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Grad ponders the past and considers the future

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:54:29 +0000

Grad ponders the past and considers the future Rachel Sauer Thu, 04/30/2026 - 16:54

Rachel Sauer

Abigail Verneuille, who is earning a BA in anthropology along with a GIS certificate, is honored as the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate

In the summer of 2024, following her sophomore year as a University of Colorado Boulder anthropology major, Abigail Verneuille signed up for archaeological field school in the Velarde Valley of northern New Mexico.

The area is stunning with its boundless sky and mosaic of mesas, but summers there are intense—arid and scorchingly hot, plus dusty and buggy.

“We were sleeping on the floor for a month, and despite that and the heat, all the dirt, the bugs, everything, I just had the best time of my life,” she says. “I loved everything about it.”

Abigail Verneuille (third from left), the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate, with (left to right) Dean of Arts and Humanities John-Michael Rivera, Dean of Social Sciences Sarah Jackson, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Daryl Maeda, Dean of Natural Sciences Irene Blair and Interim Associate Dean for Student Success Jennifer Fitzgerald.

Before that summer, she had indistinct ideas about her path following college, but after it she knew that she wanted a career in archaeology and directed the rest of her undergraduate education toward that goal—earning a certificate in geographic information systems (GIS) and computational science and writing a thesis aiming to predict past streamflow heights of the Rio Grande River to identify years of agricultural instability.

In recognition of her innovative research, academic excellence and dedicated work, Verneuille has been named the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate.

“Verneuille’s perfect academic record tells only part of the story, as she has taken courses ranging from humanities to women and gender studies to biological anthropology to math to astronomy to geographic information systems to computational science, and she has received straight A’s in all of them!” wrote Scott Ortman, professor of anthropology, in recommending her. “She has also conducted archaeological field research in North Macedonia and participated in the anthropology department’s archaeology field school in northern New Mexico. Her honors thesis project emerged from that experience.

“What stands out about Abby’s thesis is not just its organization, clarity and technical sophistication, but the fact that the work is of such significance in its field.”

Hiking into the backcountry

Because the kind of archaeology she wants to do is outdoors and sometimes miles down a dirt road, it helps that Verneuille has always loved to be outside. Growing up in Tennessee, she spent a lot of time hiking and exploring—activities she continued when she moved to Boulder for college.

She majored in anthropology and minored in women and gender studies, which allowed her to study themes of religion and ritual that dovetailed with her archaeological research. She discovered her academic passion, though, near the tiny community of Estaca, New Mexico, where she and her research colleagues opened four two-meter by one-meter rectangles in which they found artifacts that helped describe the people who lived in that area before and after Spanish colonialism.

Another project on which she worked was documenting petroglyphs with the Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project. “There would be days where we’d like an hour and a half into the backcountry and spend eight hours recording petroglyphs, then hike an hour and a half back up this mesa, and that was just the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” Verneuille says.

In talking with archaeologists from other universities, though, she realized at field school that she would need technical expertise to accompany her hands-in-the-dirt skills, so in fall 2024 she began pursuing her GIS and computational science certificate. “For that, you’re required to take a semester of statistics in R Studio and then two semesters of coding in Python, and I’d never really thought of myself as a computer kind of person, but I got thrown straight into it,” she says.

“But once I got into the actual mapping classes, the spatial analytics, all the remote sensing, that’s when I thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing, I love this.’”

Abigail Verneuille working at an archaeological field site in northern New Mexico. (Photo: Abigail Verneuille)

Amazing work, amazing people

For her thesis, Verneuille sought to tackle a 100-year-old mystery in U.S. Southwest archaeology: When Pueblo ancestors migrated from the Four Corners region into the Rio Grande Valley in the 13th century, why did they initially settle away from the main courses of the Rio Grande and Rio Chama, where most of the water was, only to gravitate toward the rivers about 100 years later?

Verneuille combined river flow data from the Embudo gauge, the oldest river gauge in the United States, with weather station data and tree ring data reflecting precipitation and temperature from the headwaters of the Rio Grande to essentially “predict the past” and understand June flood risk from the present back to 1200 C.E.

Abigail Verneuille conducts land surveys in northern New Mexico for her archaeological research. (Photo: Abigail Verneuille)

Transitions visible in her model corresponded with the end of a phenomenon called the Medieval Climate Anomaly, an unusually warm and wet period worldwide.

“In a final stroke of brilliance, Verneuille not only showed that this reduction in June flood risk corresponds in time to the concentration of population along the main river channels, but she also considers how Pueblo ancestors would have interpreted this change in the environment by considering depictions of water serpent beings in rock art of the area,” Ortman wrote. “Her work shows that climate change can improve local environments for humans in counterintuitive ways, and that there is a connection between the practical and the spiritual with regard to human adaptation to the environment.”

She notes that while the physical work of archaeology was fascinating, she equally loved the community-building aspect of it, working with people who live in the area and whose ancestors are the Tewa-speaking people she was studying. In March, she and several colleagues gave a presentation to residents in the area on what their research had revealed about things like diet and socioeconomic differences of the people who lived in that area hundreds of years ago.

“They were gracious enough to welcome us into their some, so everyone sat around the dining room table and we had a little projector,” Verneuille says. “This is their livelihood, their community, so they had a lot of questions, and it was such a rewarding experience so see how the technical side of academic work has real-life impacts.”

