CSU Spur is a unique partnership between the CSU System and the city and county of Denver to more closely connect the Denver area – and 60,000 CSU alumni – with Colorado State University’s education, research, and outreach mission.
"It is our hope that everyone who steps onto Spur will realize how much we have in common, and that we’re not just better together, we’re interdependent on each other.”
CSU System Chancellor Tony Frank
Engagement and research
at CSU Spur
Engineering faculty and staff are located in the Hydro building, where we engage with students, alumni, and friends in the Denver area, including the surrounding Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods.
The CSU System approved funding for dozens of community engagement and research projects at CSU Spur, including those showcased below from the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering.
Education, Outreach,
and Research
The college’s efforts in education, outreach, and research for people in the Denver area will bring engineering to life, with engaging community programs that speak directly to Colorado State University’s land grant mission.
The college’s Engineering Success Center will connect with middle and high school students through a range of events, developing interests in science and technology through such activities as hands-on engineering experiments. Building relationships with community colleges to promote recruitment of transfer students.
Systems Engineering, one of the fastest growing graduate programs at CSU, will hire a non-tenure track faculty member from industry to work at Spur to leverage partnership opportunities and assist with K-12 outreach activities.
The Biomanufacturing and Biotechnology Laboratory in the Hydro building is designed for hands-on courses in bioprocessing, associated with a Professional Science Master’s degree program. The program trains a workforce for industries that provide environmentally sustainable solutions for energy and food production – such as biofuels - and for the biopharmaceutical industry.
The Colorado Climate Center, based in one of the top Atmospheric Science departments in the country, will install a CoAgMET (COlorado AGricultural Meteorological nETwork) weather station on the Spur campus, and create other opportunities for the public to engage with climate and weather data.
This new center at Spur has been created out of the existing Interdisciplinary Training, Education and Research in Food-Energy-Water Systems program (InTERFEWS) on the CSU Fort Collins campus. The program brings together graduate students and industry leaders in various disciplines to research key problems involving the intersection food, water and energy.
The program will create a physical platform that enables the development, testing, and validation of commercially viable water treatment technologies. The laboratory will allow researchers and industry partners to treat alternative water sources such as reclaimed water from wastewater treatment facilities, greywater, stormwater, and roof runoff.
This program would expand Catena Analytics – the software and technology development arm of the CSU One Water Solutions Institute – to provide software solutions for planning, management, and real-time control over water and environmental systems.
Researchers in Civil and Environmental Engineering will work with the Colorado Water Center to develop the next generation of state and regional water leaders.