The canning jar containing a quart of murky, brownish-yellow water sits at the front of the room. The water has been disinfected with iodine and is unquestionably unappealing. “If anyone wants to try it, we’ve got cups,” Jason Young calls out to the 50 or so investors, inventors, entrepreneurs, and industry executives gathered to hear about some of the latest technologies discovered and developed at the University of Utah.

No one grabs a paper cup from the stack for a drink of the cloudy water. But there is plenty of interest in an invention that will make iodine-treated drinking water unnecessary. Young BS’01 MD’10, a business development manager with the University of Utah’s Technology and Venture Commercialization (TVC) office, passes around a prototype of the solar-powered water purification device. No bigger than a cell phone, the white plastic rectangle contains a maze-like framework holding a coiled metal wire arrayed with microscopic titanium dioxide nanotubes. Using ultraviolet light to produce free radicals, the device can decontaminate a liter of water in five minutes. It weighs about one ounce and is expected to retail for around $40.

Ninghai Su, left, a U postdoctoral researcher, and Megan Bulte, an undergraduate student, run tests on Nanoxene, a nanocomposite that may change the way homes are heated.

The water purifier was invented a year ago by Krista Carlson, a research associate with the U’s Metallurgical Engineering Department, and Swomitra Mohanty, a research assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and they are looking for help to get it to market through their company SolaPur. More than a hundred inventions such as their water purifier are disclosed each year at the University, and more than a dozen start-up companies are formed annually to market them. Assisting them is the U’s Technology and Venture Commercialization office. Since 1967, that office and its precursors have been responsible for managing all of the University’s intellectual assets, as well as those of its medical centers and hospitals, the Huntsman Cancer Institute, and ARUP Laboratories. The technology commercialization office has helped launch leading companies such as Myriad Genetics, BioFire Diagnostics, and Anesta, as well as hundreds of lesser-known, smaller start-ups.

Each year, the U office manages dozens of new patents and licenses, invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in technology development, and brings to the mainstream inventions that range from a compound that could prove to be the next major class of antibiotic to a new type of radiant floor heating. In the last 45 years, 5,500 inventions have been disclosed by researchers and faculty at the University of Utah, and 230 spin-off companies have been launched from those technologies.

“If you think about a modern university, there are traditionally two really big legs of a stool: teaching and research; and those are really important,” says Bryan Ritchie, who has led the University’s TVC office since 2011 as the U’s associate vice president for research commercialization. “What the U has done is legitimize a third leg of the stool, which is commercialization.”

Bryan Ritchie, whose office is in Research Park at the University of Utah, has been the University’s associate vice president for research commercialization since 2011.

Like its counterparts at most universities across the country, the U office has historically handled “technology transfer” and been responsible for licensing inventions to existing companies and start-ups. At that point, it was the licensees’ job to develop and ultimately commercialize the technology. During the past three years, however, the U office has been focusing on building value for inventors and the University through not only licensing and patenting intellectual property but building sustainable ventures and finding viable markets for those inventions. Since the office’s inception in 1967, 21 faculty members have become millionaires by commercializing their inventions, including 15 or 16 in the last decade, and revenue back to the U from the companies and technologies totals tens of millions of dollars each year. “We’re not just transferring but also commercializing and creating ventures,” Ritchie says. “I think we’re really leading the country in how this happens.”

Because the University owns all intellectual property at the U, faculty and researchers must disclose their inventions to the U Technology and Venture Commercialization office. The University does not own the intellectual property of student inventors, so their work with the TVC office is optional. The office currently assists about five to 10 student-led companies. It also works closely with the U’s David Eccles School of Business, which just this fall was ranked by Princeton Review as a top-25 school for entrepreneurship for the fourth straight year. The U tech commercialization office collaborates, too, with the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, which broke ground in October on the new Lassonde Studios student center. Each year, about 40 students also work with the TVC office as interns who assist in the commercialization process.