It’s work that she hopes to continue doing after she graduates Saturday, and she has applied for field technician position with cultural resource management firms. She also is aiming for graduate school in the next five years to continue her archaeology studies.

“It’s amazing work and the most amazing community of people,” she says, “and one that I’d love to continue being a part of.”

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Abigail Verneuille, who is earning a BA in anthropology along with a GIS certificate, is honored as the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate.

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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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Preserving the spaces that shaped O’Keeffe’s iconic art

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:00:50 +0000

Preserving the spaces that shaped O’Keeffe’s iconic art Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/21/2026 - 08:00

Cody DeBos

CU Boulder MFA alumna Giustina Renzoni considers how to share space and preserve history as director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

In Abiquiú, New Mexico, vast mesas sprawl beneath an expansive blue sky. Among them sit the adobe walls of a home once inhabited by one of America’s most iconic artists. The interior is painted with light and characterized by quiet restraint reminiscent of the natural features outside.

It is here, in the home of Georgia O’Keeffe, that Giustina Renzoni helps visitors see both the artist’s work and the world that shaped it.

“When I first encountered Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiú, what struck me immediately was that it wasn’t just her residence. It was also a remarkable example of vernacular adobe architecture with nearly 200 years of history before she purchased it,” Renzoni says.

Giustina Renzoni, CU Boulder MFA alumna, is the director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in New Mexico.

Now, as the director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Renzoni’s day-to-day work involves a careful balance of sharing the space with visitors while also preserving the structure and its layers of history.

A path shaped at CU Boulder

Renzoni’s path to her current role began with a long-standing interest in the relationship between art and environment.

“I’ve always been drawn to the intersection of art, history and place,” she says. “Over time, I became especially interested in how artists’ environments shape their creative work.”

After studying art history and visual culture and gaining early experience working in museums, she pursued a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“I chose CU Boulder because it offered a program that encouraged interdisciplinary thinking. I was interested in exploring art history alongside visual culture, often through sociohistorical frameworks,” Renzoni says.

She also calls out the collaboration required when working in a museum and recalls how her time at CU helped hone these skills.

“My time at CU helped me develop the ability to think across those disciplines and see how they all contribute to interpreting art and history for the public. That interdisciplinary mindset has been incredibly valuable in my role at the O’Keeffe Museum.”

How place helps us understand art

At the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Renzoni oversees the preservation and interpretation of the Museum’s historic properties—O’Keeffe’s home in the village of Abiquiú and another at Ghost Ranch. The Abiquiú home welcomes thousands of visitors a year, while the Ghost Ranch home is currently closed to the public, awaiting renovations and preservation work Renzoni will head. Her work bridges scholarship and public experience, ensuring the physical spaces connected to O’Keeffe’s life remain protected while also giving visitors a chance to experience them.

Much of her work is rooted in a simple, but powerful, idea: To understand an artist, one must understand where and how they lived.

“Seeing the places where artists lived, the landscapes they looked at every day, and the objects they surrounded themselves with can reveal dimensions of their work that aren’t always visible in a gallery setting. For me, those spaces create a kind of context that brings the artwork to life,” Renzoni says.

The Abiquiú patio, bedroom and zaguán of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. (Photos: Krysta Jabczenski/© Georgia O'Keeffe Museum)

Though the art may be stunning, viewers can’t see the full picture when it is hanging on a featureless white wall.

“Historic spaces show the relationship between creative work and daily life. You see what an artist chose to keep around them, how they organized their studio and how the landscape shaped their perspective,” she says.

For Renzoni, one of the most compelling ways to explore that connection is through her recent exhibition, Artful Living: O’Keeffe & Modern Design, which is currently on view at the museum’s welcome center in Abiquiú.

“The exhibition explores how O’Keeffe transformed her traditional adobe home in Abiquiú into a distinctly modern living environment through furniture, textiles, and design objects,” Renzoni says. “What I find fascinating is that the house itself becomes a kind of three-dimensional expression of her artistic vision.”

Balancing preservation with public access

Preserving this one-of-a-kind environment, however, comes with challenges.

“The biggest is balancing preservation with access,” Renzoni says.

Historic homes like O’Keeffe’s weren’t designed for a steady stream of visitors. Even small interactions can cause lasting damage.

“Things like light exposure, temperature changes and foot traffic can all affect fragile materials,” Renzoni notes.

In Abiquiú, where O’Keeffe’s home is built from earthen adobe, those concerns are even more pronounced. Still, ensuring public access is essential.

“The goal is to create thoughtful ways for people to experience [these spaces] without compromising their long-term preservation,” Renzoni says.

Doing so requires careful coordination across disciplines, from conservation and collections management to education and visitor engagement.

“In a gallery, the artwork is often isolated from that context. In a historic home or studio, you begin to see how art, environment and personal life were all intertwined.”

Reinterpreting O’Keeffe’s legacy 40 years later

Renzoni’s work feels especially timely in 2026, which marks the 40th anniversary of O’Keeffe’s death. Decades later, the artist’s work continues to resonate with audiences around the world.

“I think O’Keeffe resonates because her work feels both deeply personal and universal,” Renzoni says. “Her paintings of New Mexico, in particular, capture a sense of space, light and stillness that many people continue to find compelling today.”

Visiting the places where O’Keeffe lived can also reshape how people understand her work.

“Seeing those environments helps visitors understand that her work was deeply rooted in direct observation and in her relationship with the land,” Renzoni says.

