Left Hand Laurel: Derek Curd

This month's Left Hand Laurel is Derek Curd, a mentor for students at Up-A-Creek Robotics. Curd, a hardware engineer, relocated from the Bay area 18 years ago with his family. Curd is adored by his students on the St. Vrain Valley School District robotics team which, this past April, became the first Colorado team to win the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition World Championship.

Violet Oliver, a Niwot High School junior and member of the robotics team, nominated Curd for this Left Hand Laurel, saying, "He leads the assembly subteam on our FTC team and has played an instrumental role in helping us win while also acquiring a cult following from his students." "Over the summer months, Derek leads off-season projects," she added, "helping kids build two 2.5-foot Tesla coils that play music, an air-powered t-shirt cannon, and a rideable robot. This year I think we're building a laser."

Curd recounted the four-day FIRST Robotics Competition last April in Houston where 120 high school teams from 14 countries competed. Up-A-Creek Robotics, which was partnered with Romania, won the world championship with thousands of people from around the world cheering at the Houston Convention Center.

Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri and the son of a law enforcement officer, Curd was accepted into the engineering program at MIT and graduated in 1993 from one of the top engineering colleges in the world.

After spending several years working in the Bay area and in Silicon Valley, he and his family moved to Boulder County where he worked as a hardware engineer at Xilinx (now AMD). At the end of 2019, he and two friends who are also Up-A-Creek Robotics team mentors, founded a start-up company called Left Hand Robotics in Longmont. The company, where Curd still works, "got bought up by Toro, a huge maker of robotic machines for lawn care."

In the meantime, Curd said, "I got involved in Up-A-Creek Robotic before they (his children) did." Curd's son and daughter are now college students at Duke University and the University of Rochester, respectively. "When we first moved here, the robotics team was doing a show-and-tell and I became interested in robotics. And in 2014, I became a mentor when our daughter was in late elementary school and our son was a middle-schooler," Curd said.

"After I got involved, there was a lot of hard work," he said. Now in his ninth year as a mentor, he continued, "It's just amazing what these kids can do." Curd said mentors like him generally volunteer 6-10 hours a week most of the year. But in January through April, when the teams are building robots, he said many mentors volunteer 30 hours a week "in addition to our day jobs. It's a big commitment."

Clearly, Derek Curd and others like him love the work they do mentoring these students. "I've loved robots ever since I was a kid," he said, "and spending three to four years with these high school students has been amazing. They often start out unsure and then we see them grow and get all these technical and organizational skills. And by the time they are seniors, they are running sub-teams. And it's pretty darn cool to see them go though this growth process. They start out so insecure and not sure and by the time they graduate, they are super-confident."

The mentors and students train weekly in Longmont at the Robot Team Facility on South Sherman Street, near Ken Pratt Parkway.

"Derek never asks for any recognition for any of this," Oliver said, describing her mentor. She added, "To be honest, all of our Up-A-Creek mentors are under-recognized for what they do. Besides his technical expertise, Derek is just a cool person to be around. He's humble, brilliant and he doesn't take life too seriously. His commitment to us doesn't stop at Up-A-Creek either. He's driven us through parades and has hosted parties at his house. He plowed my driveway when my Dad was away, while developing autonomous snow plow robots in his day job."

For his volunteer efforts with Up-A-Creek Robotics, Derek Curd is the Courier's October Left Hand Laurel recipient.

To nominate a volunteer in the community for a Left Hand Laurel, send an email to [email protected].