U Technology Commercialization Numbers

Source: U Technology and Venture Commercialization Office

Darrell M. West, founding director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit public policy organization, applauds the U’s focus on giving faculty the tools they need to create a successful business around their inventions. “That’s where faculty members need help,” he says. “Professors are great coming up with ideas, but it’s hard for them to develop a business and find capital and bring their ideas to market.” Like the U, universities across the country are recognizing that successfully commercializing technologies goes beyond tracking the number of patents filed and start-ups launched each year, he says. “Universities are putting much more effort into commercialization. They know there is value in what is being created by faculty and students.” Commercializing technologies also brings money. “Almost every university is looking for new revenue sources,” West says. “Research and development is a big growth area.”

The U has consistently ranked near the top among universities in the United States for the number of spin-off companies it has created, according to the Association of University Technology Managers. In 2010, the U ranked first in the country, along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in creating new start-up companies around research-based inventions, and it was first again in 2011. But the recognition also came with questions about whether the University was starting companies that would last, and Ritchie notes that only 3.4 percent of inventions at the U have produced revenue and just .7 percent have returned more than $1 million to the University.

“At some level, I do think it is important that we are a leader in start-ups, but we don’t have to be No. 1,” Ritchie says. “If we’re in the top five, I’m really pretty happy. It’s only one metric; it’s only one measurement. It’s an important one, but by itself, it doesn’t mean all that much because we could start a hundred companies that weren’t worth anything, and who cares, right? So we do want to start a lot of companies, but we want to start a lot of good companies. We want to create the foundation for these companies to succeed.”

Cynthia Furse, the University of Utah’s associate vice president for research, stands in an electromagnetic anechoic chamber for measuring antennas, at the U’s College of Engineering, where she is a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

The focus is now less on the number of start-ups and more on the quality of management, investment, and structure of the start-up, he says. The University’s new vision also came with a new name. Formerly the Technology Commercialization Office, TCO became TVC last year to emphasize its dedication to building ventures.

Past practice too often shelved inventions after they were disclosed, and that was the end, Ritchie says. Now, after an invention is disclosed, his office makes contact with the inventor within two weeks and begins assessing the technology, its possible applications, and options for commercializing it. The office then helps protect the intellectual property by completing patent filings. Next, staff members gather feedback from experts and define milestones to help bring the invention to market.

Ritchie also has started an “engine process” at the U. Every eight weeks, the Technology and Venture Commercialization office brings in about 100 industry executives, entrepreneurs, and private investors from across the country to attend “engine meetings.” There, researchers and inventors present their latest inventions and technologies. The company executives sometimes decide one of the inventions is worth their investment, but mostly they advise TVC staff on how to assess the potential of the technology, and they aid with networking and identifying markets. The business leaders even advise on whether an invention is worth continued investment from the TVC office. Last year, the office put more than $500,000 into University of Utah technologies for development.

Bradley Collings, a businessman who has launched several of his own information technology and records storage companies, is a regular at the engine meetings. Collings, who lives in South Jordan, Utah, began attending after TVC leaders invited him, because he thought it would be a good networking outlet. He now volunteers tens of hours each week as a business mentor to faculty members and TVC staff. The thrill of starting up a company and moving inventions from lab to market keeps him coming back, he says. “Don’t kid yourself: There are some amazing technologies coming out of the University, and I think people are recognizing that.”

The “engine process” also is used to identify inventions and technologies that have no chance at commercialization, Ritchie says. “Some people see us as a gardener over here, and maybe that’s true to some degree, but we’re also an executioner. We want to make sure we’re not putting resources and time into things that don’t have an opportunity, and we want to learn that as fast as we can.”

