CSU wins prestigious award for land-grant universities

FORT COLLINS — Colorado State University has won a national Innovation and Economic Prosperity University award for its impact on economic development from the Association of Public Land-Grant Universities.

CSU received the honor in the “Place” category for its community-, social- and cultural-development work.

“This award is tremendous recognition for the university,” said CSU’s president Tony Frank, who serves on APLU’s board of directors and is a member of the group’s Commission on International Initiatives.

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“At Colorado State, we’ve made real investments in connecting our faculty, researchers and students across disciplines, and as a result, we’ve seen a growing wave of innovation that sweeps across the university and throughout our broader community. CSU is a place where we’re seeing innovation and economic prosperity because we’ve rolled up our sleeves and really committed ourselves as partners in an unusually inventive community,” Frank said.

Three case studies helped CSU win the award: the School of Global Environmental Sustainability, Envirofit and the Powerhouse Energy Campus, which is home to CSU’s Energy Institute.

The School of Global Environmental Sustainability serves as a hub integrating sustainability studies with the sciences, arts, humanities and business. Last year, 45 different majors were represented and more than two dozen interdisciplinary research teams were established, including all of CSU’s eight colleges.

Envirofit started at CSU’s Advanced Cookstoves Laboratory, attempting to solve a problem for roughly half the world’s population that cooks on small open-flame stoves. The goal was to make a stove that burns fuel more efficiently and releases a fraction of toxic emissions. Envirofit has sold more than a million low-emission cook stoves, created 2,400 jobs and prevented 17 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions to date, according to a university statement.

The Powerhouse Energy Campus has academic laboratories and is a showcase of clean-energy research and technology. The Energy Institute serves as a nucleus of research, education and outreach for CSU faculty, staff and students in five focus areas: access to energy, energy systems and devices, energy and water, energy policy and human behavior, and environmental impacts.

Other schools that won awards at the annual event held in Austin, Texas, were Arizona State University, Montana State University and Purdue University.

A land-grant college or university is an institution that has been designated by its state legislature or Congress to receive the benefits of the Morrill Acts of 1862, 1890 and 1994. The original mission of these institutions was to teach agriculture, military tactics and the mechanic arts as well as classical studies so members of the working classes could obtain a liberal, practical education. Over the years, land-grant status has implied several types of federal support, including funding.