Associate Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin gave a talk "Thickness and Chromatic Numbers of Inflated Graphs" at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco in January. In her talk Boutin described the current state of work she's done with Michael Albertson of Smith College and Ellen Gethner of University of Colorado, Denver, on r-inflated networks. A network is r-inflated by replacing each vertex in by a set of r mutually connected vertices and replacing each edge between a pair of vertices with all edges between the associated 2r vertices.