Ritchie knows firsthand the intricacies of creating a company. He began his career in the computer industry, developing products for companies including Iomega, Megahertz, and Novell. Fluent in Thai and Laotian, he spent a year in Asia working under a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. He also owned and sold two of his own companies, both in the computer industry. “My first company was wildly successful and took off, just exploded. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this entrepreneurship thing is pretty easy.’ My second company was a slog,” says Ritchie, who holds an MBA from Brigham Young University and a doctorate in political economy from Emory University. “It was so hard, and we ended up exiting and selling, but not in a way that made us very much money. I learned far more from the second venture than I did from the first.”

After launching his companies, Ritchie worked as an economics professor at Michigan State University for a decade before coming to the U. He has a patent pending at Michigan State for technology he invented to convert biomass into alternative energy and is currently going through that institution’s technology transfer process. “Michigan State is like most universities. They’re almost waiting for a lucky bounce of the ball to have someone come in and pick it up.”

Cynthia Furse BS’86 MS’88 PhD’94, associate vice president for research at the U and a professor of electrical and computer engineering, agrees that the TVC office’s work is much different than what other universities are doing. “I originally had this delusion, and it is a delusion, that the scientist takes their idea and tosses it over the fence to the business community, who then markets it,” says Furse, who started her own company, LiveWire Innovation, in 2002. “That’s a brilliant idea, but it doesn’t work. So you have to do a combination of teaching the technologists about business and teaching the business side about technology, and that’s when you see how it starts fitting together.”

Dustin Williams, left, a U professor of orthopedics, and Ryan Looper, an associate professor of chemistry, worked with the Technology and Venture Commercialization office to create a company to market their antimicrobial compounds.

Furse is working with TVC to find markets for LiveWire, which produces handheld devices that detect faults in electrical wires. The technology is replacing outdated, cumbersome, and sometimes dangerous equipment in mines and could be used by the airline industry to find faulty wiring in planes.

Another start-up company the TVC office is assisting, Curza, was created last year to commercialize antimicrobial research by Dustin Williams PhD’12, a U research professor of orthopedics, and Ryan Looper, U associate professor of chemistry. Curza is in the process of commercializing more than 130 classes of the chemical compounds that kill, disperse, and inhibit growth of bacterial biofilms, including those that have developed antibiotic resistance. The researchers have secured two patents and 12 provisional patents and are working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prepare for clinical trials. The hope is that the compounds can be used in an ointment to treat serious wounds, such as diabetic foot ulcers or military injuries. The compounds could also be used in industrial settings to disperse bacteria buildup.

Feng Liu, chair of the U’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is working with the TVC office to commercialize Nanoxene, a multi-component nanocomposite he discovered that may change the way homes are heated. The substance graphene is a key ingredient of the material, which Liu paints onto plastic sheets that have electrodes on each end to conduct heat. The sheets can be laid under flooring to provide radiant heating. Liu has received a provisional patent and hopes to market his technology in the next two years to the high-end home market through his new company, Life-E.

SolaPur’s Carlson and Mohanty expect to begin taking orders for their water purification device next July, and plan to market it to backpackers and other outdoor enthusiasts. The purifier was a huge hit at last year’s Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City, where they showed a prototype. The solar device also may eventually be used on a larger scale to help in developing nations that lack ready sources of clean drinking water.

At the recent U meeting where the device was presented to investors and industry leaders, Young, from the U’s Technology and Venture Commercialization office, noted that it could be very appealing to the 8.7 million backpackers in the United States who make up an estimated $435 million market, or to anyone for that matter who doesn’t like the taste of iodine. At the end of his pitch, he pointed once again to the jar of discolored liquid. “Anyone thirsty? We still have this water up here.”

–Kim M. Horiuchi is an associate editor of Continuum.

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If you run a regional theater in America, you can sometimes find yourself in trouble. Not trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P and stands for pool, because that would be The Music Man, which is always a safe bet. No, we’re talking about trouble that can make you lose season subscribers.

