (in a scene from her Dance Your PhD entry), studies how human land use affects different insect groups and, consequently, the ecosystem services they provide in coupled human-natural systems.

Start with a shimmy—reminiscent, perhaps, of the movement of bees’ wings or the vibration of their flight muscles. Then weave undulating patterns with fellow dancers, gliding and twirling in a choreography of bees in motion. And bring it home with a question about what happens when we remove native flowers from urban environments or destroy bee habitat to build roads or houses (answer: nothing good).

In short, dance your PhD. So, that’s what Asia Kaiser did.

Kaiser, a PhD candidate in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EBIO) and researcher in the Resasco Lab, this week was announced the social sciences category winner in the international Dance Your PhD contest sponsored by the journal Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Now in its 18th year, Dance Your PhD seeks, through a spirit of fun and of marrying art and science, to address a scenario that scientists commonly experience: “The party is just getting started when the dreaded question comes: ‘So, what’s your PhD research about?’ You launch into the explanation, trying to judge the level of interest as you go deeper. It takes about a minute before someone changes the subject,” contest organizers explain.

“At times like this, don’t you wish you lived in a world where you could just ask people to pull out their phones to watch an online video explaining your PhD research through interpretive dance?”

“I was a dancer all through college, so I have a background in belly dance and Latin dance,” Kaiser explains. “And I like to make music, so I thought this could be a really fun way to explain my research.”

Learning to dance

And what is that research? Bees. Specifically, how human land use affects different insect groups and, consequently, the ecosystem services they provide in coupled human-natural systems. Her research aims to improve the resilience of urban agroecosystems, increase equitable access to fresh produce and promote environmental justice in cities.

As for the dancing, Kaiser had wanted to take dance lessons while growing up in Philadelphia, but there wasn’t room in the budget for them. So, after graduating high school she took a gap year in Brazil to do service work and finally began learning dance. She started with belly dance, then branched into samba and other Latin styles.

When she began her ecology and evolutionary biology undergraduate studies at Princeton University, “I thought, ‘I’m going to invest in my secondary dream,’” Kaiser recalls, which meant stepping away from the books sometimes to immerse herself in the vibrant dance scene in Princeton and the broader New York City and Philadelphia area.

She also is a cellist, so when she came to CU Boulder to pursue her PhD she began making music with other people in her department.

When she heard about Dance Your PhD, it dovetailed with so many of the things she loves: dance and music and science. However, the deadline to submit entry videos was Feb. 20, and she decided to enter the contest a mere two weeks before then.

She started with the music, composing a piece to score the story in her mind: “I wanted to tell a story of bees emerging in early spring in your backyard and what they’re up to. People know a lot about honeybees, but not other bee species, so I wanted to highlight how important they are to urban ecosystems.”

Kaiser put out a call for dancers and fortunately, the response from her fellow PhD students and candidates was abundant and eager. Then she and Ella Henry, a violinist and EBIO PhD student, recorded the music.

Science as art

Because of the quick turnaround, the troupe had time for just two rehearsals before their afternoon of filming in front of the EBIO greenhouses on 30th Street in Boulder. It was an EBIO community collaboration. PhD students Manuela Mejía, Lincoln Taylor, Gladiana Spitz, Kaylee Rosenberger and Ella Henry danced Kaiser’s choreography alongside her. PhD student Luis de Pablo helped with sound engineering and Scott Taylor, EBIO associate professor and director of the Mountain Research Station, was cinematographer. Kaiser’s husband, John Russell, provided voiceover narration for the final video.

And despite the extremely short timeframe, it all came together, Kaiser says. For example, she happened to have a pair of gold Isis wings, a traditional belly dance prop, that Lincoln Taylor wore “to depict the fact that male bees spend their lives flying around,” she says.

The dance, music and costumes united in a science-as-art visualization of her PhD, which she uploaded to YouTube and clicked submit on her Dance Your PhD entry. She was up against scientists from around the world, so learning that she won her category was especially significant.

“Obviously, I love bees,” she says, “and I love to dance and make music, so it was a really cool experience to create this piece with my friends and find a different way to talk about my research.”

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Asia Kaiser, a bee researcher and ecology and evolutionary biology PhD candidate, is named social sciences category winner in the international Dance Your PhD contest sponsored by the journal Science.

