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KU innovations selected for Rock Chalk Ready program
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas Center for Technology Commercialization has selected six promising faculty research projects for its inaugural Rock Chalk Ready program, a university-wide initiative designed to mature early-stage innovations and position them for commercialization success. Rock Chalk Ready is supported by a FORGE grant from the Kansas Department of Commerce.
KLETC expands public safety training with new site at KU Edwards Campus
OVERLAND PARK — The Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center (KLETC), a division of the University of Kansas, officially launched its new regional training location with an open house Aug. 15 at the KU Edwards Campus in Overland Park. The event celebrated a yearlong collaboration between KLETC and the KU Edwards Campus aimed at increasing access to high-quality law enforcement training in northeast Kansas.
KU researcher examines the ties between language and emotion
LAWRENCE — A new paper from a psychologist at the University of Kansas examines how language shapes our emotional experience of the world. Katie Hoemann, assistant professor of psychology at KU, recently published her findings in the peer-reviewed journal Communications Psychology.
Law scholar examines water law approaches around the world, analyzing how nations protect vital resource
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas environmental law expert has written a chapter comparing water laws around the world as part of a book that examines how different legal systems handle environmental law. The ways in which nations protect their water, theories they use to support their legal approach, types of water they regulate, how they control pollution and other considerations all vary, according to Robin Kundis Craig, Robert A. Schroeder Distinguished Professor of Law at KU.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Danya Turkmani, Office of Research, [email protected]
6 KU innovations selected for Rock Chalk Ready program
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas Center for Technology Commercialization (KUCTC) has selected six promising research projects for its inaugural Rock Chalk Ready program, a campuswide initiative designed to mature early-stage innovations and position them for commercialization success.
Supported by a FORGE grant from the Kansas Department of Commerce, Rock Chalk Ready reflects a collaborative One KU approach, inviting participation from innovators on KU’s Lawrence and Medical Center campuses. The program aims to de-risk technologies and business concepts by providing funding, guidance and connections to resources across KU’s innovation ecosystem.
“We were thrilled to see the enthusiastic response from our research community to the Rock Chalk Ready program,” said Cliff Michaels, director of KUCTC. “We expect these funds will help these innovators make meaningful advances over the next six to 12 months and remove some of the risks inherent in early-stage innovations.”
The program received 25 proposals from across the university, demonstrating strong interest and need for early-stage innovation support. A panel of internal and external experts reviewed proposals, with six ultimately selected for funding. Projects range from novel therapeutics and medical devices to industrial and agricultural innovations, highlighting the breadth of cutting-edge research happening at KU.
Funded Rock Chalk Ready projects:
Alan Allgeier – Technologies to Enhance Corn Oil Extraction During Ethanol Production. Allgeier is a professor of chemical & petroleum engineering.
Michael Hageman – Prodrug Formulations for Oral Testosterone Replacement Therapy. Hageman is the Valentino J. Stella Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.
Divya Kamath – A Novel Therapeutic for Multiple Sclerosis. Kamath is a research assistant professor of cancer biology.
Simon Patton – A Medical Device for Improved Hysterectomy Surgeries. Patton is a clinical assistant professor of obstetrics & gynecology.
Shyam Sathyamoorthi – Antifungal and Antibacterial Agents for Industrial Agricultural Use. Sathyamoorthi is an associate professor of medicinal chemistry.
Mark Shiflett – Novel Acids for Use in the Fuel and Detergent Industries. Shiflett is a Foundation Distinguished Professor of Chemical & Petroleum Engineering.
The Rock Chalk Ready program embodies a cross-campus partnership where KU Innovation Park, the KU Office of Economic Development and KUCTC all collaborated in securing the FORGE grant. KUMC’s research administration team is helping manage the initiative. The KU School of Business is also contributing by pairing business students with the selected teams to assist with market analysis and commercialization planning.
Innovators whose proposals were not selected received detailed feedback and encouragement to engage with other programs, such as KU Innovation Park’s SBIR/STTR Boot Camp or the Great Plains I-Corps Hub.
Rock Chalk Ready projects will continue through summer 2026.
Learn more about the FORGE grant and KU’s innovation ecosystem.
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KU spent $78.9 million across Kansas on research-related goods and services in FY23.
https://ku.edu/distinction
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Contact: George Taylor, Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center, 620-694-1447, [email protected]
KLETC expands public safety training with new site at KU Edwards Campus
OVERLAND PARK — The Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center (KLETC), a division of the University of Kansas, officially launched its new regional training location with an open house Aug. 15 at the KU Edwards Campus in Overland Park.