Which brings us to the stage of Pioneer Theatre Company at the University of Utah, where one afternoon this past fall artistic director Karen Azenberg sat fielding questions from a talkback audience that had just seen The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which Azenberg also directed. The funny, softhearted musical includes a song in which a middle-school speller bemoans his “unfortunate erection” as he waits his turn at the microphone. At PTC, though, a milder version of the song, this one called “My Unfortunate Distraction,” was used for all but two shows of the two-week run. “Why?” wondered an audience member in row D.

Azenberg smiled and jumped right in with a little lesson on the politics of theater. The musical’s lyricist, she explained, provided two versions of the script. So at PTC, where many season-ticket holders expect a tame theater experience, she mostly opted for the “distraction” version. Still, she pointed out, there were many audience members who felt just as strongly that Pioneer should have used the “less mild” version. Just the week before, in fact, a subscriber had called to say he was giving back all his future tickets in protest.

Now in her third season as artistic director of PTC, Azenberg knows that if you run a big theater in a place like Salt Lake City, sometimes you’re caught in the middle, trying to please everyone.

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Azenberg is a New Yorker to her core but is no stranger to American regional theater, having worked as a freelance choreographer and director for three decades in 28 states. When she heard that Pioneer Theatre Company’s artistic director Charles Morey would be retiring after a 25-year career, she put her name in the running, along with nearly 100 other applicants.

Azenberg was chosen in 2011 and officially took the reins the next summer. She was the unanimous choice, says Chris Lino, PTC’s managing director, who sat on the selection committee. Azenberg was well known to the PTC staff because she had been guest director and choreographer of Rent, Next to Normal, and Miss Saigon, and choreographer of the sell-out Les Miz in 2007.

Karen Azenberg works with performers in a Pioneer Theatre Company rehearsal for The Rocky Horror Show.

“We knew how smart she was,” says Lino. “Plus she knew every director in the country, including the up-and-coming directors, and that was very attractive to us.” At the time, Azenberg was president of the board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, the national union for her crafts. She currently serves on the advisory board and is also a board member of the New York Musical Theatre Festival, a launching pad for new musicals.

“A lot of the applicants, on paper you’d think this is your dream candidate,” Lino says. (Some, in fact, had worked as artistic directors at well-known theaters, and Azenberg had never run a theater of any size.) “But none of them matched what Karen brought to the table.”

David Ivers, artistic director of the Utah Shakespeare Festival, who directed One Man, Two Guvnors at PTC this year, describes Azenberg this way: “The thing that sets her apart is she has theater in her DNA. She has in her bones an innate understanding of how the theater world works”—including years of tagging along with her father.

Emanuel “Manny” Azenberg began his career as company manager for touring and Broadway shows, and later was producer of most of Neil Simon’s plays, as well as producer or general manager for blockbusters including Rent, George M!, and Sunday in the Park with George. Ten of the plays he has either produced or managed have won Tony Awards, and in 2012 Azenberg himself won a “Lifetime Achievement in Theatre” Tony.

Long before there were take-your-daughter-to-work days, Manny took little Karen to the theater (and also sometimes to watch him play softball with Robert Redford in the Broadway Show League). “You sit there,” her dad would instruct her, and so from a chair backstage she would watch the show behind the show.

Pioneer Memorial Theatre is affiliated with the University of Utah’s College of Fine Arts.

“How I work here,” she says about her life now at PTC, “is how I perceive he worked; it’s my model.” That means dropping in every day to chat with scenic carpenters and the costume shop, and wanting to know all the details about lighting and sound boards and props. But Manny Azenberg told his daughter over and over: “Don’t go into theater.”

“As a kid,” she says, “this is how I translated ‘Don’t go into theater’: Don’t be an actor. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll be a dancer!’” Of course she meant dancing in musical theater, and the showdown came when it was time to go to college.

“There were lots of tears, and me saying ‘I can’t just dance three times a week! I have to dance all day every day!’ ” She ended up majoring in dance at New York University, and she wonders now if her father’s opposition was a kind of test, to see if she had the drive to make it in a business that can be brutal.