Standing in Abiquiú, visitors witness how the scale of the sky, the geometry of adobe walls and the contours of the surrounding cliffs influenced an icon of American art, grounding her paintings in lived experience.

In the end, the spaces Renzoni preserves offer more than a glimpse into O’Keeffe’s life. They let visitors connect to O’Keeffe’s work on a deeper level, granting an understanding of how her work took shape that can be found nowhere else.

“In a gallery, the artwork is often isolated from that context,” Renzoni says. “In a historic home or studio, you begin to see how art, environment and personal life were all intertwined.”

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CU Boulder MFA alumna Giustina Renzoni considers how to share space and preserve history as director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

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Top image: Abiquiú sitting room, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (Photo: Krysta Jabczenski/© Georgia O'Keeffe Museum)

Eyes in the sky focus on elephants

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:22:27 +0000

Eyes in the sky focus on elephants Rachel Sauer Mon, 03/23/2026 - 08:22

Tiffany Plate

CU Boulder PhD student Liam Jasperse-Sjolander is helping elephant behavioral observation get off the ground—and into the air above Africa

Walking through the quiet, lush rainforests of Gabon, on Africa’s equatorial west coast, forest elephants have a knack for appearing and disappearing just as quickly.

Because they travel in small groups through the thick jungles, forest elephants are much less noticeable—and thus much harder to observe—than their cousins that live on the wide-open African savannas.

For Liam Jasperse-Sjolander, a University of Colorado Boulder environmental studies PhD student, that quiet grace is part of the magic of his fieldwork. “They can be very silent, very unassuming,” he says. “Suddenly you’ll see this gigantic creature in the forest, and the next instant they’re gone.”

CU Boulder PhD student Liam Jasperse-Sjolander has been studying elephant behavior since 2016. (Photo: Alain-Djessy Banguiya)

Jasperse-Sjolander has spent years traveling through Gabon and other African countries tracking elephant behavior in a variety of ways: using radio collars, camera traps and, more recently, drones.

And he’s been publishing his findings along the way. In 2025 alone, Jasperse-Sjolander co-authored three publications, one based on data from dung collection in Gabon and two on the benefits and potential ramifications of drones in observations.

Now he’s working to collate years of field data collected from these studies—identifying behavioral patterns and their ecological implications—for his dissertation, and pondering what’s next in his research.

Discovering Africa

Growing up, Jasperse-Sjolander didn’t always know where his love of the outdoors would take him. “I just wanted to do something outside,” he says of his childhood in Colorado. “I was either going to work in science or go run off into the woods to fend for myself.”

Ultimately, he chose the former, earning an undergraduate degree in environmental biology from McGill University in Montreal. During those years he got his first taste of fieldwork, spending a semester learning about conservation and field ecology in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania—and falling in love with Africa. Why?

“From a conservation perspective I think that many areas still feel wild, with so many megafauna worth protecting. And I love the beautiful diversity and vibrancy of cultures and traditions there.”

That’s why, after finishing his undergraduate studies, he headed right back, signing on as a research assistant for a Duke University PhD student Amelia Meier, who was tracking forest elephants in the Wonga Wongué Presidential Reserve in Gabon. Jasperse-Sjolander was eager to get in the field and watch the elephants with his own eyes, and was pleased to see that Meier was interested in mixing old-school observation methods with some new technologies.

“Her approach was really interesting and it kind of opened my eyes to studying behavior in the field in new ways,” he says.

On the ground in Gabon

That approach required a few radio collars—and sorting through an awful lot of dung. Jasperse-Sjolander and his colleagues would track the forest elephants’ movements, then follow along at a safe distance to capture dung samples for later lab analysis.

The data they collected showed the makeup of the fruits and seeds the elephants were consuming in the forest, and laid the foundation for an October 2025 paper published in the journal Oikos. The article sought to model how elephants may play a role in reseeding forests with trees and other large plant species that can consume large amounts of carbon dioxide.

Forest elephants, once thought to be a subspecies of African savanna elephants, were recognized as their own species in 2021 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Part of Liam Jasperse-Sjolander’s work is to help establish a behavioral baseline. “It's really hard to protect a critically endangered species if you don't know what they're doing and where they're going.” (Photo: Liam Jasperse-Sjolander)

The results of the study showed wide variety in when and how the elephants disperse seeds, making it difficult to use a one-size-fits-all model for predicting how they will impact their local ecology.

“A lot of climate initiatives will put an emphasis on elephants being ‘gardeners of the forest,’” says Jasperse-Sjolander. These initiatives’ models assume that if elephants are in the area, carbon will in turn increase by a certain amount. “But if that’s not true in a country the size of Gabon, that’s certainly not true on an international scale.”

While there is still more work to do to better understand this interaction, Jasperse-Sjolander’s work in the field was pivotal to reaching this next step in the research.

In the air in Kenya

Now Jasperse-Sjolander is taking his fieldwork to new heights by studying how drones can be used to track elephants’ movements, eating patterns and group sizes—without disturbing the creatures. “This new format opens up a lot of doors for seeing behavior that we haven’t seen before,” says Jasperse-Sjolander.

In 2024 Jasperse-Sjolander was contracted by Save the Elephants, an African non-governmental organization dedicated to the preservation of elephants and their habitats, to analyze how drones may impact different elephant groups. “Before we start using drones to study behavior, we have to make sure that we're not negatively affecting the elephants,” says Jasperse-Sjolander.

