Seaglider was developed in 2001 by researchers at the School of Oceanography and Applied Physics Laboratory. In UW research the device has set records for the distance travelled and time spent alone at sea, using buoyancy to glide up and down through the ocean while using minimal power.

Kongsberg Maritime will pick up where the previous licensee iRobot left off, handling orders for customers external to the UW. The Norwegian company plans to hire five or six employees to build Seagliders at its Lynnwood, Wash., facility.  The UW Seaglider Fabrication Center, managed by Fritz Stahr, will continue to employ three full-time staff members and two students to build and service Seagliders for UW researchers, and to service units sold before there was a commercial provider for the technology.

The Boldt decision revisited
Richard R. Whitney, a UW emeritus professor of fisheries, will give a public talk about his role in the Boldt decision, a 1974 decision that gave Washington tribes an equal share of the state’s salmon catch. The talk is at 4 p.m. Thursday, May 23, in Fishery Sciences 102, and is free and open to the public.

Richard Whitney

Whitney’s talk, “My Fisheries Management Experience with Judge George H. Boldt in his Case United States v. The State of Washington,” will provide a firsthand account of the science and politics of those years. Whitney served as technical adviser to Judge Boldt from March 1974, one month after he handed down the ruling, until 1979, when the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed and affirmed the decision.

Whitney was a UW fisheries professor from 1983 to 1993. He previously held positions at the University of Maryland, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the predecessor to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He is co-author of “Inland Fishes of Washington” and was elected in 2008 to the American Fisheries Society’s Fisheries Management Hall of Excellence.

U. of Minnesota president to speak
Eric Kaler, University of Minnesota president and former UW professor of chemical engineering, will speak on campus Tuesday, May 28, about challenges and opportunities for the nation’s top research universities.

Eric Kaler

Kaler taught at the UW for seven years starting in 1982 before moving on to the University of Delaware and later to Stony Brook University in New York. He has been president at Minnesota since 2011.

He will speak to a general audience on “The Future of the American Research University” at 3 p.m. May 28, in the Lyceum of the Husky Union Building for the chemical engineering department’s first Bruce A. Finlayson Lecture. The lecture, the department’s largest event of the year, honors Finlayson, a chemical engineering professor emeritus who previously taught with Kaler. In a separate talk, Kaler will have a more technical presentation on surfactant microstructures at 10:30 a.m. May 28, in the Bill & Melinda Gates Commons (CSE 691) of the Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Both talks are free and open to the public. A reception will follow the afternoon talk at 4 p.m. in the HUB Lyceum.

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Created during the last two years, the video plunges viewers into the experience of building a new type of ocean observatory – one that will use fiber-optic cables to bring electrical power, high-speed Internet and modern instruments to the deep sea. The video takes viewers to one of the sites of the observatory now under construction: Axial Seamount, a volcano some 300 miles off the West Coast and a mile beneath the ocean’s surface.

UWTV

A deep-sea octopus makes a cameo appearance.

The documentary includes dramatic footage captured by high-definition video cameras operated by submersible robots. The non-human stars of the documentary include a deep-ocean octopus, bioluminescent jellyfish, and rarely seen microbial “snow blowers” that stream from the underwater volcano.

The goal of the National Science Foundation-funded observatory, part of the national Ocean Observatories Initiative, is “to have a permanent presence in the ocean via a new technology,” said principal investigator John Delaney, UW professor of oceanography.

But realizing that goal is not an easy task.

“There is no book on how you lay a fiber-optic network over an active submarine volcano,” Delaney said in the video.

There are tense moments as the team uses underwater robots to survey the site of the observatory. One scene shows a cable placed across a volcanic hydrothermal site while the robotic arm measures the temperature inside and confirms it is much hotter than the cable can survive. (The contractor has since replaced that section of cable and moved it to another location.)

UWTV

A volcanic caldera at Axial Seamount appears in the UWTV documentary.

“The ocean really is the last unexplored frontier on the planet,” said Deborah Kelley, a UW professor of oceanography. “When we dive in places, even when we’ve been there before, chances are we’re going to make a discovery.”

The observatory will replace those yearly dives with a constant virtual window on the marine life and volcanic eruptions deep below the ocean’s surface.

The documentary also features Giora Prokurowski, a project scientist and UW alumnus; work from Mark Stoermer, who does visualizations for the project; and former educational director Allison Fundis. Communications coordinator Nancy Penrose co-produced the documentary.

