News and Events

The University of Utah’s first-ever mining engineering mine rescue team won big at the 2020 Society of Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration Engineers (SME) annual conference in late February. The U led in the first aid and breathing apparatus categories, and took the overall competition. Four other more experienced mining schools participated in the event, so the U’s win took SME attendees by surprise. For the competitors, the victory was the result of lots of hard work and tenacity. The winners were Victor Harrell (trainer), Travis Brammer, Rebecca Ray, Stephen Hall, Jack Peterson, Paige Epsten, and Amy Richens.

For many students, the University of Utah is a second home. They eat, sleep, study, and even work here. In fact, one in four undergraduates (about 6,000 students) are employed in one way or another by the U. These jobs not only help students pay the bills but also help get them on a faster track to graduation. Compared to their counterparts, students who are employed through campus jobs are about 12 percent more likely to graduate within six years or less. From fish feeders to salt enthusiasts, meet some of our students with the most unusual, interesting, and rewarding jobs that leave them remarking, “Wow, they pay me to do this!”

Soon after Salt Lake City stopped shaking March 18 from its strongest earthquake on record, Amir Allam, a University of Utah seismologist, knew he had to get busy if he hoped to closely study the hundreds of aftershocks he knew would follow the 7:09 a.m. jolt.

For more than five years, University of Utah air quality sensors have hitched rides on TRAX light rail trains, scanning air pollution along the train’s Red and Green Lines. Now the study, once a passion project of U researchers, has become a state-funded long-term observatory, with an additional sensor on the Blue Line into Sandy and Draper and additional insights into the events that impact the Salt Lake Valley’s air, including summer fireworks and winter inversions.

A remarkable new species of meat-eating dinosaur has been unveiled at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Paleontologists unearthed the first specimen in early 1990s in Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah. The huge carnivore inhabited the flood plains of western North America during the Late Jurassic Period, between 157-152 million years ago, making it the geologically oldest species of Allosaurus, predating the more well-known state fossil of Utah, Allosaurus fragilis. The newly named dinosaur Allosaurus jimmadseni, was announced today in the open-access scientific journal PeerJ.