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Stalking the dirt vaccine

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 23:10:47 +0000

Stalking the dirt vaccine Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/28/2018 - 17:10

Lisa Marshall

Can good bacteria make the brain more stress-resilient? Christopher Lowry has dedicated his career to finding out

Christopher Lowry was a precocious 6-year-old, fond of playing in the dirt near his home in rural Wyoming, when researchers 8,000 miles away made a discovery that would end up shaping his career.

The year was 1971. British scientists had noticed that people living near Lake Kyoga in Uganda responded much better to certain vaccines than those elsewhere did. They suspected something in the environment was at play, and when they investigated, they discovered an intriguing orange slime—later identified as Mycobacterium vaccae—stretching across the shoreline.

Christopher Lowry in his lab. �� Photo by Glenn Asakawa. Photo at top of the page by Xan Griffin, Unsplash.

“It appeared that this microorganism living in the soil had powerful immune-regulating properties that were somehow making the vaccines work better,” says Lowry, now an integrative physiology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and pioneer in the study of how bacteria impact mental health.

In the 18 years since he first heard the story of M. vaccae, Lowry has published a series of ground-breaking papers suggesting that exposure to it, and other beneficial bugs in our midst, may have a profound impact on not only our physical health, but also our mental wellbeing.

The more we depart from the rural environments in which we evolved and the more sterile we make our surroundings, the more we risk missing out on the gifts of these microbial “old friends,” he warns. In the meantime, he’s forging ahead with studies aimed at someday harnessing those gifts, in the form of probiotic treatments for mental illness—or even a “stress immunization.”

“As human societies have migrated to urban environments, we have lost touch with a host of bacterial species that have the capacity for immunoregulation, and we believe this is helping to fuel an epidemic of inflammatory disease,” says Lowry. “I want to know: What are the impacts on mental health? And, more importantly, what new interventions can we present to prevent things like anxiety disorders, PTSD and depression?”

How do bugs talk to the brain?

Lowry was a research fellow at the University of Bristol in the UK in the early 2000s when he began to hear stories about M. vaccae. In the decades since that discovery at the lake, researchers have tried using it as an immune-boosting adjunct to various vaccines, with limited success.

But one trial testing it in lung cancer patients yielded a curious result:

While those injected with the bacterium didn’t live longer, they reported improved quality of life, including mental health.

“This suggested that there was some mechanism through which these injections of M. vaccae were affecting the brain,” explains Lowry, who quickly set out to find an answer.

Headlines about the 'dirt antidepressant' abounded. But many of his peers were skeptical. Now, they're not so skeptical.

In April 2007, he published a study in the journal Neuroscience showing that a heat-killed preparation of M. vaccae,when injected into mice, activated neurons in the brain that produce the feel-good chemical serotonin and altered their behavior in a way similar to that of antidepressants.

Headlines about the “dirt antidepressant” abounded.

But many of his peers were skeptical.

“Some people commented that it must have been an April Fool’s joke,” he recalls.

It would be another nine years of toiling away in the lab before Lowry published the follow-up paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS), showing that injections of M. vaccae prior to a stressful event could actually help mice become more stress-resilient, fending off conditions like stress-induced colitis and making them act less anxious and fearful when later stressed.

In short, Lowry says, M. vaccae could prevent a “PTSD-like” syndrome in mice.

Since then, he’s published a flurry of studies with collaborators around the globe, adding weight to the notion that good bacteria can be good for the mood.

One study of 40 healthy men, published in the April 2018 issue of PNAS with researchers at the University of Ulm in Germany, showed that children raised in a rural environment, surrounded by animals and bacteria-laden dust, grow up to have more stress-resilient immune systems and may be at lower risk of mental illness than pet-free city dwellers.

Another paper, published with Dr. Matt Frank, a senior research associate in the department of psychology and neuroscience, found that in animal models, M. vaccae has a long-lasting anti-inflammatory effect on the brain. That’s important, explains Frank, because stress-induced brain inflammation has been shown to boost risk of anxiety and mood disorders, in part by impacting mood-influencing neurotransmitters like norepinephrine or dopamine.

“If you could reduce brain inflammation in people, it could have broad implications for a number of neuroinflammatory diseases,” explains Frank.

In 2016, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation named Lowry’s research among the “Top 10” advancements in mental health research—an illustration that the scientific community is coming around.

“There is a growing recognition that the microbiome can impact health in general and, more specifically, mental health,” said Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein, president of the foundation. “Dr. Lowry’s work can potentially be a game-changer in our understanding of this and could ultimately lead to new treatments.”

Lowry notes that, while more research is needed, some evidence already suggests that probiotic supplements can have an anti-inflammatory effect, boost cognitive function and possibly alleviate anxiety.

While M. vaccae has been the focus of his research, other microorganisms also hold promise.

He’s collaborating with the Department of Veterans Affairs on a clinical trial looking at whether Lactobacillus reuteri can improve physiological and psychological responses to stressful situations in veterans with PTSD.

Someday, he imagines an M. vaccae-based “stress immunization” could be given to soldiers, nurses, first responders or people in other high-stress jobs to make their brains and bodies more resilient.

“I do not want to promote this as a panacea,” he emphasizes, noting that many other factors influence whether someone develops a mental illness. “But I do think this could play an important role.”

In the meantime, he makes a point of exposing his two children, 6 and 8, to a healthy dose of dirt, via a front yard vegetable garden and frequent camping trips, like he was exposed to as a child. He encourages his friends and colleagues to do the same.

Only now, they’re not so skeptical.

“It went from being this novel, turn-your-world upside down concept to something that doesn’t even surprise people anymore,” he says. “It’s exciting to see so many people interested in our relationship with the microbial world.”

Can good bacteria make the brain more stress-resilient? Christopher Lowry has dedicated his career to finding out.

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Alum will support students of the (far) distant future

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 17:54:30 +0000

Alum will support students of the (far) distant future Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/05/2018 - 11:54

Jeff Thomas

Legacy endowments for both music and international-affairs students reflect Courtney Rowe’s values and her work

After spending considerable effort trying to stay in Boulder for the long term, Courtney Rowe has also found a way to leave a little bit of herself behind when she’s gone—long gone.