One of the purposes of the 2011 cruise was to find sites for the observatory’s giant electrical outlets. Those outlets were installed last summer by a telecommunications contractor. This year Delaney, Kelley and their team of researchers and students will sail from Seattle to install the low-voltage electrical outlets, lay smaller cables and attach sensors that will, in a few months, begin to send real-time observations back to land-based computers.

Live video and updates will be posted throughout July and August at the project’s website. The observatory is scheduled to be commissioned and fully operational by early 2015.

An Ethics Feature in the May-June issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine describes the lessons learned as the Madras Medical Group transformed itself into a pharma-free clinic.  The small, private clinic of five physicians no longer has contact with detailers – representatives from the pharmaceutical industry who visit physicians to educate them about medications. The clinic also refuses drug samples, gifts and lunches from pharmaceutical companies.

Alice C. Gray

Pharma-free medical practices refuse gifts, lunches, educational programs and samples from pharmaceutical industries.

The corresponding author of the paper, David V. Evans, practiced at the clinic and is now an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Washington. He and his colleagues at the Oregon State University College of Pharmacy and at University of Oregon Health & Sciences University  examined the clinic’s successful methods to change a culture ingrained in medicine.

“Detailing – selling drugs by educating physicians –  was first reported as a problem in the late 1950’s,” Evans said.  Since then, extensive research indicates that detailing can encourage physicians to prescribe medicines that may not be appropriate, necessary or cost-effective for patients, and that may pose safety concerns.

Academic medical centers, such as medical schools and teaching hospitals,  Evans noted, have critically looked at detailing,  have advocated against it nationally, and have set institutional policies prohibiting or limiting student, resident and faculty contact with detailers .

However, he added, three-fourths of the country’s physicians practice in the community, where interactions between physicians and pharmaceutical representatives are still commonplace.  Although some states have curbed contact between drug reps and physicians, most physicians in small, independent practices have little guidance on how to become pharma-free, the authors of the paper observed.

“Changing this situation is not easy, but with a deliberate and thoughtful approach it can occur,” Evans said.  Although his clinic’s personnel were not unanimous in wanting to go pharma-free, approaching it in smaller steps helped to decrease dissent.

First, those championing a pharma-free clinic quantified the presence of detailers and their marketing strategies.  This data helped convince the physicians and staff that a problem existed.  The staff and physicians then voiced their concerns. These included doing without prescription samples for patients.

The clinic then scheduled sessions for their health professionals to keep current about medications by reviewing rigorous scientific studies. To replace the pharma-sponsored lunches, the clinic held its own regular lunches for their clinicians and staff.  Clinic staff told patients about the change, and news media in the local area informed the nearby public.  The clinic also created a chart comparing average monthly costs of many heavily marketed drugs with first-line, less-expensive or generic drugs, if such alternatives were available.

“Becoming pharma-free at our clinic was not an overnight thing,” said Evans. “Cultural change takes time.  Eventually even the initial dissenters in the clinic came to feel good about the change, and it became a point of pride.”

Now, as a UW medical school faculty member who teaches medical students and residents, Evans, along with colleague Pam Pentin, educate future physicians on effectively managing drug detailers, including how to turn all of them away.

“One of the concerns,” Evans said, “is that medical students and residents may come up through their education without ever having interacted with a drug representative.  It’s important to teach medical students and residents how detailers operate in the real world. At the UW, family medicine residents learn about detailer strategies during their third-year practice management curriculum.  This year’s graduating residents will be the first to have taken the training.”

As of 2009, there was one drug sales representative for every eight physicians.  Despite increased scrutiny and regulation, Evans and his colleagues noted that the percentage of primary care physicians with industrial relationships remains high at 84 percent.  Evans explained that most drug reps are well trained and personable. They use marketing strategies time-tested in the social sciences.

“It’s a sophisticated operation. For example, before they go in to see physicians,” he said, “detailers sit in their cars data-mining on their electronic devices. They find out the physicians’ prescribing patterns from databases in which the patients’ names and other identifying information have been removed. They know how much a doctor has prescribed of drug A, and will either thank the doctor or encourage him or her to prescribe drug B instead.”

Beginning in August 2013, as part of the Affordable Care Act of 2013, a national web site will contain information for patients on the monetary value of what individual physicians accept from pharmaceutical firms.  The Physician Payment Sunshine Act will require manufacturers of drugs, devices and biologics to report all payments to physicians and teaching hospitals to a public web database.