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You might think that the daughter of a Broadway producer would have an easy entrée to Broadway. “Oh, no,” she says. “He hates nepotism… Dad’s theory is, anything you achieve, you achieve on your own.”

So he gave her a job answering phones in his office, which helped pay the bills as she auditioned for dance roles. In her early 20s, she got her first choreography job, in a summer stock theater in Connecticut. Then her work was noticed at a community theater in Manhattan, and from that came a chance to choreograph a revue at the Smithsonian, and that led to a gig choreographing Sweeney Todd at Michigan Opera Theatre, and the next year, at age 24, choreographing West Side Story.

But there were also plenty of dry periods. And this is where being Manny Azenberg’s daughter did get her a foot in the door. When one of his shows moved to Broadway and in a pinch they needed an assistant stage manager, they hired her because they knew she was adept at coordinating sound, lighting, and scene-change cues for performances. And from there came other offers, including Brighton Beach Memoirs and Master Harold and the Boys.

“Pay her minimum,” Manny insisted.

Her next big break came in 1989 when she was choreographing Guys and Dolls at Indiana Repertory Theatre. “You think like a director,” the artistic director told her, and the next year he offered her a job directing. “Like many things, I thought, ‘Oh, I can do that,’ and so I did,” Azenberg remembers. “I was winging it.” Later, that same self-confidence led her to apply for the artistic director job at Pioneer Theatre Company.

The Utah job felt like a once-in-a-lifetime chance. But it also meant that her husband, Augie Mericola, would have to give up his job as head of props for the Broadway company of Wicked. And it meant uprooting their son and daughter, then 12 and 15. On the other hand, their home was an hour commute into Manhattan for Augie, and her job as a freelance choreographer and director meant being gone for long stretches of time. On the other other hand, her daughter hated the idea of moving so much that she offered to live in their car in the garage of their house. In the end, though, Utah won out.

“There are a lot of theaters in the U.S., but not of this size, with this kind of facility, with this kind of financial stability,” Azenberg explains.

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Like her favorite musicals, Azenberg is high-voltage and straightforward. “You always know where you stand with her, which is a rarity in the theater,” says the Shakespeare Festival’s Ivers. Adds PTC resident scenic designer George Maxwell: “She’s very precise, and she doesn’t give up until she gets what she wants.”

A person driven like that can sometimes get stressed out, of course. “I have a barometer of how stressed she is by her hair,” says PTC managing director Lino. “It has its own emotional life.”

PTC runs a “very lean ship,” says Lino. “Our peers—large middle-America theaters with at least a $4 million budget—all have larger budgets but don’t produce work as big as ours. A greater percentage of our operating budget goes into what you see on stage.” (The 932-seat theater is affiliated with the University of Utah’s College of Fine Arts but gets no direct funding from the U.) “Karen knows how to stick to a budget,” Lino adds, “because she instinctively prioritizes. Not every artistic director can also think like a producer.”

Azenberg travels back to New York seven or eight times a year, to do auditions for PTC shows (most hires are New York actors, although she also auditions in Salt Lake and hires a fair number of locals), and to see what’s new on Broadway and off—a requirement since she’s a Tony Awards voter. That also puts her in the loop for what new plays and musicals might be a good fit for PTC.

Karen Azenberg recently started a new play-development reading series at Pioneer Theatre Company, called Play-by-Play.

In sheer volume of potential audience members, Pioneer’s biggest rival is Broadway Across America and the “Broadway-style” 2,500-seat mega-theater now under construction three miles away in downtown Salt Lake City. Here’s how Azenberg and Lino explain the difference between the two venues: The caliber of the actors is equal, but PTC’s stage design, costuming, and other crews are Utahns who pay Utah taxes; the tickets are less than half the price; and, says Azenberg, “our productions are staged for this theater and this cast, so everything is fresh for this production.” Of course, convincing Utahns to pick PTC over the tour is a hard sell, especially when the tour is Wicked or The Book of Mormon.