“Well, hopefully I’m not going anywhere soon,” said Rowe, 36, who was recently promoted to assistant dean for the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Music advancement team. “I spent my entire life being here, seeking a way to get here or trying to get back here.”

But when she’s no longer here—literally, figuratively and existentially—there will still be some of Rowe left behind, as she has set up legacy endowments benefitting both the College of Music and the International Affairs Program Global Grants program. Rowe studied and graduated with a degree in international affairs, and her family already has an endowment at the College of Music. She said the reason she pursued a legacy endowment was simple.

“Being in my line of work, in advancement, I know the importance of sharing your gift expectations,” said Rowe, who used her university life-insurance policy to set up the two $25,000, grants.

Courtney Rowe and her mother, Peg Rowe.

“It’s super easy if you are an employee here, which is awesome. You can do it yourself or with an advancement professional,” she said. “I can tell potential donors, ‘See, if I can do it, you can do it. It’s easy.’”

Rowe, who originally hailed from the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois, first came to �� Boulder at the age of 15, visiting a friend who lived in Sewall Hall. Returning home and meeting with her mother at the airport, Rowe proclaimed that Boulder was the one and only place for her university studies. Her mother, Peg Rowe, who completed some of her graduate studies at Colorado State University, was sympathetic.

Courtney Rowe, however, did defer her enrollment here to study at Richmond, the American International University in London. Perceiving that she would probably be more focused on her course work in Boulder, she returned to her original plan to study international affairs at �� Boulder, where she attended from 2002 to 2006.

She took advantage of the global affairs program to work in Ghana, where she developed a profound respect for what a “boots-on-the-ground” experience can mean for students of international affairs. Her legacy gift will enable such experiences for students who come after her.

“It was eye-opening in a brutally real way for me—I was going to make a huge impact as young idealist going there,” she said. “But there is so much that is so much bigger than you are. You see the colossal scale of some of these crises and how big the solutions have to be, and what isn’t working.”

“It’s a real-world experience you really need to see. You see how to be part of the solution.”

After her international experience, Rowe returned to the Chicago area, where she held similar fundraising posts, but her eye was still on Boulder. In 2014, she was part of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s (MCA) development team that raised support for “David Bowie Is,” the international exhibition celebrating five decades of music, art, and fashion from the pop icon’s personal archives.

Her rise in the Office of Advancement has been a bit meteoric, working the Music+campaign, the $50 million fundraising effort for the College of Music’s 100th annual celebration in 2020. She was originally hired as an assistant director of development in 2015, promoted to director, and then served as the interim assistant dean before taking the office officially in June of this year.

“This is my dream job,” said Rowe, “I have no intention of going anywhere (literally or figuratively) soon.”

Taking control of a $50 million fundraising effort is a fairly tall order, but Rowe already has a great deal of experience working with donors for the College of Music and Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Her mother, Peg, also set up a legacy gift for her own mother, Margaret Steed, a gifted and avid violinist who was never offered the opportunity to further her music education.

“My grandmother was the musician in the family, but she wasn’t able to pursue it as a career while raising a family,” said Rowe, noting her own legacy gift will also honor her grandmother. “She played in a string quartet until she was too sick to continue. The quartet played at her funeral with an empty chair and her violin sitting on it.”

After spending considerable effort trying to stay in Boulder for the long term, Courtney Rowe has also found a way to leave a little bit of herself behind when she’s gone—long gone.

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Unveiling success one dress at a time

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 16:58:45 +0000

Unveiling success one dress at a time Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/05/2018 - 10:58

�� Boulder graduate’s business career selling wedding apparel draws on an arts and sciences foundation

Politics doesn’t necessarily draw a lot of pink-bow types, but Jillian Howison (PolSci’10), an unabashed “girly girl,” was mesmerized.

Growing up in the Cleveland area, Howison loved fashion, shopping and horses—she rode dressage on a Lipizzaner gelding, Brenna, who still lives with her mom. Even when she played basketball, she made a point to tie a pink bow in her hair. But when she saw the character of C.J. Cregg, press secretary to President Josiah Bartlet on NBC’s immensely popular “West Wing,” played by Alison Janney, she couldn’t look away.

Cousins Jillian Howison (left) and Laura Seitz are shown on the swingset, above, and as business partners at the top of the page.

“I wanted to be C.J. Cregg so badly,” she says. That interest led her to study political science, but she eventually channeled her considerable energy into launching a successful wedding-apparel business.

Howison, now 30, matriculated at St. Anselm, a small New Hampshire Benedictine liberal-arts college with an outsized political reputation, thanks to its quadrennial hosting of presidential debates.

But after a couple of years, Howison realized she wasn’t cut out for the political world and decided she wanted a broader, deeper college experience. Her father had recently moved to Golden, and when she visited Boulder, she knew immediately she wanted to finish her undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“Academically, I have always appreciated the huge university feel, coming from a small school with 2,000 people. Anything you wanted to do at �� or get involved with was right at your fingertips,” she says. “Whatever you are interested in, a club, a class or a speaker, and Boulder gets great speakers.”

At St. Anselm, Howison says, she was required to take just one science class, but even as a political science major, at �� she was required to enroll in a broad swath of courses across numerous disciplines. She counts a 500-level philosophy class as the most challenging, and most rewarding, class she’s ever taken.

She worked at Nordstrom department store while in school, and was a sales and marketing intern at Meritech, her father’s firm in Golden. Graduating into the weak job market that followed the 2008 economic crash, Howison was grateful to land a job with Meritech selling hand-washing equipment to food-processing plants, restaurants and hospitals, though it didn’t appeal to her girly-girl side.

“I learned a lot, selling something I really didn’t care about that much,” she says. “But going into food-processing plants in high heels and a dress was not exactly what I’d pictured myself doing!”

She later took over health and beauty and travel accounts for shopathome.com. After that, was hired by Search Monitor, where she continues as account strategy director, specializing in data analytics, search-engine optimization and other areas, with clients ranging from major retailers to large advertising agencies.

“I wanted more flexibility, and it’s been great,” she says. “I’m working from home with major retailers and ad agencies.”