What else can patients do to mitigate undesirable effects of drug marketing?  Evans advises asking their physicians about the issue. He suggests refusing drug samples if they are offered. Patients can also become aware of the effects of drug advertising on their own treatment choices.

The authors of the paper, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Lessons Learned from a Pharma-Free Practice Transformation,” wrote that they hope their description of how a clinic changed its practice “contributes to the ongoing discussion of the potential clinical influences and the ethics of the relationship between practicing physicians and pharmaceutical marketing.”

The other authors were Daniel M. Hartung and Denise Beasley of the Department of Pharmacy Practice, Oregon State University College of Pharmacy in Portland. The senior author was Lyle J. Fagnan, a physician in the Oregon Rural Practice-based Research Network in the Department of Family Practice, Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine.

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The externally peer-reviewed analysis of the clinic transformation received no funding and the researchers declared no conflicts of interest.

These new UW online courses, under the name UWashingtonX, will be free and open to the public. The courses will be in addition to the such courses already available on Coursera, where the UW was an early innovator with both free and for-credit classes, announced in July 2012.

The UW plans to start with four new courses for edX, ready in January 2014. Courses under consideration will build on the university’s online teaching expertise since the 1990s that includes: more than a dozen Massive Open Online Courses launched in 2012-13, plus 15 online graduate degrees, undergraduate online degree completion, 40 certificate programs, 58 online undergraduate courses, and 14 other free courses made available during the last decade.

In addition to Harvard and MIT, edX elite partners also include such universities as California, Berkeley; Georgetown; Toronto; Cornell; Boston and Texas, plus leading institutions in Asia, Europe and Australia. Each partner shares a commitment to transforming educational quality, efficiency and scale through technology and research for the benefit of campus-based students and the worldwide community of online and blended learners.

“The University of Washington remains committed to learning more about the impacts, reach, challenges and benefits of MOOCs,” said UW President Michael K. Young. “As a large, public research institution with a mission to increase access to education, we’ll continue to explore the forefront of educational delivery, evaluate teaching and learning effectiveness, consider trends, and drive research to improve higher education. MOOCs are part of this, and joining with edX adds to our portfolio of high-quality, free offerings for the public.”

Among institutions offering new Massive Open Online Courses the last year, the UW was the first university to provide a way for those online students to obtain credit. Many UW Coursera students are provided an option to convert from the free online courses to an enhanced, small cohort, instructor-led, UW online for-credit class that requires additional homework, assignments, evaluations, and a fee.

“The research focus and Harvard/MIT roots of edX will allow us to further our knowledge of MOOCs and their efficacy,” said David P. Szatmary, vice provost of UW Educational Outreach. “As a leader in online education, we want to help shape this important innovation and define what’s possible.”

Currently, the UW offers 14 Massive Open Online Courses on Coursera. Some are new courses, launching soon. Enrollments for representative UW courses on Coursera are listed below. Numbers reflect the top instance for each individual course to date, since some courses are repeated multiple times throughout the year:

• Introduction to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics: 30,578
• Information and Risk Management: 25,077
• *Introduction to Public Speaking: 15,929 (*growing daily; course starts June 24, 2013)
• Computational Methods for Data Analysis: 15,179
• High Performing Scientific Computing: 14,977
• Scientific Computing: 13,374
• Building an Information Risk Management Toolkit: 10,533
• Designing and Executing Information Security Strategies: 9,206

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“Dr. Yeigh has been a force of innovation and change throughout his career, particularly in positions of academic leadership,” said Young. “He has left a trail of success everywhere he has been, and we are very excited to have him join the University of Washington and lead our dynamic campus at Bothell as it continues to grow and develop.”

Yeigh has been at SUNYIT since 2008, where he has overseen operations for the 800-acre science and technology campus, SUNY’s only institute of technology. During his tenure at SUNYIT, he secured $15.5 million capital grants for cybersecurity and nanotechnology programs and led the effort to gain two rounds of funding for regional economic development projects totaling $119.9 million. Working in partnership with the University at Albany, a $240 million nanotechnology partnership was secured. Overseeing the largest expansion of the campus to date, he guided the building of more than $100 million in capital projects including a student center, field house, and a residential complex. He secured private and public funding to significantly add science, technology, engineering and mathematics faculty and student excellence scholarships.