Jasperse-Sjolander analyzed the behavioral data Save the Elephants had captured during trial runs of the drones with 14 distinct elephant groups in the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya. The results, which were published in November 2025 in Scientific Reports, were positive: While some of the elephants exhibited a few changes in baseline behavior—like eating a bit less or staying more alert—after multiple trial runs the group seemed generally unphased.

The researchers performing the trials adhered to some general common-sense protocols about how far to stay from the group.

“We always would launch the drone at least a half kilometer away from the group, since it's really at takeoff that it's the most noisy and disturbing,” says Jasperse-Sjolander. “Then we flew at a height of 120 meters (around 400 feet), which is the maximum height you can fly drones in Kenya. So we're basically as far away as we can be.”

Even at that distance, the latest high-tech drones can still capture high-resolution images; researchers can also use the drones’ embedded infrared camera to follow the elephants at night. That camera allowed researchers to follow some elephants for 24 hours and learn more than they ever knew about the animals’ sleep patterns.

Even at heights of 400 feet, drones’ high-resolution lenses allow researchers to capture important information, such as back length measurements, a common indicator of age. (Photo: Save the Elephants)

“Previously we’d estimated that they only sleep for 15 minutes, but we found that sometimes they’ll all lay down together in a dry riverbed and sleep for a full two hours,” says Jasperse-Sjolander.

“We didn’t really know before what elephants were doing at night,” he adds.. “And so we’re uncovering all these layers of elephant behavior that can help the population.” Knowing where they spend most of their time, when they leave an area and when they are most vulnerable to poaching are all important considerations in the business of saving elephants, he explains.

In May 2025, Jasperse-Sjolander and the Save the Elephants team also published a small field note in the journal Pachyderm about how to maximize these drones’ capabilities, even when there are restrictions on their flight (e.g., in Kenya, where drones are highly regulated). “It can still be a very useful piece of equipment,” says Jasperse-Sjolander, noting that the device’s infrared camera and potential for measuring elephant shoulder height (another common indicator of age) can all be used on the ground, and can take the place of other, more expensive equipment.

In the lab in Colorado

Now, with so much fieldwork data under his belt, Jasperse-Sjolander is back at CU working to finalize his dissertation, comparing behavior between forest and savanna elephants. He’ll build on his master’s coursework (also earned at CU Boulder), which looked specifically at the different behaviors of forest elephants in Gabon—which is 90% forest, 10% savanna—when they’re in the two different biomes.

“Most forest elephant groups are just a mother around their calf and maybe a few relatives,” says Jasperse-Sjolander, explaining that the patchily distributed fruit trees that the elephants feed on are not enough to sustain groups much larger than that.

But, when they emerge from the forest, these groups connect with other small groups.

“Elephants are still very social, and it’s important for them to keep those links and have that larger association network,” says Jasperse-Sjolander, adding that the elephants’ time in the savanna is also important for the exchange of information.

Jasperse-Sjolander’s dissertation will expand the boundaries of his comparison of forest and savanna elephant behaviors to take more of a continent-wide approach to understanding the variations between and among them.

And after that? Jasperse-Sjolander is hoping to head back to Africa for a longer contract with a non-governmental organization like Save the Elephants, where he can use learnings from his PhD to advance our understanding of elephant behavior even further.

“I like just being in Africa and being in the field,” he says. While many researchers in his field go back and forth between the U.S. and Africa, “I like to live and embody the places I study.”

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CU Boulder PhD student Liam Jasperse-Sjolander is helping elephant behavioral observation get off the ground—and into the air above Africa.

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When the mountain becomes a mirror

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:42:33 +0000

When the mountain becomes a mirror Rachel Sauer Thu, 03/19/2026 - 11:42

Cody DeBos

CU Boulder alum Jason Kolaczkowski’s new memoir reveals lessons found in the mountains and in life

Jason Kolaczkowski (PolSci ’99) didn’t know if the Himalayas would bring him clarity, but he knew he needed to attempt the first ascent of an unclimbed peak. Diagnosed with leukemia just a year earlier, he boarded a flight to Asia in 2019 with a plan.

The goal wasn’t to make history as a mountaineer. For Kolaczkowski, the trip was about defying the notion that his time was already running out.

“There was a moment when I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to die a lot younger than I thought I was, and so I want to go and do this thing.’ There was no going back from there,” he recalls.

Jason Kolaczkowski (PolSci ’99), shown here at basecamp, attempted the first ascent of a previously unclimbed Himalayan peak after being diagnosed with leukemia. (All photos courtesy Jason Kolaczkowski)

In his forthcoming memoir, Notions of Grace: A Memoir of Climbing, Cancer and Family, Kolaczkowski chronicles the lessons learned leading up to and following that expedition.

“It started as internal processing for me. The process of writing the book was really then an act of compulsion,” he explains. “I wanted to archive a snapshot of my life for my kids, who were too young to understand at the time. Maybe when they’re 14 and maybe again when they’re 24—maybe they’ll care.”

The mountain becomes a mirror

Wrestling with risk, fatherhood, identity and a cancer diagnosis layered with unknowns, Kolaczkowski thought of climbing as a reprieve.

The type of slow-progressing leukemia he had been diagnosed with can remain asymptomatic for years. Treatment wasn’t recommended yet, so he entered a “watch-and-wait” phase that included taking precautions to protect his compromised immune system.

But Kolaczkowski’s internal clock was ticking.

