July 27, 2011
Etc.: Campus News & Notes
Barbara Trask
INSPIRING WOMAN: UW Professor Emeritus Barbara Trask is among four local women being honored for their outstanding accomplishments, courage, service and dedication as “Women of Inspiration.” The award is sponsored by the Seattle Storm womens basketball team.
Trask is an internationally recognized expert in genomics and has devoted her career to studying the genetic basis for cancer and other diseases. She also played a significant role in the Human Genome Project and served for a decade as senior vice president and director of the Human Biology Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where she was the first woman to lead a scientific research division. She retired in May and remains an emeritus faculty member at the Hutch and the UW Department of Genome Sciences.
The honorees will be celebrated during a pre-game reception and halftime ceremony when Storm hosts Connecticut at KeyArena Aug. 5. Other honorees are Jerilyn Brusseau, founder of PeaceTrees Vietnam; Grethe Cammermeyer, equal rights pioneer; and Jessica Markowitz, founder of Richards Rwanda-IMPUHWE, an organization that supports educational opportunities for girls in primary and secondary school in the rural area of Nyamata, Rwanda.
Shwetak Patel
HIGH-IMPACT RESEARCH: Shwetak Patel, assistant professor of Computer Science & Engineering and of Electrical Engineering, has been named a 2011 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow. The program recognizes innovative, promising new faculty who are pursuing high-impact research areas. Each honoree receives $200,000 to support creative research, as well as access to software, conferences and Microsoft Research facilities. Patels research is easy-to-deploy, practical home sensing systems. He is among eight new fellows selected this year.