Yeigh is a founding member and serves on the board of directors of the Fort Schuyler Management Corp., a nonprofit organization that supports industry-government partnerships for SUNYIT.

Yeigh holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from Dartmouth, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford and a master’s and doctorate in civil engineering and operations research from Princeton.

He was an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University from 1995 to 1999. He moved to Yale in 1999, where he served as assistant provost for science and technology, a fellow of Pierson College and also as a faculty member in mechanical engineering and the Graduate School.

He was at St. Louis University from 2003 to 2006, serving as dean of the Parks College of Engineering, Aviation and Technology; director, Center for Space, Technology and Engineering Policy; and as a faculty member in the Cook School of Business, Parks College and the Graduate College.

From 2006 to 2008 he was vice president for academic affairs, dean of the faculty and professor in business and engineering at Norwich University in Northfield, Vt.

Yeigh, an elected fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, has conducted research in mathematical and computer modeling, analytics, simulation, science and technology, engineering physics, engineering management, and safety and security studies.

Yeigh’s salary will be $285,000.

The University of Washington Bothell was established in 1990 to serve students in North King and Snohomish counties. It is the fastest-growing public university in the state of Washington; about 92 percent of its students are from Washington. The university currently enrolls 4,100 students and offers more than 30 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. UW Bothell inhabits a 128-acre campus that is home to one of the most successful wetland restorations in the Pacific Northwest.

But new research by University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker argues that the tea party ideology owes more to the paranoid politics associated with the John Birch Society — and even the infamous Ku Klux Klan — than to traditional American conservatism.

Parker is the author, with fellow UW political scientist Matt Barreto, of a new book titled “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America,” published this spring by Princeton University Press.

At the heart of their book is a nationwide telephone survey overseen by Parker in early 2011 of 1,500 adults — equal numbers of men and women — across 13 geographically diverse states. The results starkly illustrate where tea partyers and true conservatives part ideological ways.

Responses place tea party members far to the right of the mainstream Republican conservatism of Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and even George W. Bush — viewing President Obama as a faux citizen, a Muslim and socialist agitator, bent on America’s demise.

“Tea party conservatives believe in some conservative principles, to be sure, but they are different from more mainstream conservatives in at least one important respect,” Parker said. “True conservatives aren’t paranoid; tea party conservatives are.”

Asked flat-out if they think President Obama is “destroying the country,” only 6 percent of non-tea party conservatives agreed, a number that rose to 36 percent among all conservatives regardless of tea party affiliations. By contrast, 71 percent of self-identified tea party supporters thought this extreme statement true.

“And that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Parker, a UW associate professor of political science. “It’s no secret that tea party conservatives view President Obama with such contempt, but I am the first to document it empirically.”

Other survey results include:

• Three-quarters of tea party conservatives said they think President Obama’s policies are politically socialist while only 40 percent of non-tea party conservatives held that view.

• Twenty-seven percent of tea party conservatives said they think President Obama is a practicing Muslim, while 18 percent of non-tea party conservatives took that view.

• Similarly, 46 percent of non-tea party conservatives allowed that President Obama is a practicing Christian, while only 27 percent of tea party conservatives believed it so.
• Was President Obama born in the United States? A majority — 55 percent — of conservatives allowed that this was true, but of tea party conservatives, only 40 percent agreed.

And perhaps not surprisingly, fully three-quarters — 75 percent — of tea partyers said they wish President Obama’s policies to fail, compared with 32 percent of conservatives.

Parker called the tea party a continuation of what political scientist Richard Hofstadter in the 1960s described as “the paranoid style in American politics,” characterized by exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy.

Parker said, “Consider me a skeptic when tea party supporters call upon a conservative tradition to which they have but a slight claim.”

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For information or interviews, contact Parker at 510-285-7770 or csparker@uw.edu, or Barreto at 206-569-4259 or mbarreto@uw.edu.

The latest version, made public April 9, was developed by a national team with input from thousands of teachers, scientists and other stakeholders, including Philip Bell, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Science and Math Education and the College of Education, and Andrew Shouse, associate director of the institute.

Bell and Shouse are now advising schools, districts and states about how to implement the standards. They will host two public events May 22 to talk about the vision and the new standards with teachers, scientists, school administrators, parents and others interested in science education.

Bell answered questions about the new K-12 science education standards for UW Today.

