CU professor Chris Yakacki and his company, Impressio, are working on a revolutionary new padding for football helmets.
BOULDER — University of Colorado professor Chris Yakacki wants to make a safer football helmet.
You could say he's making some serious headway.
Yakacki is a Buffs fan, a Colorado grad and a current associate professor of mechanical engineering at CU Denver. He and his cohorts at Impressio Inc., a company he helped found, are developing and testing a new kind of helmet padding made from lab-developed liquid-crystal elastomers (LCEs). They believe the new material will significantly improve the energy absorption compared to current helmet pads, and thus make a safer protective headgear.