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Film builds science into beaver tales

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:46:49 +0000

Film builds science into beaver tales Rachel Sauer Mon, 03/09/2026 - 10:46

Rachel Sauer

CU Boulder alumna Emily Fairfax shared her scientific expertise as the beaver consultant on the new Pixar film Hoppers

Emily Fairfax came home one evening from her job as a weapons engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory feeling a bit sad. Yes, she was using her degrees in chemistry and physics, but the work just wasn’t a good fit for her.

She sat on the couch and turned on the TV, happening across an episode of Nature on PBS called “Leave it to Beavers.”

“I was so hooked,” recalls Fairfax (PhDGeol’19). “I couldn’t stop thinking about it. There were all these aerial images of beaver wetlands in places like the Nevada desert, which was amazing and I couldn’t get it out of my head. So, I thought, ‘I’ve got to go to grad school and study beavers.’”

CU Boulder alumnus Emily Fairfax (PhDGeol’19) was the scientific beaver consultant for the new Pixar film Hoppers. (Photo: Emily Fairfax)

Fast forward to the evening of Feb. 23 on the red carpet outside the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California. There, wearing a beautiful teal and black dress with a lace and sequin overlay—and having received glam tips from her grad students—Fairfax posed for photographers in front of a yellow screen bearing the images of animated beavers she’d helped bring to life.

Fairfax, whose “a-ha beavers!” moment led her to the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Geological Sciences, was the scientific beaver consultant for the acclaimed new Pixar film Hoppers, which opened nationwide Friday.

The story of an animal-loving college student whose mind is transferred into a robotic beaver so she can help save a pristine glade from being paved for a freeway, Hoppers highlights a keystone species in a scientifically accurate way that is, frankly, adorable.

“People need to know that they’re a keystone species,” says Fairfax, who signed on to the film project with the assurance that this point would be emphasized. “When you lose the beaver, you lose the ecosystem, and I think (Pixar filmmakers) made that crystal clear.

“The other point that I really wanted to be in the film is that beavers are not just off in national parks. You can have beavers living in cities, living adjacent to cities, and we can coexist with them to our benefit, not just the benefit of the beaver. I wanted to highlight the idea that protecting beavers and habitats isn’t just about protecting nature out of the goodness of our hearts; we benefit greatly.”

The force of a glacier

Long before her pivot from Los Alamos to CU Boulder, Fairfax, who now is an assistant professor of geography, environment and society at the University of Minnesota, was a Girl Scout in a troop that took its role as stewards of the natural world very seriously.

“We learned the basic principles of ‘Leave No Trace’ very early on, but then our troop leaders took it a step further,” she wrote on her personal website. “They urged us to put in that little bit of extra effort and leave things better than we found them. When we went camping this usually panned out as picking up trash off of trails, but the sentiment stuck with me. If everyone strives to leave things better than they started—even if only by a little bit—then the overall state of things will consistently improve.”

It’s a sentiment that dovetailed neatly with her graduate work at CU Boulder, where she studied beavers through the lens of ecohydrology, combining remote sensing, modeling and field work to understand how beaver damming changes the landscape and the timescales on which that change happens.

“I’m at heart a water scientist—how fast it’s moving, if it’s being slowed or stored or just blasting downstream superfast,” Fairfax says. “I care about the shape of rivers as a geomorphologist, and I’m very hyper-focused on how one specific animal controls water or the shape of water.”

Her first Colorado field site was in Lefthand Canyon west of Boulder—where, if you drive slowly and look closely, it’s possible to see an 11-foot-tall beaver dam from the road—and her dissertation research was inspired by “Leave It to Beavers”: “In the documentary, they were interviewing hydrologists and geomorphologists, who kept bringing up how beaver wetlands in these areas are the only things staying green during droughts.

Emily Fairfax takes measurements of a beaver dam in Lefthand Canyon west of Boulder. (Photo: Emily Fairfax)

“I get that beavers can seem really chaotic—they don’t draw any blueprints, they don’t pull permits, they don’t let anybody know what they’re going to do before they do it. But beavers are second only to us, humans, in terms of animals that can change the physical earth. They’ve been damming for at least 7.5 million years, maybe as long as 25 million years, so thinking about beavers as this geological force is really intellectually exciting—this rodent in my yard carries the force of a glacier.”