Q: Why are science learning standards important?

A: Scientific literacy helps us all make better life choices and decisions. The learning standards set the baseline of what we should all know about science. We were very careful to make sure the learning goals help all youth become scientifically literate and college-ready, so they can transition more seamlessly to college and have more choices about majors they can pursue.

Q: What do the standards look like?

A: There are three dimensions that help define the performances for each standard: disciplinary practices, core ideas of science and cross-cutting concepts that apply to multiple fields of science. The standards describe ways a student integrates these dimensions, but we didn’t lay out specific ways to meet these learning goals, so there’s still a lot of work to do in developing innovative curricula and instruction.

Q: What is different about the latest standards?

A: There are several major changes from the last incarnation of documents that have laid out standards for science education in the mid-1990s:

1. More emphasis on specific disciplinary practices used by scientists and engineers, such as developing and using a model, writing an argument from evidence, engaging in computational thinking and developing causal explanations about the natural world. The eight practices for science and engineering help focus what has previously been described as “inquiry” or “hands-on” instruction.
2. Greater focus on engineering and design. This is particularly important now that there’s an increased emphasis on science, technology, mathematics and engineering and thinking about how to integrate those subjects to solve complex problems. And a greater emphasis on engineering in K-12 is especially important because of the technology industries in the state of Washington and the lack of qualified people for jobs in those fields.
3. More challenging goals for preschoolers and kindergarten students. Research studies show that our youngest learners are capable of thinking that’s more complex than we previously believed, so the new standards have more ambitious learning goals for this age group.

Q: Won’t this just be more work for teachers?

A: I have known many elementary school teachers who feel like they haven’t had as much opportunity to teach science over the last decade because of the increased attention being given to reading, writing and mathematics. The new science standards have greater overlap with the existing standards for mathematics and English language arts so that teachers can teach science in ways that accomplish multiple goals. We hope this will make the lives of classroom teachers more manageable while allowing all students to meaningfully learn about science.

Q: Why should people who don’t want a science career have to meet these standards?

A: The science standards help people develop core knowledge and ways of thinking that can be used in a broad variety of everyday situations and other careers, including the ability to skeptically critique information, build an argument based on evidence and design a solution to fit an everyday need.

Q: How are the standards put into action?

A: Each state will decide whether they’ll try to adopt them and on what timeline. Washington state is working toward adoption, and my sense is there’s a lot of excitement around embracing these standards. The state’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction is coordinating the process of figuring out what the new science standards would mean for the state.

Q: Why are you excited about the new science learning goals?

A: It’s an exciting time for helping the public think more deeply about how science and technology relate to their lives and how they can leverage it for their own interests, such as solving problems their communities may be facing. This compels us in a lot of the work that we do.

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For more information, contact Bell at 206-221-3642 or pbell@uw.edu or Shouse at 206-897-1461 or awshouse@uw.edu.

Jeffrey Richey / UW

The team used rented boats to collect samples in the mouth of the world’s largest river.

Until recently people believed much of the rain forest’s carbon floated down the Amazon River and ended up deep in the ocean. University of Washington research showed a decade ago that rivers exhale huge amounts of carbon dioxide – though left open the question of how that was possible, since bark and stems were thought to be too tough for river bacteria to digest.

A study published this week in Nature Geoscience resolves the conundrum, proving that woody plant matter is almost completely digested by bacteria living in the Amazon River, and that this tough stuff plays a major part in fueling the river’s breath.

The finding has implications for global carbon models, and for the ecology of the Amazon and the world’s other rivers.

“People thought this was one of the components that just got dumped into the ocean,” said first author Nick Ward, a UW doctoral student in oceanography. “We’ve found that terrestrial carbon is respired and basically turned into carbon dioxide as it travels down the river.”

Tough lignin, which helps form the main part of woody tissue, is the second most common component of terrestrial plants. Scientists believed that much of it got buried on the seafloor to stay there for centuries or millennia. The new paper shows river bacteria break it down within two weeks, and that just 5 percent of the Amazon rainforest’s carbon ever reaches the ocean.

“Rivers were once thought of as passive pipes,” said co-author Jeffrey Richey, a UW professor of oceanography. “This shows they’re more like metabolic hotspots.”

Jeffrey Richey / UW

Nick Ward collects samples of Amazon River water.