Then, in 2015, her cousin Laura Seitz called with an intriguing idea. Seitz had been working as a manager for Bella Bridesmaids, a national wedding apparel company with dozens of franchises across the United States, and wanted to know if Howison would be interested in opening a franchise of the company with her.

“We’d always talked as kids about opening our own boutique,” Howison says. “We asked ourselves where isn’t there a Bella where there are lots of weddings, and where we thought we’d like to live, and came up with Scottsdale (Arizona).”

They visited the upscale Phoenix suburb in July 2015, wrote a business plan and won financing from the Small Business Administration. They bought their franchise in November, and opened in December.

“We definitely had to learn on the fly,” Howison says. “We don’t have a bookkeeper; I taught myself Quickbooks. I had marketing experience, Laura had retail.”

But neither had experience owning and operating a business, and Howison says her broad liberal arts education has served her well when it comes to adaptability and picking up new skills, whether it’s negotiating a lease, renovating commercial space or dealing with air-conditioning on the blink in the heat of a desert summer.

“The first year, we were not making any money,” she says. “But last year, we were up 28 percent over the previous year, and this year we’re up 30 percent on average.”

Owning their own business means being constantly “on call,” but Howison and her husband have found time to travel to such places as Croatia, Prague, London, the wine country of France, Oktoberfest in Munich and, most recently, Cuba.

Howison has many former St. Anselm classmates working in or around the political world, but she’s never looked back.

“If I’d stayed where I was, I would never have opened this business. The school I went to before was kind of like high school; you never left campus,” she says. “Going to �� has made me a proponent of bigger schools. I was able to schedule my classes so I could work internships. And there was just so much opportunity to do more than just sitting in a classroom.”

Politics doesn’t necessarily draw a lot of pink-bow types, but Jillian Howison (PolSci’10), an unabashed “girly girl,” was mesmerized by a "West Wing" character.

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Rising star at Amazon values diversification and diversity

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 16:06:05 +0000

Rising star at Amazon values diversification and diversity Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/05/2018 - 10:06

Clay Bonnyman Evans

�� Boulder alum—now Amazon account specialist— finds strength in the flexibility provided by a liberal arts education

Even by the time he was a senior at Chatfield High School in Littleton, Colo., Cory Ketai (PolSci’16) had put together a business resume that many a recent college graduate might envy.

For that, he gives credit to his mother, Paula, and father, Brad Ketai (PolSci’80), now retired, who encouraged their son to get a job while in high school at Airhead, an outdoor-sports equipment company where Brad was a national sales manager.

Cory Ketai, at the top of the page in France.

“They wanted me to learn the value of work,” says Cory Ketai, 26, now a vendor specialist (essentially, an accounts manager) for Amazon in Seattle.

At Airhead—whose founder, Aaron Kramer (EnvCon‘78), is also a �� graduate—Ketai got to work in nearly every facet of the business. He started in the warehouse, transitioned to customer service, managed a parts department and represented the company at trade shows.

Noticing that the company had virtually no social-media presence, Ketai eventually approached management and proposed to get them up to speed.

“I went in, said, if you pay me the equivalent of last summer, I’ll originate all these platforms for you guys, build original content, and start publishing,” he says. “They gave me the green light.”

Yet for all that early experience, Ketai says it was studying political science at ��’s College of Arts & Sciences that propelled him toward his successful career. In particular, learning how to write well and being exposed to a diverse spectrum of people, cultures and viewpoints have made a major difference.

“Irrespective of what line of business you are in, your intelligence is limited if you are not able to communicate effectively. I learned early, sometimes the hard way, how to be concise and relatively articulate,” he says. “That’s the thing that has most helped me in the business world.”

Not that Ketai has always had his nose in a book or a figurative pen in hand. A ski racer growing up, he took a gap year after high school in hopes of improving his ski record enough to make the team at �� or another NCAA Division I team. His father, too, had come to �� to ski for the Buffs.

“I lived out of a suitcase for a year, chasing races in the western and northern U.S.,” Cory Ketai says.

He arrived in Boulder hoping to snare the single walk-on slot on the alpine racing roster, but ultimately didn’t make the team.

“I came knowing it was very unlikely I’d get a spot on the team,” he says. “It was a long shot, but I didn’t want to look back and say, ‘What if?’”

He pondered transferring to another school where he might make the team, all the while keeping himself in shape with regular sessions at the recreation center. That’s where he began to make friends with members of ��’s rugby team. They talked him into practicing with the team for a week, and he was hooked.

“It kept me in shape, I was having a good time, and making friends,” Ketai recalls.

Academically, it took him a few tries to settle in. He started in economics, but found he was “not good” at calculus, and thought he might try international affairs. When he realized that a language requirement for that major would require another year of school before he could graduate, he looked elsewhere.

“Political science really fit the mold for me. It checked the box on a lot of economics-based things and international development,” he says. “It ended up being an awesome decision and a great fit.”

In the summer, Ketai took internships with an uncle’s commercial real-estate firm in Detroit, USA Rugby and Toyota North America. Then he found a role on Career Buffs where he interviewed for, and got a job with, PepsiCo Inc. in Seattle.

“Coming out of college, I wanted to find a good opportunity that would be a springboard for my career and diversify my experience at a heavy-hitting firm that would carry weight on my resume,” he says. “It didn’t hurt to be surrounded by (Seattle-based companies such as) Starbucks, Boeing, Amazon and Microsoft.”

At Pepsi, Ketai was a merchandising manager who led a team of 50 people. He served as de facto project manager for the company’s response to Seattle’s imposition of a sugar-sweetened beverage tax, consulting with customers and others to determine how to alter pricing and resolve other critical issues.

“It was stressful, exciting and pioneering, albeit not the most positive thing for the business. But it was an important matter for the business,” he says.

After a year and a half, a former Pepsi manager who had taken a job with Amazon approached Ketai about an opportunity to pursue a job with the global retailing giant. He interviewed and accepted a job as a vendor specialist, and now handles day-to-day account management, marketing and supply-chain for three movie-studios that sell DVDs and other physical items on Amazon.

