March 6, 2025

Women shaping CSU history

For Women’s History Month, SOURCE has created a collection of stories and images to celebrate the array of research activity led by women across Colorado State University and highlighted two faculty from our community.

Kristen Rasmussen has quickly become a leader in research and education at Colorado State University since joining the Department of Atmospheric Science in 2016.

Rasmussen earned her M.S. (2011) and Ph.D. (2014) from the University of Washington, where her research centered on the cloud and mesoscale processes of high-impact weather events in South America, as well as flooding in India and Pakistan. She continued that work as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) before building her own lab at CSU centered on the weather-climate interface to further study the dynamics of convective storms – intense weather events characterized by strong up and down drafts and how they may change in a future climate.

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Elizabeth Barnes did not set out to be an engineer. That was something her parents did and, as such, was something to avoid if possible. Growing up with a talent for science, she instead wanted to be an astrophysicist like Jodie Foster’s character in the 1997 movie “Contact.”

But as she entered graduate school to study atmospheric science, she realized two things. Her undergraduate work in math and physics provided her with a strong foundation to examine complex Earth systems. At the same time, she had skills and interest in translating the vast amounts of data being collected about those systems into something that was useable, applicable and needed.

The combination provided a pathway into a research career as a professor at Colorado State University who sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence as well as various weather, climate and physical sciences.

“I was talking to a colleague who pointed out that I was actually thinking like an engineer, trying to develop the needed data science tools and expertise to do science better,” said Barnes. “That clicked for me. It opened up a lot of interesting questions that sit at the boundaries of disciplines that my lab and team have since explored successfully, with still more fascinating topics left to be examined.” 