When previous research showed how much carbon dioxide was outgassing from rivers, scientists knew it didn’t add up. They speculated there might be some unknown, short-lived carbon source that freshwater bacteria could turn into carbon dioxide.

“The fact that lignin is proving to be this metabolically active is a big surprise,” Richey said. “It’s a mechanism for the rivers’ role in the global carbon cycle – it’s the food for the river breath.”

The Amazon alone discharges about one-fifth of the world’s freshwater and plays a large role in global processes, but it also serves as a test bed for natural river ecosystems.

Richey and his collaborators have studied the Amazon River for more than three decades. Earlier research took place more than 500 miles upstream. This time the U.S. and Brazilian team sought to understand the connection between the river and ocean, which meant working at the mouth of the world’s largest river – a treacherous study site.

NASA

The mouth of the Amazon River has three main channels, with an island the size of Switzerland in the middle.

“There’s a reason that no one’s really studied in this area,” Ward said. “Pulling it off has been quite a challenge. It’s a humongous, sloppy piece of water.”

The team used flat-bottomed boats to traverse the three river mouths, each so wide that you cannot see land, in water so rich with sediment that it looks like chocolate milk. Tides raise the ocean by 30 feet, reversing the flow of freshwater at the river mouth, and winds blow at up to 35 mph.

Under these conditions, Ward collected river water samples in all four seasons. He compared the original samples with ones left to sit for up to a week at river temperatures. Back at the UW, he used newly developed techniques to scan the samples for some 100 compounds, covering 95 percent of all plant-based lignin. Previous techniques could identify only 1 percent of the plant-based carbon in the water.

Based on the results, the authors estimate that about 40 percent of the Amazon’s lignin breaks down in soils, 55 percent breaks down in the river system, and 5 percent reaches the ocean, where it may break down or sink to the ocean floor.

“People had just assumed, ‘Well, it’s not energetically feasible for an organism to break lignin apart, so why would they?’” Ward said. “We’re thinking that as rain falls over the land it’s taking with it these lignin compounds, but it’s also taking with it the bacterial community that’s really good at eating the lignin.”

The research was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Research Council for the State of São Paulo. Co-authors are Richard Keil at the UW; Patricia Medeiros and Patricia Yager at the University of Georgia; Daimio Brito and Alan Cunha at the Federal University of Amap in Brazil; Thorsten Dittmar at Carl von Ossietzky University in Germany; and Alex Krusche at University of São Paulo in Brazil.

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For more information, contact Ward at nickward@uw.edu or 858-531-1558 and Richey at jrichey@uw.edu or 206-368-1906.

Flickr user Eddie~S

Anti-bullying poster on the front door of a Berea, Ohio, school.

The research team analyzed responses collected in a 2010 Washington state survey of more than 24,000 public school students in grades eight through 12. The study found that 14 percent, 11 percent and 9 percent of male students in grades 8, 10, and 12 respectively reported being bullied because of perceived sexual orientation. For female students in those grades, the numbers were 11 percent, 10 percent and 6 percent respectively.

“These findings underscore the need for early prevention efforts before 10^th grade,” wrote the authors.

Being bullied because of perceived sexual orientation was linked to lower quality of life scores and increased the odds of depressed mood or consideration of suicide. Moreover, the size of these associations was greater than being bullied for other reasons

”Youth at this age group are extremely vulnerable to the effects of bullying when they are perceived rightly or wrongly to be gay, lesbian or bisexual. The effects are profound for many youth struggling with issues of identity and self-esteem,” said Patrick, principal investigator of the study.

“Bully-prevention or harm-reduction programs must address bullying because of perceived sexual orientation. All youths are entitled to safe school environments and support is essential for those who are most vulnerable to being bullied because of perceived sexual orientation,” the study concluded.

Read the article in the American Journal of Public Health.

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Sascha Vaughn

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, an all-male ballet company, will perform in Meany Hall May 16-18.

Dance and drama talents combine for the annual MFA Dance Concert, which leads a busy week of UW arts events. The week also features exhibits, visiting performers and the 50^th annual Theodore Roethke Poetry Reading.

Also, the Ethnomusicology Program winds up its own half-century celebration with a visiting artists concert and the Henry Art Gallery offers the alluringly titled presentation “Off with the Corset!”

All this, and dudes who look like ladies in Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, described by the New York Times as “pancaked, bewigged ladies” trying and failing “mightily — to sustain poses, falling on their rumps, showboating and knocking into one another.”

