TEDxMileHigh
Could a Tattoo Help You Stay Healthy?
Carson's TEDx talk on the future of tattoos was featured on the homepage of TED.com. He also wrote The Rise of Smart Tattoos for the TEDxMileHigh blog.
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Beyond the lab
Outreach
Our work lives in tattoo studios, museums, libraries and podcasts as much as it does in journals. Talking about it well is part of the job.
Carson has given 48 invited talks and the lab regularly hosts K–12 students, apprentices and visiting researchers.
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CU NEXT, New York City
Bufftalk
A Bufftalk — CU's homegrown version of a TED talk — given to alumni, students, parents and friends at the award-winning NEXT event in New York City.
me Convention, Frankfurt
Keynote on tech tattoos
A keynote at the me Convention, a future-focused technology conference organised by SXSW and Mercedes-Benz.
Vesterheim Museum, Decorah, Iowa
Tattoo: Identity Through Ink
Our nano-engineered tattoos were featured in this exhibit from June 2019 to April 2020. Carson gave the final lecture of the autumn series in cooperation with the Scandinavian Studies and Chemistry departments at Luther College, his alma mater.
Belmar Library, Lakewood
Teen Science Café
A small group of teenagers spent an afternoon learning about smart tattoos — and tattooing bananas with our thermochromic and photochromic inks.
CU Boulder Engineering Center
Art pop-up: tattoo a fruit
Students wandering through the engineering center stopped to try their hand at tattooing while learning about our work on tattoo innovation.
University of Zurich
Department of Chemistry webinar
Carson gave the first of a new webinar series hosted by the Chemistry Department at the University of Zurich.
Association of Food and Drug Officials
Tattoo safety and the FDA
No pigment has ever been FDA-approved for tattoo inks or permanent makeup, despite inks being regulated as cosmetics. Carson works with the AFDO Body Art Committee on the first Colour Additive Petition for tattoo inks — a long process that, if successful, would help protect hundreds of millions of people who get tattooed.
The Disruptors podcast
Tech tattoos, molecular machines and the future
A long-form conversation about where nanotechnology and the body meet.
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Working with students
The lab has mentored more than thirty undergraduates, several of whom stayed on for graduate degrees, along with high school students through CU Science Discovery and apprentices through the Discovery Learning programme. In 2024, Ramshreyas Mangu and Samuel Scott spent a summer becoming experts at fabricating shape-specific microgels and orchestrating their self-assembly.
We have also brought demonstrations into schools — Femke, Neely and Aseem built a large-scale demonstration of how slide-ring polymers dissipate stress for 180 middle schoolers at the Early Engineering Exposure fair.