“(Amazon is) wildly innovative and growing, and I’m seeing things from a macro-perspective state of business,” Ketai says.

Ultimately, he’d like to be CEO of a “big firm,” though he knows he’s got to get a lot more experience under his belt, first.

“I want to be a jack-of-all-trades, supply chain, sales, marketing, you name it, and my position now is giving me more experience in all those things. My dream job may still be three jobs away, but every job will be a springboard to the next,” he says.

As he moves up in his career, Ketai says the diversity he experienced at �� has become a surprising tool in business.

“You find grounds to relate with a lot of different people, taking astronomy sequence classes or sub-Saharan African history classes. They sound like they’d be one-off experiences, but then you amazingly meet someone (in business) from a random country that you actually know something about,” he says, citing the example of a French citizen with whom he could discuss European Union politics.

“It’s a ‘soft skill,’ but the frequency with which those circumstances have come up is shocking, and all that social diversity is a product of having an arts and sciences degree.”

Even by the time he was a senior at Chatfield High School in Littleton, Colo., Cory Ketai (PolSci’16) had put together a business resume that many a recent college graduate might envy.

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�� Boulder geographers studying plot-level land-use changes over 200 years

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 22:20:34 +0000

�� Boulder geographers studying plot-level land-use changes over 200 years Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/04/2018 - 16:20

Sarah Kuta

Partnership with Zillow offers unprecedented ability to track where people have lived since 1810

Take a plot of land—maybe the one your house, your school or your business sits on—and imagine the way it’s changed over the last 200 years. From the very first settlers and their primitive structures to the modern homes and office complexes that likely exist there now, that one small piece of land has evolved with the times.

Two researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are exploring human settlement and urbanization patterns in the United States between 1810 and 2015 using a groundbreaking new dataset from Zillow, the online real estate and rental marketplace. A paper describing the initial data products the researchers created using Zillow’s information was published today in the open-access online journal Scientific Data.

Stefan Leyk

While the raw data themselves are proprietary to Zillow, the �� researchers are able to share the so-called data derivatives they have created with the research community and the public.

These and future data products will almost certainly serve as a launch pad for a slew of novel research projects related to natural hazards, land-use changes, ecology, demography, urban geography and more, said Stefan Leyk, a �� Boulder associate professor of geography who co-authored the paper, titled “HISDAC-US, historical settlement data compilation for the conterminous United States over 200 years,” with geography graduate student Johannes Uhl.

“This is unique data that simply never existed before in this dimension,” Leyk said. “We can go back more than 200 years across most of the United States to understand where people have settled at which point in time. That’s something we simply have never, ever seen before. But before we can start on any research projects, we have to actually write data products that we can use for research that will come in the near future.”

We can go back more than 200 years across most of the United States to understand where people have settled at which point in time. That’s something we simply have never, ever seen before."

On somewhat of a whim, Leyk and Uhl reached out to Zillow roughly two years ago to see if the company would consider collaborating with them by sharing its massive cache of property data. Though they didn’t know exactly what the data looked like, Leyk and Uhl were intrigued and excited about what they might discover.

After working together on an agreement about how the information could be used and shared, Leyk and Uhl set to work sifting through Zillow’s Transaction and Assessment Dataset—or ZTRAX for short—which contained more than 374 million data records.

In essence, Zillow had been collecting property records from as many U.S. counties as possible, dating back to the earliest structure built on each parcel of land. Zillow created its database with information from a major third-party data provider and from an internal company initiative called County Direct, which is gathering data from assessor and recorder’s offices across the country.

This was an undertaking Leyk had attempted at one time, but found it to be an extraordinarily time- and labor-intensive process. With more than 3,100 counties in the United States, Zillow’s dataset was “a tremendous effort,” Leyk said.

For its part, Zillow understands the value of partnering with academic researchers to help comb through and analyze its massive collection of information.

“Zillow has a huge treasure trove of really fascinating data, and there’s a lot of important research we can do with it,” said Sarah Mikhitarian, senior economist at Zillow. “Several members of our economic research team come from an academic background and are interested in the type of research that some of these other organizations are pursuing. We don’t always have the time and resources to do it, though, so it’s great to collaborate with outside researchers who do.”

After designing a data structure and extraction workflow, Leyk and Uhl sorted the data into 250-by-250-meter plots of land. They also sorted the data over time, looking at each plot every 5 years between 1810 and 2015.

With this information, they were able to sum up how much indoor building area accumulated on each plot in a given year, which indicates how intensely the land has been developed. The researchers also determined the year of the first settlement for each plot.

“We really can understand, in incredible detail, how did we occupy the landscape? What are the potential impacts because we settled in certain regions? What happened to wetlands and hydrological systems?” Leyk said, noting that the data could prove useful for interdisciplinary research related to fire- and flood-risk modeling, for example.

The data products created by Leyk and Uhl are now part of the public domain and are accessible to other researchers through the Harvard Dataverse, an open-source data repository.

The �� researchers funded this initial project with a seed grant from the �� Population Center. Now that they have arranged the Zillow data into useful formats, they plan to go after larger federal grants from the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health for further research.

Both Leyk and Uhl said they have been impressed with Zillow’s willingness to collaborate with academia and make this extremely valuable data accessible to the world.

“This project shows the benefits of collaboration between industry and research institutions,” Uhl said.

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The paradox of 'suicide in happy places' seems not to exist

Anonymous — Sat, 18 Aug 2018 23:04:20 +0000

The paradox of 'suicide in happy places' seems not to exist Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 08/18/2018 - 17:04

Sarah Kuta

A closer look at geographic data finds no correlation between generally happy locales and rates of suicide, according to new research by �� Boulder and U of California Irvine

Several years ago, a research paper made headlines by finding that the happiest states in the United States also had the highest suicide rates.

This seemingly paradoxical conclusion caught the attention of a trio of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and University of California Irvine for a different reason: could there be more to the story than the eye-catching findings suggested?

Tim Wadsworth

By looking at counties instead of states and making a few other experimental tweaks, researchers put the newsy findings to the test. The results of their study, published last fall in the Journal of Happiness Studies, contradict the earlier study, adding another layer to a growing body of research about how our geographic location affects our happiness and well-being.