Roethke Memorial Poetry Reading: Kay Ryan, 8 p.m., May 16. This 50^th annual Roethke reading will be in 130 Kane Hall, the Roethke Auditorium. Ryan has written several poetry collections, including “The Best of It: New and Selected Poems,” which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Yale Review and many other journals and anthologies. Free. Doors open at 7 p.m.

Tim Summers

The 2013 MFA Dance Concert will be through May 19 in the Meany Studio Theater.

MFA Dance Concert 2013, 7:30 p.m., through May 19. The UW Dance Program’s annual event includes choreography by seven master’s of fine arts candidates, in collaboration with masters students from the School of Drama and professional artists from the community. Advanced undergraduate dancers perform. In the Meany Studio Theater. Learn more online. Tickets are $10-$16, $2 more if purchased at the door. 206-543-4880.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, 8 p.m., May 16-18. This popular all-male professional dance troupe performs the full range of the ballet and modern dance repertoire, but for laughs. Advance notes state, “The fact that men dance all the parts — heavy bodies delicately balancing on toes as swans, sylphs, water sprites, romantic princesses or angst-ridden Victorian ladies — enhances, rather than mocks, the spirit of dance as an art form.” In Meany Hall. Tickets are $51-$55 ($20 for students). Presented by the UW World Series. 206-543-4880.

Symposium: “The Mechanics of Beauty: A Question of Representation,” 10 a.m.-8 p.m., May 17. This year’s art history symposium theme springs from a Henry Art Gallery exhibition and carries it to other media and perspectives. There will be morning and afternoon sessions at the gallery, each with multiple presentations. Reception 6-8 p.m. in Molly’s Café. Free and open to the public.

The Brink Bash, 6-9 p.m., May 17. The Henry Art Gallery celebrates the six finalists for its 2013 Brink Award at the Hilliard’s Beer Taproom, 1550 NW 49^th St., Seattle. The winner will be announced on June 7. Tickets are $15.

Voice Division Recital, 7:30 p.m., May 20. UW voice students perform their spring quarter recital, including songs and arias by Handel, Mozart, Bernstein, Brahms, Schubert, Donizetti, Wolf, Debussy and others. Tickets are $5, cash or check at the door. Brechemin Auditorium. 206-685-8384.

Srivani Jade will perform in Meany Hall on May 21.

Ethnomusicology visiting artists recital, 7:30 p.m., May 21. The Ethnomusicology program wraps up its 50^th anniversary celebration with this concert in Meany Hall featuring performances by Srivani Jade, a Hindustani singer who specializes in the North Indian classical form of Khayal; and Thione Diope, a percussionist from Senegal, West Africa. Jade will be accompanied by Aarshin Karande (harmonium), Ravi Albright (tabla) and Priya Bondre (tanpura). Tickets are $20 ($12 for students). 206-543-4880.

Henry Art Gallery, “Off with the Corset!” 7-8:30 p.m., May 23. One of the museum’s periodic “Collection in Focus” events, a presentation by art history doctoral candidate Kimberly Hereford, who will discuss Victorian-era aesthetic dress using garments and historic photographs from the Henry’s collections. At the Henry’s Reed Collection Study Center. Free but RSVP is requested.

School of Art graduation exhibits:

• Several School of Art students will participate in the 2013 Undergraduate Research Symposium, 11 a.m.-5:45 p.m. May 17, in Mary Gates Hall. Free and open to the public.
• Painting and drawing students receiving master’s of fine arts degrees exhibit work in the Sand Point Gallery May 21-25. Reception 6-8 p.m., May 20.
• Three Dimensional Forum master’s of fine arts student Lacy Draper exhibits at the Ceramic and Metal Arts Building May 21-25. Reception 6 p.m., May 21.

• Coming next week: Tennessee Williams one-act plays from the School of Drama.

In the podcasts, Janes, professor in the UW Information School, explores the origin and evolving meaning of historical documents both famous and less known. UW Today presents these periodically, and all of the podcasts are available online.

In this installment, Janes discusses a political

Wikimedia Commons

“Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État?” or What is the Third Estate? A pamphlet by Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès.

pamphlet written and published in Paris in 1789 by Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, a “little-known and less-regarded provincial French priest.” Its title was “Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État?” — or in English, “What is the Third Estate?” More elaborate by far than the trifold brochure we think of as pamphlets today, it was put out in three versions growing from 86 pages finally to 180.

