In the wake of One Ocean Week Seattle, participating University of Washington researchers share highlights, connecting the week’s events to ongoing efforts to understand and protect marine ecosystems and coastal communities.
Learning
Bee experts wouldn’t have previously expected to find the likes of Osmia cyaneonitens, Dufourea dilatipes and Stelis heronae in Washington. But this year, while collecting pollinators in Chelan County to study how climate and wildfires affect native bee populations, Autumn Maust, a University of Washington research scientist of biology, discovered eight bee species never recorded in Washington.
Every year, undergraduates at the University of Washington start their college experience, often in cavernous classrooms, learning alongside dozens, if not hundreds, of their peers. Research shows that taking these courses — some prerequisites and other classes on popular topics — can make students feel isolated, scared and not up to the task.
Researchers at the University of Washington created a new audio chatbot, Self-Talk with Superhero Zip, aimed to help children speak positively to themselves. This chatbot is “a ‘Sesame Street’ experience for a smart speaker.”
In UW Architecture’s Making and Meaning class, students built benches to learn about design and construction, and to create community.
These nocturnal flying mammals live in cities and rural areas and in most climates around the world – and maybe even in your own backyard.
Sharlene Santana, a University of Washington professor of biology and curator of mammals at the Burke Museum, explains that there are over 1,400 species of bats spanning an incredible diversity.
This year, the School of Music’s Improvised Music Project focused on audio recording, inviting acclaimed recording engineer David Boucher for a weeklong workshop. The new format allowed students and faculty to gain experience with UW’s new mobile recording system while teaching fundamental recording and audio skills.
Who do you talk to when you have a problem? For a student, it’s most likely a friend. Because young people tend to talk first to someone in their peer group, UW’s LiveWell created a Peer Health Education program where trained students teach other students about taking care of themselves and each other.
A UW class that normally is about air pollution has pivoted to focus on another airborne health hazard — coronavirus aerosols. As part of the class project, students are designing and building air purifiers and testing how effective they are.
A team led by UW studied whether hanging out with conversational agents, such as Alexa or Siri, could affect the way children communicate with their fellow humans.
This week, a few members of our UW News team joined glaciologists from the UW Department of Earth & Space Sciences on a trip to Mt. Baker. Students that came along got to chat with their professor on the hike up, and we learned about how the recent heat wave impacted the snow melt on the ice.
Soil, particularly in urban areas, can hold contaminants that are unhealthy for people who handle it or eat things grown in the ground. Chemicals left behind by vehicles, air pollution and heavy industry can show up in the ground and in plants. Melanie Malone, assistant professor in UW Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences investigates these contaminants and their prevalence in shared garden spaces.
This summer a UW mobile health outreach van will hit the road, bringing some basic health care services to people without housing who might have a hard time getting to a doctor’s office.
The University of Washington today announced that the School of Social Work and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the Behavioral Health Institute at Harborview Medical Center are part of a transformational $38 million set of gifts from Ballmer Group to support a broad, collaborative response to the state’s behavioral health crisis. The gifts aim to address the state of Washington’s serious workforce shortage in the community behavioral health system, in large part by supporting statewide education and training innovations at partner institutions developed through the University of Washington.
Systemic racism has for generations undermined the health of individuals and communities across America, a public health crisis that has made the pandemic even more deadly and destructive for people of color. Recognizing that nurses play a central role in and hold major responsibility for the health of individuals and communities hit hard by historic racial inequity, the University of Washington School of Nursing is launching the Center for Antiracism in Nursing. “There is much work to do to become…
Students in the arts and other fields will have greater access to research texts and media thanks to an expansion of online resources by UW Libraries to help meet the needs of remote learning during the pandemic.
With a grant from the National Institutes of Health, a five-year, $1.8 million training program at the University of Washington will fund 25 academic-year graduate fellowships, develop a new training curriculum and contribute to methodological advances in health research at the intersection of demography and data science.
The COVID-19 Clearinghouse at UW Law is just one of the ways that faculty and staff across the university have revamped summer research internships and worked with outside partners and employers to involve students in a remote working environment, even for jobs that would normally be out in the field.
Researchers examined 15 years of records of student performance, education and demographics for chemistry courses at the University of Washington. They found that underrepresented students received lower grades in the general chemistry series compared to their peers and, if the grade was sufficiently low, were less likely to continue in the series and more likely to leave STEM. But if underrepresented students completed the first general chemistry course with at least the minimum grade needed to continue in the series, they were more likely than their peers to continue the general chemistry series and complete this major step toward a STEM degree.
