Roselinde Kaiser, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, is being recognized for her research on the science and treatment of adolescent depression

Roselinde Kaiser, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, has been named a winner, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their independent careers.

“PECASE embodies the high priority placed by the government on maintaining the leadership position of the United States in science by producing outstanding scientists and engineers and nurturing their continued development,” according to the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), which was commissioned in 1996 to create PECASE.

“The awards identify a cadre of outstanding scientists and engineers who will broadly advance science and the missions important to the participating agencies.

In honoring scientists and engineers who are early in their research careers, the PECASE Awards recognize “exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the 21st century. The awards foster innovative and far-reaching developments in science and technology, increase awareness of careers in science and engineering, give recognition to the scientific missions of participating agencies, enhance connections between fundamental research and national goals, and highlight the importance of science and technology for the nation's future,” according to the NSTC.

Kaiser is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist who studies the science and treatment of adolescent depression. With her research group, the Research on Affective Disorders and Development Lab (RADD Lab), she conducts research that asks questions such as: How can brain functioning and behavior help us to understand the experience of depression in adolescence and over the course of human development? Can we use brain or behavioral markers to better predict depression—or to predict resilience? How can we enhance brain and behavioral functioning to promote emotional health and wellness throughout the lifespan?

The mission of the RADD Lab is to gain insight into the brain and behavioral processes that reflect or underlie depression and other mood experiences, with the goal of leveraging research discoveries to foster emotional health. This year, in partnership with an interdisciplinary team of scientists, educators and young people, Kaiser and her team are launching an initiative to scale and translate scientific discovery into high-impact programs aimed at promoting mental health.

“I am delighted and honored to receive the PECASE, which truly reflects the dedicated efforts of our research team and the commitment to innovation at the University of Colorado,” Kaiser says.

“Youth depression is an urgent public health priority; in our research, we are advancing new paths to promote healthy mood through interdisciplinary discovery achieved with and for young people. The PECASE recognizes the promise and innovation of this work and is a launchpad for research that will develop and scale programs for personalized health insight and wellness promotion. We are enthusiastic to begin the next chapter in research discovery and real-world impact.”

Also recognized with a PECASE award was , JILA fellow, National Institute of Standards and Technology physicist and CU Boulder physics professor.

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NEH funding also was awarded for two other humanities projects at CU Boulder

University of Colorado Boulder Department of History Associate Professor Henry Lovejoy has won a $60,000 fellowship from the  to allow him to research and write a book about involuntary African indentured labor between 1800 and 1914.

Lovejoy’s research focuses on the political, economic and cultural history of Africa and the African Diaspora. He also has special expertise in digital humanities and is director of the Digital Slavery Research Lab, which focuses on developing, linking and archiving open-source data and multi-media related to the global phenomenon of slavery and human trafficking.

Additionally, Lovejoy spearheaded the creation and update of the website , a living memorial to the more than 700,000 men, women and children who were “liberated” but not immediately freed in the British-led campaign to abolish African slave trafficking.

The term “Liberated Africans” coincides with a now-little-remembered part of history following the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 by the United Kingdom’s Parliament, which prohibited the slave trade within the British Empire (although it did not abolish the practice of slavery until 1834).

Around the same time, other countries—including the United States, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands—passed their own trafficking laws and operated squadrons of ships in the Atlantic and Indian oceans to interdict the slave trade.

However, in a cruel twist of fate, most of those “liberated” people weren’t actually freed—but were instead condemned as property, declared free under anti-slave trade legislation and then subjected to indentures lasting several years.

Lovejoy said the NEH fellowship is allowing him to take leave from work to write his book, focused on lax enforcement of anti-slavery laws, migratory patterns of African laborers, their enslavement and subsequent use as indentured laborers around the world from 1800 to 1914.

“I’m deeply grateful for being awarded this opportunity, as the NEH plays such a vital role in supporting the humanities by funding projects that foster our cultural understanding, historical awareness, and intellectual inquiry,” he said.

Meanwhile, Lovejoy said he is also writing a biography about Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a “liberated African” who was apprenticed by Queen Victoria, after conducting research in royal, national and local archives in England, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Lovejoy also wrote the book , a biography of an enslaved African who rose through the ranks of Spain’s colonial military and eventually led a socio-religious institution at the root of an African-Cuban religion, commonly known as Santería. 

Lovejoy’s NEH fellowship was one of three NEH awards to CU Boulder faculty. Other awards granted were:

Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Professor Patrick Greaney won a $60,000 fellowship to research and write a book about German manufacturer Braun, National Socialism and the creation of West German culture between1933-1975, focusing on Braun from the beginning of the Nazi regime through the 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany. Greaney’s research focuses on literature, design and modern and contemporary art.