Would Pioneer Theatre Company ever stage the irreverent, award-winning Book of Mormon? The theater chose not to stage Tony Kushner’s Angels in America two decades ago. “There was no way we could do that in this theater, named after the pioneers, and not have a large part of our audience think we were attacking them,” Lino recalls. Azenberg says she figures that by the time the rights to The Book of Mormon become available for regional theaters, she’ll “be sitting in an old-age home somewhere.”

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Theater audiences in general are a graying lot. But the average age of season-ticket holders at PTC has dropped from 65 to 55 in the past 10 years, and from 55 to 45 for single-ticket sales—perhaps because, over the years, the shows have incrementally included newer works, not just the old chestnuts.

Azenberg strives for a balance in each theater season: mysteries and musicals, comedies and drama, familiar and surprising. “I like doing fun and good and eclectic theater,” she says. But she knows “not everyone is going to like everything.” Sometimes there are nasty letters and phone calls.

During her second season, some audience members called and wrote to say they had blanched at the interracial casting of Elf: The Musical. And there was a flap over a three-second gay kiss in the murder mystery Deathtrap. (Twenty years ago, PTC became one of the first big regional theaters to institute a “content advisory,” but to have warned the audience about this kiss would have been a plot spoiler, Azenberg says.) “I’m not producing these plays and musicals to offend people,” she adds. “I’m trying to cover as wide a range of content as possible.”

To reach newer audiences, Azenberg has also instituted “concert” performances (including the recent scaled-down version of the camp musical The Rocky Horror Show) and a new-play-development reading series, Play-by-Play—no sets, no costumes, just actors reading from scripts she has culled from the hundreds sent to her from playwrights across the United States.

She hopes Play-by-Play will draw a new Utah audience. But she also knows that new play development can boost Pioneer’s standing among actors, directors, and writers nationwide, as PTC launches world premieres that might have a chance of making their way to New York because of Azenberg’s connections. “When I arrived, Pioneer Theatre Company had a wonderful but quiet reputation—which is starting to change,” she says. “Now we are still wonderful, but a little more raucous.”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City freelance journalist and playwright and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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Tim Garrett and a friend went skiing one day during a Washington snowstorm. They were sitting on the ski lift when the friend, a meteorologist, pointed out how abruptly the snowflakes that were landing on their ski clothes changed shape and size. Garrett, who was then a graduate student in atmospheric physics at the University of Washington, hadn’t thought much before about the crystals’ variations. But the moment of realization stuck with him in the following days. “I remember being on the lift and thinking how cool, how great it would be to study snowflakes in a ski resort,” says Garrett, who is now an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah.

As a graduate student, Garrett had already participated in a large study of snow and ice crystals in the Arctic, with a group of scientists based in Barrow, Alaska. They had gathered data on clouds that they observed from the air in a turboprop that flew hundreds of miles over the Arctic Ocean from Barrow to a Canadian research icebreaker. The experience became part of Garrett’s doctoral thesis on how ice crystals and snowflakes interact with light, and how those processes can help determine how much solar radiation is reflected back into space.

This snowflake’s rounded shape is due to riming. (Photo courtesy Tim Garrett)

Garrett did a two-year fellowship at Princeton University after graduate school and then came in 2002 to the University of Utah, where he soon realized that an outdoor laboratory and reams of data were for the taking in the big mountains right up the hill. “I can’t not try to pursue this while being next to the Wasatch Front,” he thought to himself.

Eventually, with the help of his U colleague Cale Fallgatter MS’08, a mechanical engineer, Garrett designed a camera to shoot three-dimensional photos of snowflakes. With support from the University of Utah’s Technology Commercialization Office, the two scientists then created Fallgatter Technologies to develop and build their Multi Angle Snowflake Camera. Their prototype took its first images during a storm at the Alta Ski Area on April 30, 2011.