A climber since the late Aughts, he had long dreamed of attempting a previously unclimbed route. He started planning the Himalayan expedition before his diagnosis, but after it came, the trip felt more urgent.

“The first big question was: Well, should I even still go?” he says. “I ultimately reached the conclusion that I still felt healthy enough to do it.”

After finding the right group, the pieces fell into place, but the climb itself would soon be a wakeup call. In Notions of Grace, Kolaczkowski describes the peril of fixing lines in a gully littered with rockfall. The terrain, though not inherently difficult to climb, was deadly in its indifference. The mountain didn't care if Kolaczkowski died.

“What I came away with was a new sense of self-awareness. Just being in that amount of danger for that amount of time shifted my mindset into a much more forward-looking place again,” he says.

The expedition didn’t end in a triumphant summit photo, but Kolaczkowski flew home counting it as a success.

“I was really looking forward to going home and doing things with my kids.”

Writing for who matters most

Kolaczkowski describes his emotional state before the trip as grief for a life transformed by factors beyond his control.

“I guess you could say that telling a private story in public is another form of accepting risk,” says Jason Kolaczkowski of writing his memoir.

“Getting a cancer diagnosis really is a grieving process. You’re giving up a life that you had—an understanding of your goals and your family dynamics that you had—and you have to let it go and shift into the acceptance eventually of what is reality now,” he says.

Writing became his way of documenting this shift. His sons remained the intended audience for a while, but after sharing early drafts with friends over time, Kolaczkowski’s outlook on the project changed.

“People started telling me, ‘I think there are some universal themes here that other people would be interested in.’ So, I started thinking of ways to maybe get this published,” he says.

He kept writing, bringing the meticulous habits learned in planning expeditions and climbing rugged peaks to the page.

“Rather than focusing on getting the book done, my goal was to put in effort consistently. Some efforts will be great; others won’t be,” Kolaczkowski says.

“If you think about not making summits, and when to turn around and all that sort of stuff, having enough self-forgiveness to accept that, it translates well. Maybe today was hard to write and it just isn’t coming out; that’s OK as long as I’ve made the attempt,” he adds.

The calculus of risk

The title of Kolaczkowski’s memoir mirrors its tone. Grace isn’t something he claims to possess in abundance. Rather, he jokes that it’s often a goal he stumbles toward, describing several moments in the book as a “series of misadventures rather than adventures.”

The throughline connecting mountains, medical challenges and fatherhood is a series of lessons on living life with just the right amount of risk.

Just a few months after Kolaczkowski returned from Nepal, there were new obstacles to overcome as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Strict precautions for protecting his health became necessary, leading the Kolaczkowskis to the decision to homeschool their sons.

“We were shrinking down the world in order to keep me safe, but 5-year olds need their world to expand. What are we willing to do from a mitigation perspective when it comes at a cost?” he asks.

At first, the choice felt aligned with his family’s needs. But after watching one of his sons be afraid to touch playground equipment, Kolaczkowski knew it was time to rethink his approach to risk.

“And that’s what the book is about. How little risk is too little risk? How much is too much? Because we had taken too little risk and it was visibly stunting the character development of my kids,” he says.

Fortunately, in his years of climbing, Kolaczkowski had already developed a mental framework for managing uncertainty.

Jason Kolaczkowski approaches a couloir entrance on his Himalayan climb.

“You’re constantly building in these points where you are having the meta-conversation about the thing that you're doing,” he says. “You're talking about how to talk about the climb.”

That same approach became essential to not only navigating the pandemic but rebuilding his family’s relationship with adventure. Because his wife, Kristina, had often accompanied him on climbing trips, she shared some of the same language.

“The ability to sort of coalesce around that sort of meta-conversation—how are we going to talk about how we're going to deal with these new risks—was a big part of our family life,” he says.

Return to adventure

Eventually, Kolaczkowski and his family began venturing out again. Hiking, climbing and reconnecting in the relative safety of the outdoors during the pandemic ultimately led to a 100-mile family hike around Mont Blanc.

“I’ve never seen them quite so happy,” he says, recalling his sons’ experience on the trip.

Today, Kolaczkowski is planning many more adventures, some with his sons and some on his own. He recently joined an expedition in Kyrgyzstan and is looking ahead to more climbs, including a return to Nepal in 2027.

Telling his story publicly, he says, was another kind of healing.

“I guess you could say that telling a private story in public is another form of accepting risk,” he admits.

But as Kolaczkowski sets his eyes on what the future will bring, public opinions aren’t what he worries about.

“That’s one of the nice things about having cancer. It puts other stuff in perspective,” he says with a smile.

Notions of Grace: A Memoir of Climbing, Cancer and Family is available for pre-order now through DAP Books and will be released March 31.

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CU Boulder alum Jason Kolaczkowski’s new memoir reveals lessons found in the mountains and in life.

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Top photo: Jason Kolaczkowski at an 18,000-foot camp

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

When napping in nature becomes art

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:55:15 +0000

When napping in nature becomes art Rachel Sauer Thu, 03/05/2026 - 16:55

Cody DeBos

CU alum Rick Silva finds meaning in the stillness of the natural world

Rick Silva (MFA’07) is lying still in the frame, perched on a rocky outcropping overlooking azure ocean waves. He’s sound asleep.

That’s one of 46 places you’ll find him taking a snooze in his new video art piece, Dirt Nap.

As he describes it, “Dirt Nap is composed of one-minute excerpts from 46 naps Rick Silva took in nature across the Western United States between September 2024 and January 2026, sequenced in the order they were recorded.”