Wilma Doris Loayza, teaching assistant professor at the Latin American and Latinx Studies Center, and affiliated faculty of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, along with co-project directors Joe Bryan, Leila Gomez and Ambrocio Gutierrez Lorenzo, won a two-year, $149,925 grant to develop course modules and educational resources about Quechua and Zapotec language and culture as part of efforts to expand and strengthen the Latin American Indigenous Languages and Cultures program.

The awards to CU Boulder faculty were part of $22.6 million in grants the NEH provided to 219 humanities projects across the country. The awards were announced Tuesday.

“It is my pleasure to announce NEH grant awards to support 219 exemplary projects that will foster discovery, education, and innovative research in the humanities,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe.

“This funding will strengthen our ability to preserve and share important stories from the past with future generations, and expand opportunities in communities, classrooms, and institutions to engage with the history, ideas, languages, and cultures that shape our world.”

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Fileva, a CU Boulder associate professor of philosophy, won a 2024 Public Philosophy Op-Ed contest

Iskra Fileva, an associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Philosophy, has won a 2024 Public Philosophy Op-Ed contest from the American Philosophical Association for her blog 

Fileva’s article was originally published in 2023 in , for which she is a regular contributor. With her permission, the article was later reposted on the Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine website.

Iskra Fileva, an associate professor in the CU Boulder Department of Philosophy, has won a 2024 Public Philosophy Op-Ed contest from the American Philosophical Association.

Fileva specializes in moral psychology and issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and psychiatry. She also studies aesthetics and epistemology. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophers’ Imprint, Philosophical Studies and Synthese.

In addition to her academic work, Fileva writes for a broad audience, including op-eds for the New York Times. She writes a column in Psychology Today that has addressed a wide variety of topics, including perfectionism, self-sabotage, parents who envy their children, asymmetrical friendships, love without commitment, fear of freedom, death, dreams, despair and many others.

In announcing the award, the American Philosophical Association noted that winning submissions “call public attention, either directly or indirectly, to the value of philosophical thinking” and were judged in terms of sound reasoning and “their success as examples of public philosophy,” as well as their accessibility to the general public on topics of public concern.

Fileva said she’s pleased with the reception the article received and honored to be recognized by the American Philosophical Association.

“Receiving the public philosophy award was a very nice way to end the year,” she said. “It also drew attention to the essay, and I heard from people who read it and who likely would not have found it otherwise. It took me a day or so to re-read it as I don’t, in general, know what I would think of anything I’ve written several months ago, but I did re-read it, and I was happy to discover that I still agreed with what I’d written.”

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The American Mathematical Society recognition supports mid-career female researchers whose achievements demonstrate potential for further contributions to mathematics

Katherine Stange, a professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Mathematics, has been named the 2025-26 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Joan and Joseph Birman Fellow.

The  is a mid-career research fellowship that aims “to address the paucity of women at the highest levels of research in mathematics by giving exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years,” according to the AMS. Fellows are those “whose achievements demonstrate significant potential for further contributions to mathematics.”

Katherine Stange, a CU Boulder professor of mathematics, has been named the 2025-26 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Joan and Joseph Birman Fellow.

“I am both honored and humbled by this award,” Stange says. “As my career has unfolded, I've learned the incredible value of community in mathematics, and I feel a great debt of gratitude to my amazing collaborators and the support of my mathematical community.

“Joan and Joseph Birman's vision, to support the careers of women reconciling the many aspects of work and life, goes beyond these individual awards; and so, I hope to support those around me, just as I have been privileged by the support of so many.”

Fellows can use the $50,000 award in any way that most effectively enables their research, including child care, release time, participation in special research programs and travel support.

Stange, a number theorist, earned her bachelor of mathematics degree at the University of Waterloo and her PhD at Brown University under the mentorship of Joseph H. Silverman. She held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University, Stanford University and the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Simon Fraser University and is a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Describing her research, Stange says, “I enjoy simple-seeming questions that lead to a richness of structure; and arithmetic questions with geometric and especially visual access points.”

Her areas of interest include elliptic curves, Apollonian circle packings, Kleinian groups, algebraic divisibility sequences, Diophantine approximation, continued fractions, quaternion algebras and quadratic and Hermitian forms. Stange is especially interested in cryptography, including elliptic-curve and isogeny-based cryptography, as well as quantum algorithms, “in part for the surprising way mathematical structures can have an outsize influence on human affairs,” she notes. “I enjoy problems that involve experimental, algorithmic and especially visual mathematics, using a computer and other tools.

“There’s a great deal of hidden beauty in number theoretical problems waiting to be illustrated.”

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College of Arts and Sciences leadership and peers recognize history professor’s service, teaching and research with the award

Paul Sutter, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of history, has been named the 2024 College Professor of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences in recognition of his exceptional service, teaching and research.

The college presents this prestigious award annually to current faculty members who are scholars and artists of national and international renown and who are recognized by their college peers as teachers and colleagues of exceptional talent. Honorees hold this title for the remainder of their careers in the College of Arts and Sciences at CU Boulder.

“Being named a Professor of Distinction is a career honor, and I am deeply appreciative of my wonderful colleagues in the History Department who nominated me for this award, and those around campus who supported my nomination,” Sutter notes.

Sutter’s research focus is U.S. and global environmental history. He is the author of (2002) and  (2015).

CU Boulder Professor Paul Sutter is the author of many accalimed essays and books, including Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South. 

In Driven Wild, Sutter details an aspect of his longtime intellectual fascination with wilderness and U.S. environmental history: “Historians had long studied the centrality of the wilderness idea in American history, from its importation as a filter for viewing the colonial landscape to its role as a shibboleth of the postwar environmental movement, and I was fascinated by the same questions that preoccupied many of these scholars: How was it that a nation founded upon an antipathy for the wilderness had come to cherish and protect it? What had produced this intellectual and cultural sea change?”

In addition, Sutter is the co-author of  (with Leon Neel and Albert Way, 2010), and the co-editor of Environmental History and the American South: A Reader (with Christopher Manganiello, 2009) and Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast (with Paul Pressly, 2018).

His current book project, Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics: Environment, Disease, Race, and the U.S. Sanitary Program in Panama, 1904-1914, is an environmental and public health history of the construction of the Panama Canal.

In addition to his books, Sutter has also written a number of influential essays on environmental historiography, including a state-of-the-field essay in the Journal of American History (June 2013), and he is the series editor for , published by the University of Washington Press. He has received major fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health,  the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and the National Humanities Center. 

Sutter earned his BA in American studies from Hamilton College and his PhD from the University of Kansas. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia from 1997 to 2000 and a member of the History Department at the University of Georgia from 2000 to 2009. He joined CU Boulder as an associate professor of history in 2009 and was named professor in 2016.

Sutter served as Department of History chair from 2017-2021. He is a faculty affiliate in the Department of Environmental Studies and in the Center of the American West, and he has just joined the Advisory Board of the Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism.

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Actor and theater scholar Tamara Meneghini brings the long-ruling monarch to life in a solo performance that earned rave reviews at the recent Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Historical figures are so easily flattened into two dimensions—all stiff pleats and inscrutable expressions rendered in oils.

The challenge for artists and scholars, then, is how to lift these figures from the canvas—to regard them in three dimensions, to allow them foibles and failings and humanity.

For Tamara Meneghini, that meant more than just donning a red wig and pounds of brocade as one of the most famous women in Western history. It meant studying the time in which Elizabeth I of England lived—researching what influenced her behavior in her time period, how she interacted with people, what games she played, how she followed the rules and how she broke them.

Tamara Meneghini, an associate professor in the CU Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance, performed to rave reviews as the titular monarch in "Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words" at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

To become Elizabeth I onstage, Meneghini had to understand the monarch as a human woman and bring her to life for modern audiences who may believe there’s nothing new to understand about her.

So, audiences at Scotland’s in August were surprised and then delighted to rediscover the queen they thought they knew. Playing the not-so-popular-in-Scotland monarch in the one-woman performance “Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words,” Meneghini performed before full theaters and to glowing reviews.

“The key to fringe festivals is audiences want you to connect,” explains Meneghini, an associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance. “You have to connect. The audience can’t be just audience. The way our piece was set up, it worked really nicely that audience felt like A) they were in the presence of the queen and B) they could not leave, they were there with me in the moment, in this meta sort of space. I was interacting with them as the queen, but in a very specific circumstance we had created.”

Becoming Elizabeth

Meneghini’s interest in Elizabeth I grew, in part, from her interest in styles and plays from different time periods—"the ways in which we behave in those time periods, how changes in clothing, dances, culture, protocols can affect behavior,” she explains.

While working at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where she taught before joining the CU Boulder faculty in 2008, Meneghini developed a concert of early Renaissance music that involved era-specific instruments such as sackbuts and crumhorns. However, she also wanted to bring in elements of theater and approached , a pre-eminent scholar of Elizabeth I and women in the Renaissance era.

“Carole was pivotal because what we created was a fictitious meeting between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots,” Meneghini says. “Part of that was crafting this improvisation with students that was really cool. It ended up being a combination of theater and film and history, and it was just a blast.”

Fast forward to 2016, when CU Boulder was honored as a stop for the first-ever national touring exhibition of Shakespeare’s First Folio.

Tamara Meneghini as Elizabeth I outside Edinburgh's Craigmillar Castle (left) and onstage (right) as the long-ruling monarch.

“When the Folio came through, I was doing a period styles class, and I was asked to create something for the Folio visit,” she says. “I immediately thought of Elizabeth I—the idea of Elizabeth, the time period, Shakespeare’s plays. I know they never met, but she certainly influenced his plays, so I started working on this thing based on Carole’s series of lectures that she did about Elizabeth.”

The initial performance was a duet, with Meneghini playing Elizabeth in front of projected images from the time period to which Levin had access. Meneghini and her acting partner—Bernadette Sefic, a CU Boulder BFA/acting graduate and recent MFA graduate of the Old Globe and University of San Diego Shiley Graduate Theatre Program—performed at universities and sometimes in community theaters, and in costumes designed by theater colleague Markas Henry.

“As the costume as story went on, Elizabeth is becoming more and more like a real person,” Meneghini says. “The portraiture that we have of her was largely staged by how her council and her parliament wanted her to look. We wanted this piece to be an opportunity to see Elizabeth as the woman, as the human, as someone audiences could relate to.

“Markas and I talked a lot about this costume coming apart, and he made this thing that’s close to 30 pounds—the costume is immense—that gradually sheds layers through the performance.”

Fringe opportunities

Two years ago, CU Boulder graduate Penny Cole, founder of , approached Meneghini about creating a solo show and put her in contact with a Scottish theater scholar who asked whether she’d be interested in performing at Edinburgh Fringe.

   What: "Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words"

  Who: Tamara Meneghini, associate professor in the CU Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance

  When: 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19

  Where: Savoy Denver, 2700 Arapahoe St.

Meneghini sought Levin’s expertise, as well as that of Denver-based theater guru Sabin Epstein, to craft a solo play from what began as lectures. The 55-minute play, for which Levin is credited as writer, is based on Elizabeth’s own writings. It eschews the projected images of the original duet performance—a lot of which featured the men in Elizabeth’s life—to create an intimate space between Elizabeth and the audience, Meneghini says.

She performed “Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words” several times in New York City before her 14 performances at Edinburgh Fringe, where it was a hit.

“People there are crazy about their royals,” Meneghini says with a laugh. “Elizabeth is not a popular monarch in Scotland; in fact, she’s almost an antagonist. So, when I first performed it in New York, people went nuts about it, but I didn’t think they were going to like it as much in Scotland, so that was a happy surprise.

“In fact, I went to do this photo shoot at Craigmillar Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots convalesced and planned her husband’s murder, and people were coming up to me—I was in full regalia—and saying, ‘Oh, Queen Mary, Queen Mary.’ So, I had to say, ‘No, I’m Elizabeth,’ and they’d run away.”

Thanks to the play’s reception at Edinburgh Fringe, Meneghini is now developing it into a full, 120-minute performance. She also will perform it Oct. 19 in the And still, she says, there’s always more to learn about Elizabeth.

“One of my biggest takeaways (from performing at Edinburgh Fringe) was people came out of the show saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, I have a totally different perspective of her as a person. She wasn’t this awful woman, she really struggled with these decisions that she made,’” Meneghini says. “What I’ve learned in my own research with her is that she was a complicated person like we all are, didn’t take any of the decisions that she had to make in her life lightly. When I’m doing the show—whether it’s here, when I was in Edinburgh—I’m constantly reading more about her, and every day is bringing something new.”

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In her Distinguished Research Lecture, CU Boulder Professor Christy McCain will highlight how certain traits in some mammal and insect populations indicate who is at greatest risk from climate change

Colorado’s small, mountain-dwelling mammals are moving higher—not for better views or real estate, but because climate change is forcing them to.

This finding is based on a 13-year study of 27 rodent and four shrew species in Colorado’s Front Range and San Juan mountains—research that included trapping, tagging and releasing the various mammals to better understand their range.

While the findings are more complex than a simple trend of animals moving up the mountain, they spotlight the sobering possibility that climate change could force some mammals from Colorado entirely.

Christy McCain, a professor in the CU Boulder Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and curator of vertebrates in the CU Museum of Natural History, will discuss mountain biodiversity and climate change in her Distinguished Research Lecture Nov. 14.

“We’ve been talking about climate change in the Rockies for a long time, but I think we can say that this is a sign that things are now responding and responding quite drastically," Christy McCain, lead author, in Feb. 2021.

McCain, a professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and curator of vertebrates in the CU Museum of Natural History, uses mountains as natural experiments to study biodiversity, ecological theory, global change, montane ecology and range limits.

She will discuss mountain biodiversity and climate change in her Distinguished Research Lecture Nov. 14, highlighting the research her lab has done to understand how animals—mostly vertebrates and insects—are distributed on mountains around the world.

She and her research colleagues have found that different groups of animals, driven by their evolutionary history and climate, show distinctive patterns. For example, mountain biodiversity for rodents, salamanders and moths is quite different from birds, bats and reptiles. 

The conservation priorities for each group of mountain organisms are closely tied to elevational diversity patterns, land-use change and complex interactions with a rapidly warming and drying climate. McCain will explore these topics through case studies of mammal populations in the Front Range and San Juan Mountains and carrion beetles—examining how various physiological traits like heat and desiccation tolerance may be critical to responses to climate change.

About Christy McCain

McCain received dual bachelor’s degrees in wildlife biology and studio art from Humboldt State University, was a natural-resources and protected-areas specialist in the Peace Corps Honduras and earned her PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Kansas.

She was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California Santa Barbara before coming to CU Boulder as an assistant professor in 2008.

   What: 124th Distinguished Research Lecture, Mountain Biodiversity and Climate Change

  Who: Professor Christy McCain of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and CU Museum of Natural History

  When: 4-5 p.m. Nov. 14, followed by a Q&A and reception

  Where: Chancellor's Hall and Auditorium, Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE)

McCain studies how montane organisms are distributed on mountains around the world and how those populations and species are influenced by human land use and climate change. Her research spans topics across ecology and evolution to understand and conserve biodiversity.

Funded by the National Science Foundation through several grants, her research has appeared in more than 60 peer-reviewed journals, including Science, Ecology Letters, Ecology and Global Change Biology, among others.

McCain is the curator of vertebrate collections in the CU Museum of Natural History, where she is a steward for the continued protection and use of museum specimens for understanding and conserving the world’s biodiversity. Over the years, she has taught mammalogy as well as other topics in field biology, creative conservation messaging and mountain ecology and conservation.

About the Distinguished Research Lectureship

The Distinguished Research Lectureship is among the highest honors given by faculty to a faculty colleague at CU Boulder. Each year, the Research and Innovation Office requests nominations from faculty for this award, and a faculty review panel recommends one or more faculty members as recipients. 

The lectureship honors tenured faculty members, research professors (associate or full) or adjoint professors who have been with CU Boulder for at least five years and are widely recognized for a distinguished body of academic or creative achievement and prominence, as well as contributions to the educational and service missions of CU Boulder. Each recipient typically gives a lecture in the fall or spring following selection and receives a $2,000 honorarium.

McCain and Jamie Nagle, a professor of physics, have been recognized with 2024-25 Distinguished Research Lectureships. Nagle will give his lecture Feb. 6, 2025.

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Pursuing a passion for music, CU Boulder economist Murat Iyigun transforms from recognized expert on economics of the family and economic history to regional rock star with a growing musical reputation

In a low-key pub and grill on a quiet street in Littleton, Colorado, it’s about 10 minutes to 8 on a Saturday night, and the renowned economist seems to be in six places at once.

He’s sound checking his guitar and finalizing plans with the light technician and joking with the singers and ticking through the set list with the drummer and donning a dusky green bomber jacket and wraparound shades.

The dance floor in front of the stage is empty for now, but it won’t be for long. At a little after 8, members of the steadily growing audience put down their forks and drinks to welcome—as they’d been invited, as the musicians had been introduced—the Custom Shop Band.

Murat Iyigun is a professor of economics focusing on the economics of the family and economic history.

A kaleidoscope of colored lights flashes from the rafters toward the stage as lead singers Amy Gray, Mckenna Lee and Abbey Kochevar begin an iconic refrain: stomp-stomp-clap, stomp-stomp-clap.

“Buddy you're a boy, make a big noise, playin' in the street, gonna be a big man someday,” Gray sings, achieving the stratospheric, Mercurian growl and grandeur of the original. “You got mud on your face, you big disgrace, kickin' your can all over the place. Singin'…”

The renowned economist leans toward his mic and joins the immortal chorus: “We will, we will rock you.”

It wasn’t so much a threat as a promise. For the next four hours, minus breaks between sets, the band founded by Murat Iyigun, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of economics and former economist with the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., would rock everyone there.

And they would rock hard.

‘You should listen to Queen’

The question, then, is how does a scholar and economist widely known for his research on the economics of the family and economic history come to be on a pub-and-grill stage on a Saturday night, slaying licks originally conceived by Brian May?

“Life is funny, isn’t it?” Iyigun admits.

The story starts, as not many rock stories do, in Ankara, Turkey. The son of a Turkish father and a Turkish-American mother, Iyigun grew up during a tumultuous time in Turkey, when older kids might stop him on the street to ask whether he was a leftist or a rightist. Still, he says, he was lucky and maybe even a little sheltered, while some of his older sisters’ friends became victims of the left/right violence.

It was that violence, in fact, that caused his older sister’s university to be shut down for seven months. To continue her chemistry studies, she transferred to The Ohio State University, but not before leaving her LP collection to her younger brother.

“I was about 13, and I was counting the days to when she left in July because I was going to be getting all the LPs,” Iyigun recalls with a laugh. “‘Hotel California’ was huge that summer, and then there was Cat Stevens, ELO. I was totally captivated even though, compared to now, things were so closed for us. Going to the U.S. was like going to Mars. But in terms of music and Western culture, especially among urban secular Turks, we followed everything.

Murat Iyigun was inspired to learn to play the guitar after hearing Queen's album Live Killers. (Photos: The Custom Shop Band)

“Now you can get all the vinyls and they’re easy to come by, but at that time people basically made tapes that everyone shared around. There was all this bootleg stuff that would come from Europe, and someone in Istanbul would press some vinyls, but I was never sure if they had an agreement (with the record labels) or if those were counterfeit.”

At the tender age of 13, Iyigun was more into the mellow side of rock n’ roll. A few years deeper into his teens, however, and he discovered KISS. Visiting family in the United States during the summer of ’78—a time that might be considered the fever-pitch apex of the band’s makeup years—Iyigun acquired all things KISS: T-shirts, posters, tapes, you name it.

It might have been the following summer, he doesn’t remember exactly, that he went camping with friends and met one of the great platonic loves of his teenage years—an older girl who inadvertently changed his life.

“She said, ‘You should listen to Queen, they’re a great band,’” Iyigun recalls. “So, I asked someone to make me a tape of the Live Killers album, and that was it.”

It says something about what happened to him, listening to that album, that he currently has—in a glass case in his Boulder home—a replica of May’s immortal Red Special guitar, signed by May. Iyigun also bought Red Special replicas for both of his daughters.

He heard Live Killers and had to learn to play guitar, is the point. Then he and some of his friends, including an ambassador’s son whose presence allowed them to practice at the Swiss embassy in Ankara, formed a band. Iyigun absolutely loved it, but making it as a rock musician in a Muslim country in the 1980s started to strike him as increasingly impossible.

“I thought, ‘OK, I need to get my act together,’” Iyigun says, so he came to the United States to earn an MBA at Boston University and then a master’s and PhD in economics at Brown University.

His parents had given him a Les Paul guitar when he graduated high school and began studying business administration at Hacettepe University—“in Turkey back then you just didn’t have these instruments, so for my parents I know this was very costly,” he explains—and as a graduate student at Brown he bought an amp and noodled around at home.

The Custom Shop Band includes, left to right, lead guitarist Murat Iyigun; singers Amy Gray, Mckenna Lee and Abbey Kochevar; drummer Kevin Thomas; bassist Elliot Elder; and keyboardist Tone Show. Steve Johnson (not pictured) also is a member of the band. (Photo: The Custom Shop Band)

But then life happened. He was beginning his career, he had a wife and young children, he was working toward tenure, and he just didn’t have time to play, for more than a decade.

Then, about 15 or so years ago, at a time he was hardly ever playing guitar, his daughters and wife gave him the game Guitar Hero for Father’s Day. He played it a bit and realized the game console was an instrument in its own way, so with typical focus “I thought, ‘I need to learn to play it well,’” he says. “It’s nothing like guitar playing, but I thought I could learn to do this, and then I was thinking about how I used to play. And that’s when I brought out my guitar.”

Learning through blues jams

“Once I started to come back to it, I realized some of my fundamentals had gone,” Iyigun says. “So, I started by taking these baby steps. I immediately hooked up with a great music teacher, Jeff Sollohub, a Berklee (College of Music) graduate and super nice guy, and every two weeks I’d work with him on a new song, on composition and things like that.

“Within a year or two, I realized I’m only going to get so good if I don’t actually go out and play. By the time I came back to it, there were so many more resources online, YouTube and things like that, and I still got a lot of joy out of playing at home. But I quickly realized there’s a limit to how much I can improve unless I get out and play. That’s when I discovered blues jams, which are the easiest way to go play live even though blues is super difficult to play well.”

He went to multiple blues jams a month around metro Denver and endured the “painful, painful learning process.” A significant moment of clarity and focus came when he saw the parallels between being onstage playing and lecturing in front of a full classroom or at an economics conference.

“I had a lot of embarrassing days where the ride home would be miserable, and I did that for a couple of years, and I was discovering other jams and just kept playing,” he says. “The limitation of blues jams, though, is you pack all the gear, get in the car, drive 40 minutes, get on the list, then the person running the jam will put these bands together and you play for 20 minutes. So, I drove there an hour, waited an hour, spent this time to play 20 minutes—and 18 minutes of that was painful.

“But after doing that a couple years, this blues band of three guys needed a guitar player, and they’d seen me play, so they said, ‘Do you want to join a band?’ I joined for about a year, and there was this point where I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want.’”

Inside, though, he was still the kid obsessed with KISS and Queen who knew all the guitar greats, not just the blues ones. He was treasurer for Mile High Blues Society, but he wanted to play rock.

Joining the band

The —the name is a reference to the custom guitars Iyigun plays—came together in a way that could be interpreted as either patchwork or destiny: friends of friends, acquaintances who know a guy, calls and emails that began with, “Hey, are you interested in being in a band?”

Elliot Elder, the Custom Shop Band bass player and a 2022 CU Boulder graduate in jazz bass performance, was recommended by a mutual friend. Amy Gray, the original in what is now a trio of lead singers, was recommended to Iyigun by another mutual friend:

“I was singing with another band and had recently left them when I got a message from Murat,” Gray says. “He saw me in a video from that band, and he said they were looking for someone to do backups and fill in when their lead at the time was not available.

“So, I looked them up, I went to a show to see what they sounded like and saw that they played some fun songs, that they as instrumentalists all sounded good, so I thought, ‘Why not, let’s give it a chance, they all seem very nice’ and I jumped in and went with it.”

Murat Iyigun joins in on harmony during the Custom Shop Band's set list of "hits, with a twist."

Gray recruited Kochevar, whom she knew from performing with her in theater, and Lee, who had recently moved to Colorado from California and whom she knew through mutual friends. And that’s how the Custom Shop Band has worked: Iyigun founded it and continues to act as band leader and manager, but in every other way it’s a democracy.

“Murat is an awesome band leader,” Elder says. “One of the reasons why a lot of bands don’t get past a certain point, in my opinion, is the band leader doesn’t have the flexibility and communication skills to manage situations where lineups change, things change on short notice, people have different ideas about how a song should be played. Murat’s emailing venues, scheduling gigs, managing lineups and all the while teaching at CU. He puts a lot of work into it. You meet a lot of people in the music scene who don’t communicate, who don’t get details to people on time, but Murat is definitely an exception.”

The band, which also includes Kevin Thomas on drums and either Tone Show or Steve Johnson on guitar and keyboards, practices in-person when adding a new song to the set list or a new musician, but otherwise its members practice at home with versions of the songs that Iyigun sends to everyone. In keeping with the band’s democratic ethos, every member brings song suggestions to the table.

At any given show, the Custom Shop Band may open with Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and soon thereafter play “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus and “It’s Raining Men” by The Weather Girls, which might be followed by a mashup of Foreigner’s “Jukebox Hero” and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

On a Saturday night in September, at a pub and grill on a quiet street in Littleton, “So What” by P!nk gets booties to the dance floor in a joyful melee. A dude to the left is lost in his own world of intricate air guitar and a lady on the right has divested herself of shoes. A little later, as the band plays Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” the air guitarist to the left reaches a fever pitch as the band’s lead guitarist, who also happens to be a renowned economist, absolutely wails on the solo.

And transitioning smoothly into Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz,” the dancefloor still throbbing, the economist is grinning wide.

He will rock you.

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CU scholar Rai Farrelly is partnering with English language teachers in Ukraine this semester through a U.S. Department of State program

In some of Rai Farrelly’s first meetings with her new colleagues, they warned her that the air raid sirens might go off while she’s observing their classes.

If that happens, she recalls them telling her, they’ll run down to the bunker in the basement and hope that a nationwide effort to increase internet capacity in subterranean locations has reached their schools and universities. And then they’ll pick up where they left off, because students are still eager to learn, and her colleagues’ job is to teach them.

Farrelly, a teaching associate professor and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) director in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Linguistics, is virtually partnering with educators in Ukraine this semester through the .

Rai Farrelly, a teaching associate professor and TESOL director in the CU Boulder Department of Linguistics, is virtually partnering with educators in Ukraine this semester through the U.S. Department of State English Language Specialist Program.

The Ukrainian educators are part of the State Department’s and work with either teenagers in after-school programs or undergraduate students training to be teachers in any subject because “Ukraine has a plan to start teaching all their content in English coming up very soon,” Farrelly explains.

In her role as an (ELS), Farrelly will observe classes and partner with teachers in Ukraine on strategies and methods for teaching large, mixed-level English classes. Farrelly’s TESOL students at CU Boulder also will partner with English language students in Ukraine via virtual conversation sessions.

“Our realities are worlds apart,” Farrelly says, “yet we'll be connected online and building community together.”

Educational collaboration

Farrelly, whose teaching experience has taken her around the world—from Armenia to Tanzania, where she co-founded to help support students from rural areas who are pursuing post-secondary education—qualified as a State Department ELS several years ago.

To qualify as an ELS, an educator must have a master’s or PhD in TESOL or applied linguistics and the ability to partner with teachers and students around the world either in person or virtually. The program, which is organized through U.S. embassies and regional language officers around the world, focuses on “delivering and maintaining quality English language programs overseas and promoting mutual understanding between the U.S. and other countries.”