“Our basic finding was that we don’t see any relationship between the general level of happiness in a place and people’s likelihood of committing suicide,” said Tim Wadsworth, an associate sociology professor at �� Boulder and one of the study’s co-authors.

Designing the experiment

The initial headline-grabbing study, conducted by a team of economists and published in 2011, concluded that the happiest U.S. states also had the highest suicide rates. The economists’ explanation for this paradox was that people tended to compare themselves to those around them—if you’re an unhappy person in a happy place, your negative feelings might be exacerbated by your positive surroundings, which could lead to suicide.

Wadsworth, along with then-�� Boulder graduate student Philip Pendergast and UC Irvine criminology professor Charis Kubrin, were skeptical of the study’s focus on people living in the same state.

Since states can span hundreds of thousands of square miles, there are major regional differences to consider—Boulder, for example, is very different from Colorado Springs. Positing that people were more likely to compare themselves to others in their immediate vicinity, the researchers narrowed in on data at the county level instead.

“We found it to be problematic, unless you’re going to make the argument that people in one part of California are comparing themselves to people in other parts of California,” Wadsworth said. “But I will buy the idea that I’m influenced by what I see living in Boulder among other Boulderites.”

They deviated from the initial study in other ways, too, such as by controlling for regional variations in suicide rates and well-being. The researchers also accounted for the availability of firearms and included a measure of overall health in their analysis, since those two factors are also correlated with suicide. In essence, they created a more rigorous experiment to see if they could reproduce the initial findings.

The idea that anybody could move to a place to change their level of happiness, there’s no evidence that that’s actually happening."

In the end, their study failed to find evidence of a relationship, either negative or positive, between suicide rates and the average subjective well-being, or happiness, of U.S. counties. Instead, the findings reinforced the traditional predictors of suicide, such as the accessibility of firearms and health and regional variations.

Noting the limitations of their work and the low number of studies on this topic, the researchers also pointed out the need for future research.

“The question is then, ‘Well, who’s right?’” Kubrin said. “No study is ever the full explanation of anything. What awaits is additional studies to weigh in on this—that’s the way science works. More than anything, our paper raises questions about those initial findings.”

Understanding the findings

Practically speaking, the study’s findings suggest that you shouldn’t necessarily be concerned about living in a happy place if you’re unhappy, nor that you should rush out and move to a happy place in an attempt to become happier.

“The idea that anybody could move to a place to change their level of happiness, there’s no evidence that that’s actually happening,” Wadsworth said. “Let’s not all of a sudden jump on the bandwagon and say we need to be extra concerned about unhappy people in happy places, not to say that it’s impossible, but (this study was) really just sort of holding up our hands and saying, ‘Whoa.’”

Another analysis made headlines recently, too, this one from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In May, the federal agency reported that suicide rates across the country increased 25 percent between 1999 and 2016.

While that statistic alone is alarming, sociologists like Wadsworth and Kubrin say it’s important for public health officials and policymakers to drill down into the data to look at state, regional and local trends, as well as other factors such as race, age, education level, marital status and the availability of firearms.

“One of the things we know about suicide, as well as homicide, is that it’s not equally distributed,” Kubrin said. “One of the things you have to do is disaggregate the suicide rate. The overall suicide rate is helpful, but not nearly as helpful as looking at different groups of people and the areas where the increase has occurred in particular.”

On the other side of the spectrum, when our friends, family members and even celebrities such as Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain die by suicide, we tend to focus on their individual circumstances, such as their mental health. But if we really want to prevent more suicides across the country, it’s equally as important to look at widescale trends that go beyond individual factors such as depression, Kubrin said.

Philip Pendergast and Charis Kubrin

“Individual-level explanations are 100 percent absolutely important,” she said. “But if we just stay at the individual level, we might be missing bigger, broader factors that impact suicide above and beyond any one individual’s characteristics. There are other questions about suicide that need answering. Why do suicide rates cluster in certain regions of the U.S.? It’s not just a function of people with depression moving to certain areas. There’s something beyond the individual that plays into this distribution.”

Suicide research continues

Overall, the researchers say that further study on suicide is needed. Though suicide is much more common than homicide or violent crime, it receives a fraction of the attention.

“We’re obsessed with crime and crime trends and crime data,” Kubrin said. “The reality is that suicide, especially for certain groups, is much more likely to occur than homicide.”

For his part, Pendergast said he hopes to continue his contributions to suicide research in his new role as administrator of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Rocky Mountain Federal Statistical Research Data Center, which is housed on campus.

After completing his doctorate at �� in May, Pendergast now reviews proposals from people who want to use the center’s restricted population data in their research. With such a rich dataset, Pendergast said he hopes researchers will explore topics such as why the American West has a higher suicide rate than other parts of the country. More broadly, Pendergast said he hopes this and other studies help spark much-needed conversations about suicide.

“I hope that any papers about suicide would have the implication of causing people to engage in more of a cultural dialogue about suicide and making it less stigmatized by simply talking about it,” Pendergast said.

A closer look at geographic data finds no correlation between generally happy locales and rates of suicide, according to research by �� Boulder and U of California Irvine.

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Humans might not be altruistic ‘avengers’ after all, study finds

Anonymous — Sat, 18 Aug 2018 23:02:19 +0000

Humans might not be altruistic ‘avengers’ after all, study finds Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 08/18/2018 - 17:02

Sarah Kuta

�� Boulder research contradicts the long-held belief that humans interfere when they see the abuse of strangers

Picture this: You’re walking down the street when you overhear someone spewing nasty insults at a stranger. Would you intervene, even if it meant putting yourself in harm’s way?

While most of us would like to think we’d step in, even going so far as to punish the bad actor, new research led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that might not be the case.

The study, published in April in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, adds a new, contradictory perspective to the established wisdom that humans have evolved to punish people who mistreat strangers, even when intervening could lead to social costs.

In their paper “The Unresponsive Avenger: More Evidence That Disinterested Third Parties Do Not Punish Altruistically,” a team of researchers tested this scientifically accepted theory using a novel set of experiments. Their findings suggest that, on average, people aren’t inclined to selflessly punish people who abuse strangers, except for when they are faced with a very specific set of conditions in a lab.