“The project has some heavier personal meanings for me, but I also think it touches on broader themes of loss related to landscape in the 21st century, whether that’s the precarity of protected lands or ongoing threats from climate change,” says Rick Silva (MFA ’07) of his new video art piece, Dirt Nap.

The project’s structure is simple, almost stubbornly so. But the simplicity of one-minute naps, repeated 46 times, has a way of becoming something else—a question that challenges notions of patience and what it means to rest.

Taking a rest

The project began in 2024, a time marked by both grief and physical strain for Silva.

“My uncle-in-law died in a ski accident the previous year, and that late summer we hiked into the Grand Tetons to spread his ashes,” he recalls.

That same summer, Silva was dealing with severe migraines that forced him to retire to a dark room, sometimes for the entire day, just to ease the pain.

“The idea for Dirt Nap emerged during a lull in the pain of a migraine,” he says.

From the start, Silva knew the project needed to unfold over time. As the idea of deliberately resting in nature took hold, he started thinking of locations. Some had personal meaning. Others he hadn’t yet experienced but wanted to.

“There was a balance between planning and spontaneity throughout the process. I created a loose set of rules around framing and duration, then pushed against those rules through location, weather and light,” he says.

The title carries its own gravity. Often a dysphemism for death, the phrase “dirt nap” invokes images of a body being returned to the ground for its final rest.

Silva acknowledges the double meaning.

An ‘in-action’ sport

Prior to Dirt Nap, Silva spent years immersed in outdoor action sports culture, especially snowboarding. Video is a powerful medium for showcasing the pulse-pounding motion and spectacle of athletes carving through exotic terrain at high speeds.

CU Boulder alumnus and artist Rick Silva created his video piece Dirt Nap from 46 naps he took in nature across the Western United States between September 2024 and January 2026.

Dirt Nap inverts the formula.

“There’s definitely a connection between Dirt Nap and that lineage of sport and nature filmmaking,” Silva says, “except here I’m doing ‘nothing’ in the landscape. It’s a kind of in-action sport focused on recharging and recovering.”

For Silva, shooting videos lying down instead of airborne while capturing exotic vistas across the Western United States is something of a return to his roots.

“My MFA thesis work at CU was a video art piece in which I filmed myself in nature, sort of DJ-ing various landscapes,” he says.

A CU foundation

Silva traces much of his foundational approach to filmmaking to his time in CU Boulder’s MFA program.

“I was exposed to many different approaches to working with moving images, including experimental film, video art, performance and new media,” he says.

Just as influential was the support he received along the way.

“My professors encouraged me to follow my own path through those techniques and conceptual strategies, especially around time, presence and process.”

That trio anchors Dirt Nap.

“I think meaning emerges through the variation and duration of the project. It’s a very simple act, but multiplied to this extent it becomes something more epic, or perhaps absurd. I hope viewers oscillate between those readings,” says CU Boulder alumnus Rick Silva.

Silva also found inspiration for the meditative quality of his footage from artists like Roman Signer and Ana Mendieta. While filming, he learned about the early works of Laurie Anderson, another artist who captured herself napping in public.

“I’m a longtime fan of her work and felt connected to her through our napping projects,” he says.

For current students, Silva offers some practical advice rooted in his own trajectory.

“If you can make it financially feasible, I highly recommend taking on an ambitious, self-driven creative project during a summer break.”

He points to an example close to home.

“The creators of South Park made Cannibal! The Musical during a summer break while they were students at CU.”

Ambitious early projects, he says, often echo through the careers of their creators for years.

Learning to look longer

As for Dirt Nap, the cumulative effect of 46 one-minute excerpts challenges viewers with one request: patience. It’s a hard ask in a world consumed by short-form videos and a never-ending tide of “the next big trend.”

Silva often finds himself returning to a quote from composer John Cage: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

“That quote took on even more meaning for me during this project, which was both born from and made within that zone of observation and reflection,” Silva recalls.

While appreciating Dirt Nap, viewers start noticing the little things. The flicker of shadows across Silva’s face. The rhythm of his breathing. Grass, trees and water responding to the wind. From one minute to the next, a person lying down outdoors runs the gamut of looking peaceful to looking exposed.

What first appears to be “doing nothing” becomes a sustained practice of attention born from grief and structured by repetition. The act is quiet, even vulnerable, and for Silva, it’s a reminder that nothing is ever truly still.

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CU alum Rick Silva finds meaning in the stillness of the natural world.

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All photos courtesy Mario Gallucci

Art historian walks into the Middle Ages

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 22:27:17 +0000

Art historian walks into the Middle Ages Rachel Sauer Wed, 02/25/2026 - 15:27

Clint Talbott

CU Boulder Professor Kirk Ambrose set out to better understand art, doubt and medieval pilgrimages, but his 800-mile walk has modern implications

At some point during his trek, Kirk Ambrose felt that walking was “too fast.” Days stretched and the small loomed large. He and his wife would stop to admire a spider, then just talk about it.

“It really did change my perceptions,” he says. And that was kind of the point.

Kirk Ambrose (right), a CU Boulder professor of classics, walked nearly 800 miles along medieval pilgrimage routes, joined for part of the journey by his wife, Kim Dickey, a professor of art and art history. (Photo: Kirk Ambrose)

Last summer, Ambrose, a professor of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder, walked nearly 800 miles along medieval pilgrimage routes—much of it on the Via Jacobi, the Way of St. James, which threads through France toward Santiago de Compostela in Spain. His wife, Kim Dickey, who is a CU Boulder professor of ceramics, joined him for part of the walk.

