Faces of Innovation honors CC alumni, students, and faculty who embody the innovative and adventurous spirit of Colorado College with creativity and collaborative ideas. True liberal-arts thinkers, they make connections across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences. They are addressing some of the world’s most challenging problems, delighting with artful approaches, and always surprising us

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Watch video interviews of these Faces of Innovation honorees.

Habiba Vaghoo

The creative process inherent in the sciences like chemistry may not be immediately apparent. Colorado College Professor of Chemistry Habiba Vaghoo uses her interest in cooking and food to reveal that creativity to students in her chemistry classes, demonstrating chemical processes and interactions by making recipes.

Kagen Sound ’00

At the beginning of a design class with CC Art Professor Carl Reed, Kagen Sound asked if, instead of doing the planned class projects, he could devote the whole class to an idea that he had been mulling since middle school — creating an innovative wooden puzzle box. Sound now makes a living creating increasingly intricate, interlocking wooden puzzle boxes that push the limits of the material.

Meg O’Neill MAT ’13

Master’s in Teaching graduate Meg O’Neill is a seventh-grade science teacher at an international school whose students are primarily refugees fleeing from areas of conflict around the world. “There is no road map” for what she does, she says, so she gets to create the map. Recently, for example, she took 43 students from 16 different countries on a camping trip in southern Utah where they got to see what they were learning about in her science classroom.

Terry Winograd ’66

As professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University and founding faculty member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, Terry Winograd has mentored many tech entrepreneurs whose innovations have changed the world. Winograd says his early interest in artificial intelligence gradually shifted over the years as he realized that the goal should not be to make computers that replace people, but rather to figure out how to make computers be better at working with people.

Anubrat Prasai ’17 and Soeren Walls ’17

Sharing ideas in collaboration with people who are totally different from you. That concept, learned and honed at CC, was key to Anubrat Prasai’s and Soeren Walls’ ability to envision, research, and produce an app that helps theatre actors learn their lines.