Eric Pedersen

“We’ve drastically overestimated the extent to which we think that third parties are willing to intervene on behalf of strangers,” said Eric Pedersen, assistant professor of social psychology at �� Boulder and the study’s lead author. “Our findings highlight how important it is for researchers to make sure they’re testing ideas in a multitude of different ways to make sure we get converging evidence from different methodologies.”

Using economic games

Since at least the early 2000s, psychologists have been studying whether humans evolved to altruistically punish people who act badly toward strangers. The most common way researchers have tried to answer this question is with laboratory-based economic games in which participants can pay to “punish” another participant who had purportedly harmed someone.

In those experiments, participants tend to punish others for treating strangers unfairly. The working theory is that humans have evolved this way in order to encourage cooperation in society.

“There has been lots of research suggestions that people are very, very willing to engage in third-party punishment when they don’t have a personal stake in the conflict,” Pedersen said.

However, Pedersen and his colleagues weren’t convinced that these economic games were the best way to test this concept. In essence, the researchers guessed that people were being influenced by the setup of the experiments, a concept known as experimental demand.

“If you ask people to focus their attention on the idea that a third party has been unfair toward another person, and then invite that person to invest a little of their own income in punishing that unfair third party, they will do it,” said Michael McCullough, a psychology professor at the University of Miami and one of the study’s co-authors.

“But, if any of those pieces are missing, you don’t get punishment. What we’ve found is that if there is such a thing as altruistic third-party punishment, it really unfolds under a very specific, very restricted set of circumstances. The horizon of real-life events to which that original finding is applicable is really narrow.”

Designing robust tests

The team decided to test the theory of altruistic third-party punishment in a new way, using five experiments that did not involve economic games.

The experiments varied, however, in that a person either insulted the participant directly, insulted a stranger or insulted a friend of the participant. Then, researchers gave the participant the opportunity to blast an annoying sound at the bad actor, letting them choose the duration and volume. In another experiment, participants simply imagined that a person had insulted them directly or had insulted a stranger.

What we’ve found is that if there is such a thing as altruistic third-party punishment, it really unfolds under a very specific, very restricted set of circumstances. The horizon of real-life events to which that original finding is applicable is really narrow.”

Taken together, the findings contradicted past research, suggesting that people will punish others who have harmed them directly or who have harmed a friend, but will not punish someone who has harmed a stranger.

“The fact that people did not take advantage of an opportunity to punish on behalf of strangers, despite the lack of barriers to doing so, was striking,” said William McAuliffe, a psychology graduate student at the University of Miami and one of the paper’s co-authors.

“Participants had no reason to fear retaliation from the insulter and did not have to pay a price to punish, as they do in the economic game method. This suggests that most participants were truly quite apathetic that some other stranger was insulted in an unwarranted way.”

The researchers note that their study has limitations and caution that their findings assess average human behavior, noting that there will always be exceptional “heroes” who intervene on behalf of strangers.

“There are always individual differences, and our experiments are no exception in that regard,” McAuliffe said.“Experiments are not well-equipped to make all-or-nothing statements about human nature anyhow. They are better equipped to demonstrate what is typical under various circumstances. Exceptional behavior is better documented by studying real-world heroes.”

Training bystanders effectively

Though the researchers say that more work needs to be done to better understand third-party punishment, their recent findings have important scientific and practical implications.

In the psychology community, the paper challenges a widely held theory that scientists use as a starting point for other research and arguments, which points to the acute need for further study in this area.

“(The paper) casts serious doubts on these assumptions, and going forward, it’s important to use a variety of methods in addition to what we have used in this paper, such as going out into the field and using real-world data so we can get convergence on what might the best approximate answer,” said Pedersen, who started this research as a graduate student at the University of Miami.

In the real world, the findings reinforce the usefulness of a criminal justice system that doles out punishment on behalf of strangers. For people who create policies or programs intended to improve human cooperation and behavior—programs to prevent bullying in schools, for example—the findings suggest that people need help intervening.

Since the research suggests that stepping in on behalf of strangers is not a natural tendency, people need to be made aware of the innate psychological barriers they’re up against and given strategies for overcoming them. In addition, the findings highlight the importance of tools that don’t require direct confrontation, such as anonymous tip lines and ombuds offices, Pedersen said.

“We can really try to prompt people to be on the lookout for their own reluctance to intervene and find a way to do something,” Pedersen said. “We can incentivize people to step up in various ways by making it clear that there are benefits to standing up for others or highlight ways in which people can intervene without putting themselves in harm’s way.”

�� Boulder research contradicts the long-held belief that humans interfere when they see the abuse of strangers.

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Prof transforms political science class into a game

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 18:03:02 +0000

Prof transforms political science class into a game Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/13/2018 - 12:03

Jeff Thomas

�� Boulder political scientist employs teaching method that calls on students to play historical characters as part of an immersive ‘game’

Sometimes Michaele Ferguson’s classes are going too smoothly, and there’s a real need for a riot or maybe just a bit more heckling.

The heckling is real, the riots just acknowledged, and they are part of an innovative teaching method called Reacting to the Past, which was initiated at Barnard College in New York. Ferguson, an associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder, usually teaches at least one class a semester involving these games, which require students to play characters from the past.

Michaele Ferguson uses a teaching method called "Reacting to the Past," in which students play characters from notable events in history. One event, depicted at the top of the page in the painting by Jacques Louis David, is the trial of Socrates.

The idea is that when students taken on historical roles informed by classic texts, they learn skills—speaking, writing, critical thinking, problem solving, leadership and teamwork, which helps them “prevail in difficult and complicated situations,” the Reacting to the Past site says.

“Sometimes things are going too smoothly, and you don’t want people up there just reading their speeches,” Ferguson explained. “I can create more chaos. Often, I like the chaos. Students can heckle each other, and when everyone is having fun, they actually end up learning a lot.”

And the students agree. “She’s the behind-the-scene puppet master, but she would work vicariously through the students,” said Jacob Reagan, a junior majoring in Spanish and political science who took one of Ferguson’s gaming courses last semester. “The adjustments she made kept the game going.”

