Dr. Michelle Barron has had a tough three years. When the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a national emergency in the U.S. in March 2020, her job put her on the front lines.
But Barron, the senior medical director of infection prevention and control for UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital, and her team were up for the challenge, drawing on years of experience researching infectious diseases to improve public health outcomes.
Nothing demands a solution like a broken toilet.
That’s what Mae Rohrbach learned in the UCCS dorms in the fall of 2013.
“We had to flush it multiple times until we got it fixed. I thought: There is so much water being wasted,” says Mae, now a senior studying geography and environmental studies.
Most students would fix it and forget it. But Mae and a couple classmates from her “Sustainable Me” environmental studies course knew this problem deserved a longer look.
“We thought about the toilets,” she recalls. A lot.
What’s something about you that most people wouldn’t know if they were looking right at you?
Garrett Rose briefly considered the question and then wrote:
I get depressed a lot.
“I either didn’t know what to say or didn’t understand the question,” Garrett, now a senior at CU Boulder, recalls.
Sean Coetzee loved how media forensics—an emerging industry that uses technology to fight crime in the digital age—expanded the realm of what he did as a sound engineer. Yet in late 2013, one year away from completing his master’s at CU Denver in the Media Forensics program, Sean was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. He died only six weeks later at the age of 32.
“When I lost Sean I thought my life was over,” said his wife, Melissa Coetzee.
Nina Jean was a rancher’s daughter, who passed down the value of working hard and helping others. She was the kind of grandmother who let you pick out whatever sugary cereal you wanted in the grocery store and who baked an extra pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving so you could eat it for breakfast the next morning.