Inquiry from Pixar

Two years after earning her PhD and joining the California State University Channel Islands faculty, where she worked before joining the University of Minnesota faculty in 2023, Fairfax presented a Zoom webinar about beavers and drought in California that several Pixar employees attended. “I thought, ‘OK, cool, they have a right to be interested in what’s going on in their state,’” she remembers. Several months later, she received an email with the subject line “Inquiry from Pixar” and thought it was a prank.

Nope: It was legitimate.

Pixar filmmakers wanted her to give a presentation to studio staff about beavers, which she did. It turns out that Pixar was making a film about them, and after signing reams of non-disclosure agreements and securing a promise that the filmmakers wouldn’t even think about having the beaver characters eat fish—because beavers do not eat fish—Fairfax was officially the Hoppers beaver consultant.

At first, Fairfax answered a lot of basic questions about beaver behaviors, ecology, what they can and can’t do, how long they live, their family units, their size and why their teeth are orange. Then the questions started getting more specific: What other animals would you see in a beaver wetland? How do beavers get along with humans? If someone tried to build a road by a beaver wetland, how would beavers react? She brought a group of Pixar filmmakers to Lefthand Canyon for a week of beaver observation, which yielded even more questions.

“At every step along the way, they were turning seemingly disconnected beaver facts into scenes,” Fairfax says. For example, as with humans, beavers’ tailbones tuck under, allowing them to sit on their tails like little chairs. So, the scene in Hoppers in which the real beaver George sits on his tail is accurate, and the fact that the character Mabel sits with her tail outstretched is a clue that she’s not a real beaver.

The dam-building sequence in Hoppers is also scientifically accurate: “A lot of people don’t know how beavers build dams,” Fairfax explains. "It can be very sudden, and they will often use relatively large cobbles and stones to start, which they put along the base of their dams. Then they’ll put on some sticks and then pack it with mud. Everyone thinks they pat the mud on with their tails, but they actually use their paws. So, the sequence in the film where you see these super buff beavers lifting up stones and rolling them down, then you see other beavers waddling in carrying mud and patting it down, that actually shows the real sequence of dam building.”

Among the questions that Pixar filmmakers asked scientist Emily Fairfax was how beavers relate to and get along with other animals in the areas where they live. (Photo: Disney/Pixar)

Throughout the filmmaking process, Fairfax received scenes to review, so the accurately rotund beavers in the film are her doing. “The very first time I saw one of the (film) beavers, I told them it was too skinny. Beavers are shaped like a bowling ball, so when I saw it again it was a little fatter, and then I saw it again and it was a little fatter. Finally, people with Pixar were like, ‘If it’s sitting on its tail, it needs more rolls’ and ‘It should be jiggling more when it’s running.’ I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is adorable.’ They’re like big, fuzzy bowling balls, and I’m collecting all the little plushies.”

Science and storytelling

Through the process, Fairfax says, the filmmakers balanced storytelling and science. There were times when total accuracy had to concede a little to the story, “but they always asked me, ‘Is this realistic enough? Is it going to hurt beavers, is it going to hurt climate change work if we do it this way?’ They were always really good about asking me how much certain things mattered, because they are people trying to create a compelling narrative, but they also wanted to respect the science.”

(And speaking of respecting the science—and scientist—the full name of the film character Dr. Sam is Dr. Samatha Emily Fairfax.)

Fairfax’s work on the film was also a matter of balancing the often solitary, generally unglamorous work of science with the razzle-dazzle of Hollywood. She jokes that she considered wearing her waders to the Hollywood premiere, but her grad students stepped in with hair and makeup tips. And then she was on the red carpet with A-list stars like Jon Hamm, then inside the ornate theater watching the velvet curtain rise on her research via Hollywood movie magic.

“It was just so surreal,” she says. “I’d seen the movie many times before that, but it was so real in that moment, packed into this theater, all the voice actors there, and immediately I’m crying. In many ways, it felt like there was a lot of myself on that screen, and seeing people’s reactions to it felt like seeing reactions to my research.

“Trying to translate what I know in a way that’s relevant to artists was not a normal part of my job, and it felt very high risk at first because what if people don’t like the movie and it sets beavers back? Beavers are still coming back from the fur trade, plus we have the rising challenge of climate change, so it felt risky. But it’s a beautiful movie and people seem to love it, so that makes me feel very hopeful about how science and storytelling can benefit all species.”

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CU Boulder alumna Emily Fairfax shared her scientific expertise as the beaver consultant on the new Pixar film Hoppers.

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Top image: Disney/Pixar

Rachel Sauer

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