Ferguson said she usually teaches the “reacting” classes as first-year seminara, capped at about 19 students. However, the courses have become so highly sought after that last year she also had an honors course.

Katelyn Kelly, who graduated in political science this spring, was a peer mentor for a course last year and said one of the more interesting aspects of the games is how practiced Ferguson is at engaging all the students. “The students are impassioned about what they are doing in that class, and it does allow for students with varying levels of engagement,” she said.

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Ferguson said keeping students hooked throughout the semester is an important element, and it occurs by design. There are three games in each course, each looser and vaguer than the last.

For instance, last spring her three games dealt with the beginning of Greek democracy and the trial of Socrates; the decision of whether to declare independence on the eve of the American Revolution; and the most backstabbing part of the French Revolution. Essentially, by the time they get to the third, most intense, class, the students are practiced, and some primed, to fight for their characters’ goals.

Last fall, the seminar class was on “Legacies of Violence,” beginning with a game around the Democratic National Convention in 1968, then going to a game about the inaction from the U.N. Security Council regarding Rwanda genocide in the 1990s, and ending with a game about a high school in Buenos Aires in the 1960s. Again, the last class was the most intense as students learned about the widespread distrust and secrecy of the people following years of political and cultural purges, including mass murders.

I’m able to teach students skills that, in a more normal classroom situation, we’d never get to.”

“By the third game, students are just about experts, and you can move to games with less structure,” she said. “As it goes on, you’re going to get heckled, but by gradually increasing the temperature over the semester, you learn how to think creatively on your feet.”

That’s an important lesson for students coming into a college atmosphere, she said, as it creates confidence in presenting their own ideas in upper-level courses down the road.

Ferguson said she had one “incredibly shy” student whom she started with characters mostly responsible for writing papers and organizing events. Midway through the course, she said he was asking questions and participating in discussion.

“By the end of the semester, while he was hardly the most forceful student in the class, he was totally fine handling these situations,” Ferguson said. “That’s part of what I love about this method. I’m able to teach students skills that, in a more normal classroom situation, we’d never get to.”

Reagan said another aspect of the course is that he thought students were much more diligent about paying attention to the readings and lectures, in comparison to more normal classrooms, mostly so they were ready for the game itself.

“The confidence I gained to speak publically, and debate at the drop of a hat, increased significantly,” he said. “You are constantly being pushed to deal with changing situations, and different political scenarios.”

Kelly—who will begin her PhD candidacy at the University of California, Irvine, this year—said she was interested in the games specifically because she wants to use them in her future teaching career. “Even during the lectures, you begin to have a greater level of engagement,” she said.

Ferguson said about 20 Reacting to the Past games are fully published, including selected readings, by W.W. Norton & Company; another 20 in final play testing; another 40 in which participating instructors can request the game in unfinished form; and perhaps another 100 that are in development.

The �� Boulder professor also has a game up her sleeve she hopes to develop in the near future, which centers around the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, which was proposed by President Gerald Ford and then held under the Carter administration. Conservative women boycotted the conference and then held a counter-conference on the other side of Houston under the leadership of Phyllis Schlafly.

“It’s pretty much already set up to be gamified,” Ferguson said.

The heckling is real, the riots just acknowledged, and they are part of an innovative teaching method called Reacting to the Past, which aims to help students learn by prompting them to assume historical roles.

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Women who run for office inspire others to do the same, study suggests

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 16:35:45 +0000

Women who run for office inspire others to do the same, study suggests Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/31/2018 - 10:35

Sarah Kuta

As record numbers of women seek seats in Congress, �� Boulder and Notre Dame researchers probe the motivations behind the trend

In the wake of the historic 2016 presidential election, there’s been a record number of female candidates seeking office nationwide. In the House alone, there are 476 women candidatesin 2018, a sharp increase from the number two years ago, OpenSecrets.org reports.

While one might assume that Trump’s victory inspired more women to run because they disagreed with his views, there may be another, less-obvious answer: Hillary Clinton.

Christina Ladam

Though Clinton lost the election, her journey to become the first female presidential candidate ever nominated by a major party may have had a ripple effect, which could have lasting effects in this year’s election. That’s one theory that can be extrapolated from new University of Colorado Boulder research that was published in March in the American Journal of Political Science.

“People tend to discount the effect that Hillary Clinton probably had on the number of women running for office,” said Christina Ladam, a �� Boulder political science graduate student and the study’s lead author. “There’s strong support for the idea that she may have served as a symbolic role model for women to think that they can do it, too.”

In 1990, 10 percent of congressional candidates, but this year, the figure has risen sharply, to 23 percent. Source: OpenSecrets.org.

Past research has found that women fare just as well as men when they decide to run for office, but since fewer women enter political races in general, they remain underrepresented in politics. Working alongside University of Notre Dame associate professor Jeff Harden and University of North Carolina Charlotte associate professor Jason Windett, Ladam set out to discover what motivates some women to run for office, and whether prominent female politicians could inspire other women.

To answer this question, the three researchers analyzed statistics from an extensive database that tracked winning and losing political candidates from all 50 states between 1978 and 2012. More specifically, they looked at what effect having a female governor or U.S. senator in a state had on the number of women who later ran for that state’s legislature.

“How do we get more women to run for office? We find support for the idea that electing women to prominent offices inspires other women,” Ladam said.

In fact, the researchers found that, on average, the presence of a female governor or U.S. senator in a state translated to an additional seven women running for state legislature in the next election cycle. The researchers also found evidence of a so-called “legacy effect,” meaning that having a female governor or U.S. senator continued to have an impact on the number of women who ran for that state’s legislature in subsequent years.

How do we get more women to run for office? We find support for the idea that electing women to prominent offices inspires other women."

Even when female candidates ultimately lost the race for state governor or U.S. senator, the data showed a boost in the overall number of women running for state legislature. This finding in particular stood out to Ladam in the context of the 2016 election.

