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Graduating in May 2022 with degrees in Creative Technology and Design, these graduate and undergraduate students listed are recognized for exceptional accomplishments, having demonstrated initiative in their academic and extracurricular activities, completing outstanding research or creative projects, or contributing significantly to the ATLAS community.

First-place New Venture Challenge winner, Chembotix, was awarded $45,000 for its work on speeding up the pace of chemistry research and development. Making molecules in current laboratory settings is typically time-consuming and dangerous; Kailey Shara's automation makes the process faster and safer.

First students built the instrumentation. Then they attached it to a high-altitude weather balloon that took it to an altitude of 101,000 feet. Thanks to the geolocation technology they had incorporated, they were then able to locate the instrumentation 120 miles away in Eastern Colorado.

After rebounding from a major flood with vibrant new leadership and a new toolbox of performance technologies, the ATLAS Institute’s B2 Center for Media, Arts & Performance now offers more varied and interesting opportunities to artists, engineers, creative technologists and performers than ever before.

Imagine a world where robots flawlessly detect everyone in a conversation group and also greet the newcomers. Described in a paper published in the March proceedings of the prestigious International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction  (HRI '22), Hooman Hedayati  (PhD computer science '20) and Daniel Szafir, assistant professor of computer science at UNC Chapel Hill and former ATLAS faculty member, proposed a method to overcome situations when conversational group (F-formation) detection algorithms fail.

For the second year running, Creative Technology and Design students won first place at the largest university hackathon in the Rocky Mountain region, HackCU, held this year March 5-6 on the CU ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ campus. Another student, whose two majors include CTD and computer science, took second place this year as the sole member of his team.

Museum of ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ’s new exhibit, Voces Vivas: Stories from the Latino Community in ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ County, Past and Present features Andrea Fautheree Márquez's thesis project, "Chicana Light," which explores the Chicano civil rights movement in Colorado.

​​Kailey Shara, an ATLAS PhD student and a member of the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, and her team, won third place and $1,000 for Chembotix robotic automation platform. Annie Margaret, teaching assistant professor with the ATLAS Institute, and her team, placed fourth with Digital Wellness x NoSo November. 

A Q&A with Ondine Geary by Shoutout Colorado. "I make dances that are scrappy, unruly and resourceful. They slip themselves into the crevices between genres and insist on using whatever was lost down there–chicken bones, loose wires, half-retrieved memories."

ATLAS PhD student Fiona Bell is passionate about sustainability; her doctoral dissertation tackles how to reduce waste through encouraging intimate relationships between designers, the materials they use and the artifacts they develop. In recognition of her work, Bell recently received financial support to help complete her thesis through a Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship.