The usual suspects of CSU research can be difficult to escape. Everywhere students look, there are ongoing studies about obscure animals adapting to climate change, creative interventions for dementia or something about lasers. Northern Colorado culture guarantees the latest debates on water, wolves and wildfires — not to mention the way an occasional infectious diseases study hits the public like a bat out of hell.
Though popular topics like soil productivity and polymer innovation are undeniably compelling, colleges around campus are creating golden nuggets of research in unexpected areas. CSU hosts world-altering, odd and sometimes subtle research looking for ways to make life better for everyone.
Of course, all of this research, from dark matter to blooming corpse flowers, deserves a time and place for attention. These 10 areas of science are only a small sample of the research that is quietly improving everyday life.
1. Local democracy: Center for Public Deliberation
The Center for Public Deliberation guides Northern Colorado through polarizing community issues while continuing research on democracy, civic engagement and public communication. With tools found in brain and social sciences, the CPD explores deliberative democracy while on the ground with local citizens.
2. Poverty: Center for Marketing and Social Impact
Science has only recently begun to study the intersection of poverty and resource scarcity. At the Center for Marketing and Social Impact, business scientists reach beyond the usual affluent marketplace research and explore the impacts of deprivation on behavior and well-being.
3. Music therapy: Brainwaves Research Lab
Music has played a role in therapy since ancient civilizations. However, contemporary science continues to uncover new ways to take advantage of music’s potential. At the Brainwaves Research Lab, neuroscience and music therapy are teaming up to study the impacts of music on the attention skills of children with autism.
4. Performing arts: ‘Enriched Environments for the Healthy, Aging Brain’
Dance, symphony and theater have made their way into health sciences. In the project “Enriched Environments for the Healthy, Aging Brain,” researchers from design and merchandising, communication studies and psychology collaborated to study engagement in performing arts as an intervention to delay or reduce cognitive decline. CSU’s performing artists are rarely featured in peer-reviewed science studies.
5. Interior design: Spatial Perception and Cognitive Experience Laboratory
The mission of the Spatial Perception and Cognitive Experience Laboratory is to bring neurodiversity into consideration for interior design and user interfaces. By combining building modeling, sensory tracking, neuroimaging and sometimes virtual reality, researchers collaborating from the design and merchandising and neuroscience departments have begun developing a new and inclusive approach to planning interior environments.
6. Humanizing user interface: Natural User Interaction
Computer scientists are training augmented and virtual reality systems in more intricacies of human communication in the Natural User Interaction Lab. Barriers to interaction are evaporating as the technology becomes more intuitive with natural gestures, microgestures and, soon, emotion recognition.
7. Accessibility: Assistive Technology Resource Center
The science of accessibility is beginning to grow a library of information on navigating the college experience with disabilities. In these early stages, researchers at the Assistive Technology Resource Center are collecting data about who uses assistive technologies, which technologies are used and their impacts on academic performance.
8. Play: Sensory integration, Play and Occupational Therapy Research Lab
Kids need to play. Developmental and occupational scientists at the Sensory integration, Play and Occupational Therapy Research Lab are investigating the effects of unstructured play on children’s health and happiness. As an intervention, unstructured play benefits children in a myriad of ways that neuroscience is particularly equipped to explore.
9. Transition to adulthood: Transition, Employment and Technology Lab
The Transition, Employment and Technology Lab uniquely focuses on young adult life transitions, employment outcomes and job satisfaction of students who experience intellectual and developmental disabilities. Their research includes reviews of job-matching tools, the impacts of workplace environments and the relationship between parental expectations and life outcomes of students with disabilities.
10. Inclusive science communication: STEM Center
Diversity and equity are still a significant challenge in most STEM fields. The STEM Center is currently running a project focused on using science communication as a tool for students to build self-efficacy, explore their science identities and recognize the value of contributing their own broad perspectives to science.
Is your lab researching ways to change the world? Tell us all about it at science@collegian.com.
Reach Jenn Dawson at science@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.