Ambrose trained for the trek, but the goal was not athletic. It was scholarly. The long walk served as research for a book he’s writing about art and doubt in the 11th and 12th centuries.

“I wanted to get a sense of, as much as is possible in the modern day, what these experiences were like,” he says. “Pilgrimage has been a framework for understanding medieval art—especially the 12th century—and I wanted to probe that from the ground.”

He approached the journey with “a healthy dose of skepticism.” The romantic picture of pilgrims dutifully trudging from shrine to shrine, he argues, owes much to early 20th‑century American portrayals of pilgrimages.

Ambrose cites Arthur Kingsley Porter, a wealthy American scholar who toured Europe by chauffeured Rolls‑Royce and helped popularize the idea of being on the road as a way to understand the spread of medieval art. Porter’s writings reflected a privileged and American way of moving through the world, Ambrose suggests, adding that Porter’s perspectives differed from those of most Europeans.

The road and its surroundings

The walk itself focused Ambrose’s attention on the social fabric that makes pilgrimages possible. “What interested me, perhaps more than the pilgrim, was the whole support network,” he said. He met volunteers who cleaned bathrooms and retirees who opened bedrooms—chambres d’hôtes—and cooked dinner for strangers.

Many of these workers had left urban careers after the pandemic, moved by a desire to be close to a journey even if they could not make one themselves. “Again and again, I heard a version of the same idea: ‘I travel through the people I encounter, even though I’m staying in the same spot.’”

The observation seemed timeless. Medieval monks, often prohibited from physical travel, were encouraged to undertake “spiritual pilgrimages”—imagined journeys toward the divine. The modern hosts Ambrose met felt like their analogues, he said.

Ambrose trained for a year—backpack full of books—before setting out; he finished the walk in just over two months without a blister. But the physical feat was secondary.

One observation about pilgrimages, he says, is “how much time you are not in churches.” Most days were focused on ferns, salamanders, hunger and the logistics of the next bed. Sacred sites punctuated but did not define the experience.

Scholarship in motion

Kirk Ambrose's journey took him along Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. (Photo: Kirk Ambrose)

Some scholars have argued that artistic styles spread via pilgrim highways. Ambrose suggests otherwise.

“There’s an increasing body of scholarship that challenges the idea that artists simply ‘followed’ pilgrims,” he says. “Institutional affiliation and alliances often explain transmission better—monasteries, chapters, reform movements—networks that stretch across regions through personal relationships, not roads.”

The variety he encountered along the way—the “dizzying” mix of styles and architectural solutions—underscored that point.

He offers a contemporary analogy: Rather than assuming ideas spread evenly across a state, think of a university department with deep ties to a lab in the Netherlands—ideas may travel faster via that friendship than along any map. The medieval equivalents—papal circles, Cluniac reform, houses of canons—made and remade aesthetic choices at large scale and across geography.

Ambrose also questions the notion of the Middle Ages as just an “Age of Faith.”

“I’m trying to complicate the emotional landscape,” he says. “Doubt is a primary motivator.” In the 12th century, commentaries on the Book of Job—which wrestles with faith and doubt—were among the most copied texts.

Ambrose notes that art from this period confronts doubt, raising questions such as: Which relic is genuine? Is the Eucharist literally the body of Christ or a symbol? What do I treat as true when I’m surrounded by competing claims?

Even images of damnation—liars punished, tongues ripped out—suggest a culture trying to distinguish fact from fiction. Today, humans face similar questions, he observes.

Ambrose speaks with delight about the people he met on the walk. “There’s a saying on the route that the kingdom of pilgrimage is 2,000 miles long and 5 feet wide,” he says. On that path, one might find an octogenarian walking from Budapest to Santiago—eight or nine months out and back—or a group of students between semesters, or a CEO on sabbatical. Most of the walkers he met weren’t religious.

He says the experience evoked what cultural anthropologist Victor Turner called the liminal experience—a phase between two stages of life, states of being or locations. “I met people from 18 to their 70s. We were all pilgrims together, regardless of motivation.”

Scenes from a (very long) walk

St.-Privat-d’Allier in France.

A fire salamander on the trail near Espalion, France.

The rooftops of Ste.-Foy, Conques in France.

Lungerersee in Switzerland.

View of Fribourg, Switzerland.

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CU Boulder Professor Kirk Ambrose set out to better understand art, doubt and medieval pilgrimages, but his 800-mile walk has modern implications.

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Top photo: Kirk Ambrose on the trail. (All photos courtesy Kirk Ambrose)

From EDM to ‘I do’

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 01:16:49 +0000

From EDM to ‘I do’ Rachel Sauer Thu, 02/12/2026 - 18:16

Rachel Sauer

For Fiske Planetarium off-site education lead and CU Boulder astrophysics alumna MacKenzie Zurfluh, the famed dome isn’t just where she works, but where she found love

Did MacKenzie and Tanner Zurfluh fall in love and get married because of Fiske Planetarium? Not exactly, but it is where they met and it is where she works; plus, Tanner is frequently there helping out at various events. So, credit where credit is due, let’s say that theirs is a Fiske love story.

It began in October 2018, when MacKenzie was serving in the U.S. Air Force and stationed in South Dakota, and Frederick native Tanner was living in Boulder with several roommates who attended the University of Colorado Boulder.