Since then, Garrett, with help from Daniel “Howie” Howlett, an avalanche specialist with the Alta Ski Patrol, has set up two permanent research cameras at Alta, one at the main ski-lift base and the other in Collins Gulch farther up the mountain. Garrett says snowflakes— which, it turns out, only very rarely resemble the symmetrical crystals most of us think they are—deserve study in their own right. But his research with the cameras also contributes to grander study of clouds and global warming.

Garrett grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, where even as a young student he was intrigued by the physics of ice. It probably helped that his father is an oceanographer. (Garrett’s parents were both British citizens, and his mother was a social worker.) Garrett also learned to play the oboe while in school, and when he went on to the University of Waterloo in Ontario, he was allowed to include music studies while pursuing his bachelor’s degree in physics and performed with professional groups both as an undergrad and in graduate school. But he decided to make atmospheric science the focus of his career because being good at science is easier than being a successful musician, he says. He still sees parallels, though, between music and physics, and the pathways of falling snow that he charts with his cameras at Alta.

The art of photographing snowflakes reaches back to the 19th century. A Vermont farmer, Wilson Alwyn “Snowflake” Bentley, at the age of 19 in 1885 attached a bellows camera to a microscope to take the first-ever photograph of a snowflake. In 1936, Ukichiro Nakaya of Hokkaido University created the first artificial snow crystal. Four decades ago, scientists in the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Range spent two years hand-collecting individual snowflakes, placing them on slides, and then taking black and white pictures of the crystals in optimal photographic light. Many of the resulting 100 images were what we think snow crystals look like—perfect, symmetrical, six-sided. Kenneth Libbrecht, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, has sought to understand the molecular dynamics of ice crystals and has developed methods to grow and analyze snowflakes in his lab.

The Multi Angle Snowflake Camera, developed by Garrett and Cale Fallgatter, took its first images at Alta in 2011. (Photo by Nathan Sweet)

But no one, until Garrett and his colleagues set up the cameras at Alta, had ever before taken thousands of high-resolution, three-dimensional photos of snowflakes in a single night, untouched as they fall from the sky.

Garrett’s 3-D cameras are mounted on a ring-shaped housing about 12 inches in diameter, with lenses aimed to capture the flakes as they fall through the ring. Motion sensors tell the cameras when to shoot, at a shutter speed of 1/25,000th to 1/40,000th of a second and with three LED flashes. The multi-angle camera array takes only black-and-white images, because color photography would block some light.

Garrett’s research location at Alta includes a radar, located at the base of the hill. Researcher Sandra Yuter of North Carolina State University tracks data from the radar remotely to measure precipitation structure. Garrett uses her data to help determine how tall and strong a storm is and how the precipitation changes over time. Weather forecasters can then incorporate that information with their own radar readings to determine whether snow or graupel (also known as soft hail) is falling, and if so, how much.

Tim Garrett has two cameras set up at the Alta Ski Area, one at the base and the other in Collins Gulch. (Photo by Derek Smith)

In late 2011, the U.S. Army purchased one of Fallgatter Technologies’ Multi Angle Snowflake Cameras for its Cold Regions Research lab at Mammoth Mountain, California. The U.S. Department of Energy bought one for climate studies at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, home to the largest oilfield in North America. Vanderbilt University also has ordered one to be deployed to the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory at Greenland Summit, the center of the Greenland ice sheet. Garrett says both orders will be filled by the end of 2013. And the National Science Foundation is now funding his research.

The cameras automatically collect the myriad snowflake images. But only about one in 1,000 matches the perfect snowflake icon, Garrett says. In fact, a photo gallery of snowfall at Alta displays flakes that may look like beads, popcorn, a canine tooth, sea sponges, coral, seashells, or Styrofoam packing pellets.