“The media narrative about the number of women who are running for office this year has focused a lot on the effect of Trump,” Ladam said. “But our research would suggest that Hillary Clinton really had a role to play there. She’s the closest a woman has ever come to winning the presidential election, and our research would suggest that she was really able to serve as a role model for other women to see themselves as part of the political process.”

Recruitment or role models?

These initial results made the researchers want to understand exactly why more women were inclined to run for state legislative seats. They ran a series of tests to determine whether more practical factors were at play, such as increased recruiting efforts, or whether the high-profile female politicians in that state simply served as role models.

One way they tried to answer this question was by looking at the impact of a female governor or U.S. senator on neighboring states, since it would be unlikely for recruitment efforts to cross state lines.

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They also looked at partisan differences, since a female governor or U.S. senator is unlikely to promote recruitment efforts for the opposing party.

Because they also saw an increase in the number of female candidates in neighboring states and saw no major differences by party, the researchers say their study finds the most support for female candidates serving as role models to other women, though they can’t rule out the possibility of recruitment efforts entirely.

Political gender diversity

The real-world implications of the study are straightforward: one way to improve gender diversity in politics is to simply get more women to run for high-profile offices.

“It matters not just if you are interested in campaigns but more generally about the representation of women,” said Harden, who served as an assistant professor of political science at �� Boulder from 2013 to 2016 before taking up his post at Notre Dame. “Not all of these women who decided to run win, of course, but a portion of them do, and that can be consequential. It’s not like having a female governor or U.S. senator is going to get a state’s legislature up to 50/50 in terms of gender representation, but there is still a small boost.”

Ladam, Harden and Windett plan to continue this line of research by conducting case studies of individual female politicians.

As for what will happen in November’s midterm elections, Windett says he expects the outcomes to vary, with each state’s culture and history likely playing a major role in who gets elected.

“We’ll wait and see, but right now it’s looking promising for women being elected, regardless of partisanship,” Windett said.

A �� Boulder graduate student and other researchers find strong evidence that female candidates inspire others to run.

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Paul W. Kroll elected to American Philosophical Society

Anonymous — Thu, 31 May 2018 16:28:01 +0000

Paul W. Kroll elected to American Philosophical Society Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/31/2018 - 10:28

Clint Talbott

Professor of Chinese joins group whose membership includes U.S. presidents, Darwin, Edison, Curie and scores of Nobel laureates

Paul W. Kroll. At top of the page: a Tang dynasty fresco.

Paul W. Kroll, professor of Chinese at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been elected to the prestigious American Philosophical Society, becoming the fifth member ever of the university’s faculty—and the first from the humanities—to gain this recognition.

Kroll is one of the world’s leading scholars of medieval Chinese literature, language, history and religion from the late Han through Tang periods (roughly A.D. 200 to 910). The American Philosophical Society, which is the oldest learned society in the United States, was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin and honors “extraordinary accomplishments in all fields.”

“This is an unexpected and humbling honor, for which in light of the society’s long history and highly selective nature, I am very grateful,” Kroll said.

Kroll was the founding chair of �� Boulder’s Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures (now Asian Languages and Civilizations), serving in that position from 1982 to 1995. During that time, he also designed and launched the department's graduate program in Chinese.

He is the author of more than 70 scholarly articles and the author or editor of eight books, including A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese. This is the first Chinese-English dictionary devoted specifically to the premodern Chinese written language, up to roughly A.D. 1000.

Besides his own research, Kroll has spent 40 years as an editor of various scholarly journals, helping to define the field and shape the presentation of Western studies on premodern China.

This is an unexpected and humbling honor, for which in light of the society’s long history and highly selective nature, I am very grateful.”

During his career, Kroll has won three fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and has also won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has served as president of the American Oriental Society, been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, and named to the Dayatang Chaired Professorship for one semester at Peking University.

The American Philosophical Society promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications, library resources and community outreach and has played an important role in American cultural and intellectual life for more than 250 years.

Each year, 35 new members are elected to the society from all fields of scholarship and public life. Since 1900, more than 200 members of the American Philosophical Society have also been Nobel Prize winners.

In addition to former U.S. Presidents George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, other prominent American Philosophical Society members include John J. Audubon, Robert Fulton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Alexander von Humboldt, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Margaret Mead, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost and George C. Marshall.

�� Boulder faculty previously elected to the American Philosophical Society include:

Margaret Murnane, distinguished professor of physics, MacArthur “Genius Award” winner, and fellow at JILA, a joint institute of �� Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology;
Tom Cech, �� Boulder Nobel laureate and distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry department;
Gilbert White, the late distinguished professor of geography who won the National Medal of Science in 2001 for his research on natural hazards, including floods; and
Kenneth Boulding, the late distinguished professor of economics and former president of the American Economic Association.

Kroll earned his PhD in far eastern languages and literatures from the University of Michigan in 1976. He joined the �� Boulder faculty in 1979 as assistant professor of Chinese after having served in that position at the University of Virginia.

Paul W. Kroll, professor of Chinese at �� Boulder, has been elected to the prestigious American Philosophical Society, becoming the fifth member ever of the university’s faculty—and the first from the humanities—to gain this recognition.

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Print 2018

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Alum will support students of the (far) distant future

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���������� Boulder graduate’s business career selling wedding apparel draws on an arts and sciences foundation

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���������� Boulder alum—now Amazon account specialist— finds strength in the flexibility provided by a liberal arts education

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Partnership with Zillow offers unprecedented ability to track where people have lived since 1810

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A closer look at geographic data finds no correlation between generally happy locales and rates of suicide, according to new research by ���������� Boulder and U of California Irvine

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���������� Boulder research contradicts the long-held belief that humans interfere when they see the abuse of strangers

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���������� Boulder political scientist employs teaching method that calls on students to play historical characters as part of an immersive ‘game’

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A closer look at geographic data finds no correlation between generally happy locales and rates of suicide, according to new research by �� Boulder and U of California Irvine

�� Boulder research contradicts the long-held belief that humans interfere when they see the abuse of strangers

�� Boulder political scientist employs teaching method that calls on students to play historical characters as part of an immersive ‘game’

As record numbers of women seek seats in Congress, �� Boulder and Notre Dame researchers probe the motivations behind the trend