Law enforcement professionals from across Kansas toured newly renovated classrooms, tested updated technology and met KLETC staff now based at the Overland Park location. The event celebrated a yearlong collaboration between KLETC and the KU Edwards Campus aimed at increasing access to high-quality law enforcement training in northeast Kansas.
University of Kansas Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Barbara Bichelmeyer attended the open house and praised the initiative’s alignment with KU’s statewide service mission.
“This really meets a need where more people can get quality training without having to spend a ton of money for travel, hotels and per diem when they can stay in their own area,” said Amy Osburn, assistant director of KLETC.
KLETC’s Information Technology department spent the last several months updating four classrooms with the same instructional tools found at the Yoder main campus, ensuring consistent learning experience across locations. The classrooms also received new desks, paint and carpeting to refresh the environment for incoming students.
“This is an exciting next step for KLETC,” said Darin Beck, vice provost of KLETC and director of police training for the state of Kansas. “It’s an investment in the future of law enforcement, and it’s an investment in the state of Kansas.”
KLETC staff based at the KU Edwards Campus include Osburn, Education Program Coordinator Thomas Hayselden and Jonathan Morris, associate director of KU’s Center for Public Safety Leadership (CPSL).
Continuing education classes will be taught out of the new classrooms at the KU Edwards Campus. The site will also host courses from CPSL, such as the Law Enforcement Leadership Academy – Command School. These programs are designed to support career advancement for officers and expand leadership capacity across Kansas law enforcement agencies.
Stuart Day, dean of the KU Edwards Campus and School of Professional Studies, said the new KLETC presence strengthens the campus’s role as a public service hub.
“The KU Edwards Campus is a critical partner with Overland Park, Johnson County, the K.C. metro and the state of Kansas,” Day said. “Having a stronger KLETC presence on campus brings new colleagues into the fold and enhances services to our constituencies. It also offers great opportunities for collaboration, for example, with the School of Social Welfare.”
KLETC now operates its main campus in Yoder and four regional training sites in Dodge City, Hays, Parsons and Overland Park, supporting its statewide commitment to quality, accessible law enforcement education.
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KU provides fire, rescue and law enforcement training across Kansas.
https://ku.edu/distinction
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected]
KU researcher examines the ties between language and emotion
LAWRENCE — A new paper from a psychologist at the University of Kansas examines how language shapes our emotional experience of the world. Katie Hoemann, assistant professor of psychology at KU, recently published her findings in the peer-reviewed journal Communications Psychology.
“We know from research that different languages have different vocabularies for emotion,” Hoemann said. “A lot of that research focuses on individual words — emotion vocabularies — or whether you can tell how good or bad someone feels from the language they use. What we haven’t looked at in depth is how we can see other aspects of people’s emotional experience beyond just which emotion they’re feeling or how good or bad they feel. What kinds of things are people paying attention to? What kinds of evaluations are they making about their environment? How do they see themselves situated with regard to the unfolding events?”
Hoemann’s co-authors include Yeasle Lee, Batja Mesquita, Èvelyne Dussault and Dirk Geeraerts, all from KU Leuven in Belgium; Simon Devylder from UiT, the Arctic University of Norway; and Lyle Ungar from the University of Pennsylvania.
Their paper surveyed existing research on language and emotion from a range of academic fields and suggests a framework for further study.
“It’s a set of proposals for the scientific community, a kind of synthesis across different areas of research,” Hoemann said. “A lot of the work we cite comes from psychology, linguistics and computer science. The idea is to take what we know about language as a system for scaffolding and communicating our experience and apply that to new directions in emotion science.”
Based on their deep dive into research on language and emotion, Hoemann and her colleagues propose a new paradigm for future investigations: distributing the experience of language and emotion into three aspects — “attention,” “construal” and “appraisal.”
“We wanted to structure it around three dimensions because it made sense to us,” Hoemann said. “The first is attention — what people are paying attention to. If I talk about the weather versus what I ate for lunch, that tells you what’s on my mind.”
The researchers define the second feature, construal, as “the conceptual vantage point which from events are viewed.”
“Construal is more about the perspective you take,” said the KU researcher. “If attention is what you’re looking at, construal is how you’re looking at it. Are you bringing something close, distancing yourself from it, speaking in the present or past tense, or referring to yourself in the second or third person?”
Last, the team of researchers said the experience of language and emotion should be assessed via “appraisal,” or the judging of events.
“Appraisals are the dimensional evaluations people make about their experience, especially how pleasant or unpleasant it is,” Hoemann said. “These are foundational to emotion theory and also present in language. They help us infer how people are experiencing themselves or their circumstances.”
Through study of these three facets, Hoemann and her co-authors argue a more productive understanding of language and emotion is possible.