Garrett says snowflakes usually aren’t single crystals at all. Rather, they may be rimed as millions of water droplets collide with a flake and freeze on its surface to form graupel. Or the water droplets may collide with other snowflakes to form aggregate, which under the right conditions turns into world-famous Alta champagne powder.

The flakes’ water content determines their shapes and where the prevailing wind sends them. Warmer weather means more moisture in the air. That changes in midwinter. “One thing we see very often in the Wasatch Front in January and February is very light and fluffy snow,” Garrett says.

Heavier snow falls faster and farther upwind. Aggregate flakes, full of little air pockets but not much liquid, fall more slowly and farther downwind. True champagne powder is extraordinarily dry: 30 inches of snow can be equivalent to just one inch of rain, Garrett says

This crystalline snowflake is formed by condensation. (Photo courtesy Tim Garrett)

Working to improve computer simulations of falling snow and how it degrades radar transmissions, Garrett studies how snow behaves in clouds. That research can help improve weather forecast accuracy. Meteorologists and hydrologists can use the information to make morning commute predictions, provide information that contributes to avalanche safety, and even evaluate how much water is flowing in the Colorado Basin, the lifeline for more than 35 million people in the West.

Randy Julander, Utah Snow Survey supervisor with the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, says Garrett’s work will help him see more closely where snowfall transitions into rainfall. Utah stream flow comes when snow melts after being kept in the mountain deep-freeze and accounts for 90 to 95 percent of the water that flows through the West. Should global warming change the West’s hydrology cycles to “rainfall-dominated events,” Julander says, the Colorado River and its tributaries will starve and our reservoirs will go dry.

Understanding the snow load in the mountains also affects public safety. Karl Birkeland, director and avalanche scientist with the U.S. Forest Service’s National Avalanche Center in Bozeman, Montana, says photos from the Fallgatter Technologies cameras could help snow-safety experts anticipate what they might see when they dig snow pits. “There’s some real potential there to translate the images” to gauge the snow properties and how an avalanche might occur, he says.

For his own inquiries, Garrett extends his snowflake research to the science of global warming through his study of clouds. Cloud physics, he says, remains rather mysterious. Scientists know the basics: Clouds remove pollutants from the atmosphere and shield Earth from sunlight. They can also trap heat to warm the planet.

Tim Garrett works to create snow crystals in his laboratory in the William Browning Building. (Photo by Nathan Sweet)

But studying the physics of clouds is crucial for making weather and climate forecasts. Clouds and precipitation are constantly changing, of course, and Garrett says their role in climate change can be either fundamentally simple or impossibly complex. He himself refers to clouds as “ephemeral beasts.” Garrett predicts significant regional changes in weather patterns will occur in the years ahead: few clouds, and little precipitation. Julander notes that the lack of sufficient clouds has already thwarted cloud-seeding efforts in Utah during dry periods when snowstorms were most needed.

Garrett has used data collected by weather stations, satellites, and aircraft to examine the effects of atmospheric pollution on snowfall, ice crystals in cirrus clouds, and sea ice in the Arctic. He also relies on his own cloud-gazing to gather information. Then he looks at his findings from unusual angles, and some of his conclusions have included grim news about climate change, including global warming. “It’s pretty safe to say that without an economic collapse, global carbon dioxide emissions will continue to grow unchecked” Garrett says.

Meanwhile, Garrett continues his study of how snowflakes fall, and their effects on larger weather patterns. Before his cameras caught snowflakes in free fall, he says, he had no idea of their immense variety. Now anyone can go online to see the view from his cameras and watch in real time what kind of snow is falling and how fast. What they also can see is that snowflakes are far beyond the simple shapes children cut out of paper.

“Why is it we have such an ingrained belief in that? When they land on our sleeves, they are crazy irregular,” he notes. Nature is far messier than many of our received conceptualizations of it, he says, “but beautiful, in a different way.”

—Patty Henetz is a longtime journalist who now works as a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City.

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