MacKenzie and Tanner Zurfluh met at a Fiske Planetarium show in October 2018. (Photo: MacKenzie Zurfluh)

With all due respect to South Dakota, “there wasn’t a lot to do there when you’re 19 and living on base,” MacKenzie says. So, she and her then boyfriend decided one weekend to drive to Denver for an electronic dance music (EDM) show at Red Rocks and scouted around for something to do the other evening of their visit. They happened across the ILLENIUM laser show at Fiske.

Meanwhile, one of Tanner’s roommates knew someone on the Fiske production team, and that friend of a friend got tickets to the ILLENIUM show for the group.

So, that was how two 19-year-olds who didn’t know each other—one of whom had a boyfriend that she would break up with a week later—ended up at the same Fiske Planetarium EDM show on the same evening.

The show was great—“because all shows at Fiske are,” says the unbiased MacKenzie—and afterward most of the audience migrated to the lobby to chat and make new friends. Tanner was in one amorphous circle and MacKenzie was in another, and eventually the two circles merged.

The closest they came to actually talking, though, was when MacKenzie complimented the jersey that one of Tanner’s friends was wearing. And that was it.

“But we kept running into each other,” Tanner recalls.

Because of the aforementioned South Dakota issue and the fact that Colorado’s Front Range is an EDM hub, MacKenzie drove down most weekends and kept happening across this guy whose name she couldn’t quite remember.

Tanner, however…

After an EDM show at the Ogden Theater in December 2018, Tanner waited outside the theater for 45 minutes to see if she’d come out, not knowing she’d already left.

“My friends had to drag me away,” he says. “It was the first night we talked, and I remember thinking, ‘Come hell or high water, she is going to be my wife.’”

A few weeks later, at the 2018 New Year’s Eve Decadence festival at the Colorado Convention Center, MacKenzie walked up to a group and put her arms around the two nearest people, one of whom happened to be Tanner.

By that point, she remembered his name. SnapChats were exchanged. They were officially Talking with a capital T—not dating, but it wasn’t 100% platonic, either. “After we’d been talking for a while, he looks at me and says, ‘Were you at Fiske on this day wearing this color beanie at this show?’” MacKenzie says.

On Feb. 4, 2019—yes, they remember the exact day—they decided: We’re doing this.

MacKenzie Zurfluh (left, with husband Tanner Zurfluh) graduated at Fiske Planetarium and was a speaker at the ceremony. (Photo: MacKenzie Zurfluh)

Black holes and relativity

In the beginning, MacKenzie left base on Friday afternoon, arrived in Boulder late Friday night and drove back to South Dakota Sunday afternoon. Tanner made the trip north a few times, but they both agreed there was more to do in Colorado.

However, MacKenzie was also getting ready to deploy to the Middle East and tried to give Tanner the ol’ “Go live your life, don’t worry about me.”

“And I remember he goes, ‘That’s fine if you don’t want to have a relationship, but can I still be your friend?’” MacKenzie says, adding that while the deployment ended up being canceled, she was still there and he was here. “That gave us the opportunity to build a really strong friend foundation. There were times where things sucked, and I had him to talk to.”

When she planned to exit the military, MacKenzie knew she wanted to pursue a degree but wasn’t sure where. On the cusp of returning home to California, Tanner offered her an alternative: “Come live here."

Without MacKenzie knowing it, he’d spent months finishing his mother’s Frederick basement. She could live with him there and study astrophysics at CU Boulder, which is what she did. In the middle of earning her degree, while she was going to school full time and working as a server at a brewery in Longmont, she applied for a job at Fiske and got it.

“I wouldn’t be making as much, so I was really worried about how I was going to pay my bills, but I kept thinking that NASA doesn’t care if I was a waitress, they care if I worked at Fiske,” she says.

“You were chasing your dreams,” Tanner adds. “Studying space and being in the field was always the goal.”

“So, he said to me, ‘We’ll figure it out,’” MacKenzie finishes, and that’s what they did.

In class she was studying black holes and relativity, and at work she was helping them come alive. And in the middle of all this, on the last day of finals in May 2022, kneeling in the chaos of their home remodel—because they’d bought a house in Dacono—Tanner proposed.

She said yes, but with the caveat that they couldn’t even think about planning a wedding until after she graduated—which she did at Fiske Planetarium in May 2024. Seven months later, their wedding in California was essentially Fiske West because so many of MacKenzie’s colleagues attended.

“Our director (Professor John Keller) calls Tanner a Fiske in-law,” says MacKenzie, who is now the Fiske off-site education lead. “Any time there’s an event, he’s here helping.”

“It’s great to be part of the Fiske family,” says Tanner, who co-owns Jayhawk Tile LLC. Fiske has been part of many of their important moments, MacKenzie adds, and in fact her colleague Amanda Wimmer Flint, Fiske on-site education lead, programmed the ILLENIUM show at which they unknowingly first “met.”

Now, sitting in MacKenzie’s office in the depths of Fiske, Tanner can be honest: “As cheesy as it sounds, I fell in love with her smile and her laugh. I genuinely felt a connection.”

MacKenzie beams at him and gestures to her left. “And it happened right out there.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about Fiske Planetarium? Show your support.

For Fiske Planetarium off-site education lead and CU Boulder astrophysics alumna MacKenzie Zurfluh, the famed dome isn’t just where she works, but where she found love.

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