“I don’t think anyone has a definitive answer to whether language reveals or creates our mindset,” Hoemann said. “It’s both. Language provisions us with a set of tools we can use, and those tools shape our attentional patterns over time. But we don’t just choose tools randomly. We use language in ways that help us affiliate with others and accomplish our goals.”
Hoemann has a research interest in emotions that defy easy description with language.
“There’s certainly a way in which having a word for a feeling makes it a kind of common currency,” she said. “But we can also recognize feelings that don’t have words. We might say, ‘Have you ever felt like this?’ and then describe a situation. Still, having a single word or phrase makes that much more efficient.”
Indeed, for years the KU researcher maintained a database of foreign words communicating “untranslatable emotions.”
“These are emotions that don’t have direct equivalents in English,” Hoemann said. “Of course that’s a limited perspective, because you could do that with any source and target language. People have written books cataloging invented words, historical emotion terms or culturally specific emotion vocabulary. The existence of those words shows how powerful labeling is in shaping how we talk about — and maybe how we experience — emotion.”
The authors use the term “meaning making” to describe how people construct their experiences of the world, including emotion.
“Meaning-making is about categorizing experience — taking in all the sensory and psychological information available and organizing it into something you can describe or recognize,” Hoemann said. “Our experiential space isn’t evenly distributed. Some experiences happen more frequently or tend to co-occur with certain features. These patterns act like magnets, pulling experiences into familiar categories.”
Hoemann joined KU’s social-psychology faculty a year ago, having previously studied anthropology and linguistics. She said her academic niche could be dubbed “emotional psychology.”
“Emotion and language are both social tools,” she said. “The work I do is mostly fundamental science about what emotion is, how to define and measure it, and what it can tell us about the human mind.”
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A study by global analytics firm Lightcast quantifies
KU’s annual statewide impact at $7.8 billion.
https://economicdevelopment.ku.edu/impact
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected]
Law scholar examines water law approaches around the world, analyzing how nations protect vital resource
LAWRENCE — Every nation on Earth relies on water. But how those nations access and protect their water varies widely. A University of Kansas environmental law expert has written a chapter comparing water law around the world as part of a book that examines how different legal systems handle environmental law.
Robin Kundis Craig, Robert A. Schroeder Distinguished Professor of Law at KU, wrote “Comparing approaches to water quality law,” a chapter in “Comparative Environmental Law,” edited by Tseming Yang of Santa Clara University, Anastasia Telesetsky of California Polytechnic State University and Sara Phillips of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Part of the Research Handbooks in Comparative Law Series, it was published by Edward Elgar Publishing.
The ways in which nations protect their water, theories they use to support their legal approach, types of water they regulate, how they control pollution and other considerations all vary, according to the KU Law researcher.
“In the transnational sense, the norm has always been protecting drinking water. Whatever else you do with water quality, protect the water you drink,” Craig said. “I went for categorizing the basic structural decisions nations make, like do they try to regulate ambient water quality, regulate pollution or do both, like we do here in the U.S.”
Throughout the chapter, Craig cites examples of nations that use a source-based approach, or those who regulate people, businesses and entities that pollute water, and examines subdivisions of water regulation such as what types of water nations regulate, like surface, groundwater or oceans. Similarly, the author examines different methods of enforcement and how nations hold violators accountable as well as the capacity needed to do so.
Craig’s chapter spans the globe, examining legal approaches in the European Union, China, India, pan-Central and South American nations, pan-African nations, Japan, Russia and Islamic regions. While there are unique approaches by nation and region, there are some universal principles.
Right to water
“We now have the human right to water, which is a United Nations policy. A lot of countries say they follow it, but how closely they do and how they apply it differs,” Craig said. “It’s a positive right, so someone has to be there to provide the right to you, and it’s been a little more difficult to implement than some negative rights, like the right to free speech, which holds that the government cannot take action against you for your speech.”
The author analyzes how international water law has trended toward a source-based permit regulation system in which a government determines who can access water at a source and how an ambient water protection approach is more difficult, requires more legal capacity and money to operate.
Comparative environmental law
Craig, who has written extensively on water law and is part of a team working to generate renewable energy, save water and conserve land across California, said the book is a good primer in comparative law and can be beneficial for policymakers or anyone interested in environmental law.
“If somebody is doing something different than you, it’s always worth asking if they are getting better results for less money — or if they are incorporating new values that we should factor into our law,” Craig said. “Or are they getting good results, but at a prohibitive cost? Plus, it’s always good in the law just to know what your options are. It can be a very pragmatic way to look at it, especially if a nation is at a point where they can change or need to change.”
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