The UW Asian Languages & Literature Department has been awarded a four-year $1.3 million “flagship” grant from the the Institute for International Education that will support the expanded study of Chinese language and culture across the UW.
Recent honors to UW faculty and staff have come from the American Education Research Association, the Association for Psychological Science and the SeaDoc Society.
When the UW announced it was moving its spring quarter 2020 classes entirely online to combat the novel coronavirus, instructors across campus faced a new, uncharted challenge.
With the university’s spring quarter beginning Monday, UW staff and student workers in the Student Technology Loan Program spent the week-long spring break gathering, checking and cleaning some 300 laptops and tablets for distribution – and, for the first time, shipping many of those devices to the homes of UW students across the country.
This wasn’t how LaShawnDa Pittman expected to give her final exam review: At her kitchen table, laptop open, coffee cup at the ready, her 12-year-old Chihuahua named Espresso by her side. But as the first week of the University of Washington’s shift to online classes drew to a close, Pittman, an assistant professor of American Ethnic Studies, was talking with her students over the conferencing platform Zoom, first to answer logistical questions about the upcoming exam, then to provide a…
Rick Mohler, associate professor of architecture, meets with his Research Design Studio students online. Normally a hands-on class with poster-size drawings and tabletop scale models, Mohler’s design studio has shifted to the small screen.
The University of Washington has long boasted one of the country’s top programs in atmospheric sciences. Now, the UW is also teaching undergraduates how to share that knowledge online and on TV as a broadcast meteorologist.
A conversation with UW psychology professor Sheri Mizumori about the UW-based program Broadening the Representations of Academic Investigators in NeuroScience — or BRAINS for short — designed to accelerate career advancement for postdoctoral researchers and assistant professors from underrepresented populations.
Recent notable books by UW faculty members explore the legal history of Indigenous nations and the mentoring benefits of fan fiction. Plus, a UW anthropologist’s book is honored, a former English faculty member is remembered in a biography, and UW Press brings out paperback editions of three popular titles.
New research from astronomers at the UW uses the intriguing TRAPPIST-1 planetary system as a kind of laboratory to model not the planets themselves, but how the coming James Webb Space Telescope might detect and study their atmospheres, on the path toward looking for life beyond Earth.
A robotics challenge July 20th at the UW featured twenty-eight teams of middle and high schoolers from Forks to Walla Walla and from Bellingham to Olympia. The event marked a half-century since the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon and two U.S. astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, walked its surface.
The subsurface ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus probably has higher than previously known concentrations of carbon dioxide and hydrogen and a more Earthlike pH level, possibly providing conditions favorable to life, according to new research from planetary scientists at the UW.
Of the many papers and presentations scheduled for AbSciCon2019, the conference on astrobiology and the search for life in space happening in Bellevue the week of June 24, the UW’s Dominic Sivitilli’s is perhaps unique — he’ll discuss his research into how octopuses “think.”
The annual thesis exhibition by graduating art and design students with the UW School of Art + Art History + Design reliably brings together the dreamy and the practical to cohabit at the Henry Art Gallery. This year’s exhibit features the work of 10 artists and 11 designers, and will be at the Henry through June 23.
Sometimes when science gets stuck, art can come to the rescue. Such is the case, a new study shows, with the UW Design Help Desk, which guides faculty, students and staff in improving the more artistic aspects of presenting research or reports — figures, diagrams, posters and such.
Families, students and children are invited to get their hands wet on Saturday with “Our Watery World,” the University of Washington’s second annual aquatic science open house.
Engineering Discovery Days is a yearly event that invites Washington state fourth- through eighth-graders to have fun leaning about STEM with the College of Engineering.
A new space race is underway, characterized by the intersecting trends of democratization, commercialization and militarization. Saadia Pekkanen, UW professor of international relations, is lead guest editor for a group of essays addressing such issues and more published online this month in the American Journal of International Law.
A University of Washington team placed first in a national weather forecasting contest that began in September. A UW graduate student also developed a model that for the first time beat out all human competitors.
Devin Naar, UW professor of international studies and history, is featured in “Children of the Inquisition,” a new documentary film about descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions discovering their Sephardic Jewish heritage. The film will premiere March 24 as part of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival.
A new website from the UW’s Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom, the duo behind the popular “Calling BS” class, asks viewers to choose which of two realistic face photos is real and which is a complete fake.