During the COVID pandemic, Farrelly accepted virtual ELS positions in South Korea and then Panama. Last semester, her pedagogical grammar class at CU taught English through a virtual cross-cultural exchange with learners at a language school in Arequipa, Peru.

“I have a really nice relationship with colleagues at this school, and they were like, ‘Rai, send your teachers,’” Farrelly says. “Because of that, we have had three CU students teach there, so this program really opens up doors, and I’m going to be working with them again this semester.”

The teachers in Ukraine with whom Farrelly is collaborating this semester have mentioned many of the challenges that English language teachers worldwide face: how to scaffold instruction in classes that contain everything from absolute beginners to intermediate-level speakers; when and how to correct pronunciation and grammar; how to group students during oral exercises; how to invite participation in a way that helps students feel excited to speak.

To help her support the teachers in Ukraine, Farrelly is even arranging a Zoom session with the 14-year-old daughters of three of her friends “so I can do a playful interview on the gender dynamics in class and what their teachers do in a U.S. class to make it comfortable for them,” she says. “That’s one of the concerns that my colleagues in Ukraine have expressed, that 14-year-old boys won’t work with girls and how can they get them to work in groups.”

Seeing people as people

Farrelly says her experiences working with English-teaching colleagues around the world—including in Indonesia and Russia—have taught her the vital importance of a “community of practice and what it means to work closely with teachers who ‘speak your language,’” she says.

 

I just like approaching teacher development collaboratively and creating bonds with people. I love the relationships you form with other teachers—those connection moments where you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m dealing with that same issue!’ And the next thing you know, ideas start forming.”

 

One of the biggest and most pervasive challenges in the TESOL field is the incorrect notion that anybody who speaks English can teach it. “Decades ago, anyone could step off a plane, and if you looked like me and talked like me, you could get a job,” Farrelly says. “Meanwhile, teachers in those countries who go through pedagogical training, who get degrees in teaching English, weren’t getting jobs.

“Even now, there are a lot of short TEFL or TESOL certificates you can get online. Meanwhile, I’m the director of the TESOL program at CU, and my students are taking five or six courses with me to earn a TESOL certificate. There’s a depth and breadth of proper preparation that goes beyond how to teach a language. It’s about understanding individual differences, personalities, motivations, culture, how your (first language) influences acquisition, classroom management, curriculum design. There’s so much that goes into it that’s beyond simply speaking English.”

In her ELS role, Farrelly says a significant focus is teacher mentoring and teacher development: “I’m such a huge fan of collaboration, especially among teachers,” she says. “So much of what I’ve done is grounded in working with teachers, and I never want teachers to see me as this expert outsider who’s coming in and telling them what to do. I just like approaching teacher development collaboratively and creating bonds with people. I love the relationships you form with other teachers—those connection moments where you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m dealing with that same issue!’ And the next thing you know, ideas start forming.”

The fact that Ukraine is a country at war and that geopolitics add a complicated layer to Farrelly’s collaboration with teachers there—in fact, she doesn’t mention her previous experience with teachers and students in Vladimir, Russia—underscores the importance of global partnerships, she says.

“It helps you see people as people and humanizes everyone,” she says. “That’s one of the main aims of State Department programs. It’s access for learners and mentoring for professionals, but it’s about bridging those gaps and promoting cross-cultural understanding. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, at the end of day we can all find so many commonalities.”

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Once frightened of insects, Ramsey has become a leader in the field of entomology

Samuel Ramsey, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado Boulder, is one of this year’s recipients of the .

The Lowell Thomas Award, named after broadcast journalist and explorer and given by , recognizes “excellence in domains or fields of exploration,” according to the award announcement. In particular, the award celebrates “individuals who have grit, tenacity, are undaunted by failure, and endure all obstacles, finding a way forward to discovery and results that expand the limits of knowledge.” 

Samuel Ramsey (left) working with the chieftain of a hill tribe village in Thailand to sample domesticated bees for parasites. (Photo: /.)

, also known as “your friendly neighborhood entomologist,” didn’t always like insects. They used to terrify him. But in the second grade he conquered his fears by learning about insects at his local library.

Now, more than 25 years later, Ramsey is one of the most innovative and distinguished thinkers in the field of entomology. His research has won him numerous awards, including first place in the , the American Bee Research Conference’s Award for Distinguished Research and the Acarological Society of America’s Highest Award for Advances in Acarology Research.

Ramsey—a member of the , class of 2024—also runs a nonprofit, the , which seeks to protect pollinator diversity.

Ramsey’s fellow awardees this year are zoologist , ocean conservationist and geothermal scientist . Past recipients include , , , , and .

The takes place in Austin on Nov. 1.

Top image: Samuel Ramsey researching bee biodiversity in Thailand. (Photo: /.)

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