Brandon Runnels, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, often kicks off his undergraduate mechanics course by showing images from engineering disasters.

In 1981, a walkway at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Kansas City, Mo., collapsed, killing 114 people and injuring an additional 216. In 2018 and 2019, two Boeing 737 Max airliners crashed, killing a total of 346 people and forcing the aerospace company to ground the aircraft. Six people were killed at Florida International University when a pedestrian bridge collapsed in 2018.

Runnels doesn’t give this grisly demonstration because of some macabre obsession with deadly accidents, but because he believes many of these catastrophes were avoidable.

“If we — engineers — do things right, and carefully, and precisely, a lot of these disasters can be avoided,” he said.

Runnels’ research project, for which he recently received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, could save countless lives by determining when, how and why certain structural materials fail.

“Ideally, the long-term goal is that we want to build with materials that are more reliable, and less likely to fail,” he said.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award is one of the most prestigious grants available to early career professors and was just one of a host of research grants and gifts the University of Colorado system garnered in the past year, according to a news release. The university system attracted $1.46 billion in research funding over the past year, officials said. UCCS received $9.3 million in research funding during that period.

The funding, which came from federal, state and international sources, cannot be used for anything unrelated to research, officials said.

Runnels’ Career-funded project is called “A Multifunctional Convolutional Neural Network Framework for Prediction of Damage Nucleation Sites in Microstructure.” In layman’s English, this means his research will focus on answering the questions of how and why things break and developing faster and more reliable techniques for predicting material damage.

The project will concentrate primarily on materials designed to support a lot of weight, like bridges, the wings of an airplane or the chassis of a car, Runnels said. If successful, it could have far-reaching implications, like improved protective armor for the military, tanks that are more resistant to explosives and a satellites that are better equipped to withstand possible collisions with “space junk,” he said.

“These are important problems, and I like working on important problems,” Runnels said.

The research will take place over a five-year period and will focus on fundamental — not applied — research. Any practical applications will take place years from now, according to Runnels.

“It will be a long time before we are able to take what we learn here and turn it into something you’re going to see on the streets, or on the battlefield,” he said. “I always say that if I ever get into a lab, I’m just going to break things. So I’ll leave the experiments to people who know what they’re doing.”

Aided by a graduate research assistant (whose tuition, and a stipend, will be paid by the grant funds), Runnels also intends to broaden the impact of the project by developing interactive online tools to get younger students and “citizen scientists” involved.

If the project is successful, years from now a combat soldier could return home in one piece, or a planeload of passengers could avoid a crash, without anyone knowing the name of the professor whose research saved their lives. And that’s just fine with Runnels.

“When we learn why (engineering disasters) happen, we can hopefully use that knowledge to make things better,” he said. “That’s what makes this project exciting for me.”