Janes said he chose this as an installment in his series because of a long-held fascination with the French Revolution and wondering if there was any particular document “that lit the flame, so to speak.”

He said, “I came across this pamphlet (all 180 pages of it), which didn’t provoke the revolution so much as crystallize the political situation and help to lay out the structures that emerged from it.”

As Janes said in the podcast, the pamphlet presented widely discussed ideas in a compelling way at the right time and place — that the Third Estate was us all. “His central argument was that sovereignty should come from those who produce, who generate services and goods for the benefit of society.”

Janes grew interested, too, in the personal story of Sieyès — “his meandering and generally ineffectual career, with one towering moment in the writing and reception of the pamphlet,” he said. “And how could you not be struck by his careful calculation that 95 percent of the population was doing all the work and getting no representation?

Janes continues to research and record new installments. The podcasts also are available at the iSchool website and on iTunes, where the series has passed its 32,000th download. His presentation at Town Hall Seattle is available for viewing at UWTV.

CIA World Factbook

The Antarctic Peninsula (in box) extends northward from the main part of the continent toward South America.

But new University of Washington research shows that the Southern Hemisphere’s fall months – March, April and May – are the only time when there has been extensive warming over the entire peninsula, and that is largely governed by atmospheric circulation patterns originating in the tropics.

The autumn warming also brings a notable reduction in sea ice cover in the Bellingshausen Sea off the peninsula’s west coast, and more open water leads to warmer temperatures on nearby land in winter and spring (June through November), said Qinghua Ding, a UW research associate in Earth and space sciences. In fact, the most significant warming on the west side of the peninsula in recent decades has occurred during the winter.

“Local northerly wind pushes warmer air from midlatitudes of the Southern Ocean to the peninsula, and the northern wind favors warming of the land and sea ice reduction,” said Ding.

He is the lead author of a paper explaining the findings, published online this month in the Journal of Climate. Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, is co-author. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

The scientists analyzed temperature data gathered from 1979 through 2009 at eight stations on the Antarctic Peninsula. The stations were selected because each has reliable monthly data for at least 95 percent of the study period. They also used two different sets of data, one from Europe and the other from NASA, that combine surface observations, satellite temperature data and modeling.

Hannes Grobe/Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research

A German research vessel, Polarstern, is shown off the Rothera station on the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Rothera is one of eight stations that provided temperature data for this research.

The researchers concluded that the nonsummer Antarctic Peninsula warming is being driven by large-scale atmospheric circulation originating in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. There, the warm sea surface generates an atmospheric phenomenon called a Rossby wave train, which reaches the Antarctic Peninsula and alters the local circulation to warm the region.

The sea-surface temperature trend in the tropical Pacific is related to natural phenomena such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (El Niño and La Niña) and cycles that occur on longer timescales, sometimes decades. But it is not clear whether human causes play a role in that trend.

“We still lack a very clear understanding of the tropical natural variability, of what that dynamic is,” Ding said.

He said that in the next two or three decades it is quite possible that natural variability and forcing from human factors will play equivalent roles in temperature changes on the Antarctic Peninsula, but after that the forcing from human causes will likely play a larger role.

“If these trends continue, we will continue to see warming in the peninsular region, there is no doubt,” Ding said.

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 For more information, contact Ding at 206-685-8266 or qinghua@uw.edu.

Student researcher discusses her work at 2012 Undergraduate Research Symposium.

In conjunction with the symposium, another 50 undergraduates from UW and nine other universities will present results from research collaborations through the McNair scholars and other such programs, May 16 to 18.

The UW Undergraduate Research Symposium provides a forum for undergraduate students to present the research, scholarly and creative work they have accomplished alongside faculty and graduate mentors throughout the academic year. Through their poster and oral presentations, undergraduates also learn to explain and connect their work to a general audience.

Students will share their research on topics such as new methods for targeted DNA sequencing, improving waste management efficiency at the UW, translating athletes’ football intelligence to classroom success, cultivating a sustainable farm at a prison, creating a low-cost paper-based test to diagnose infectious diseases such as malaria in developing countries, and producing a Native American comic book to share important information relating to cancer education, among many others.

The annual undergraduate research mentor awards, which recognize exceptional faculty and graduate student mentors to undergraduate researchers, will also be announced during the program.

The symposium is organized by Undergraduate Academic Affairs’ Undergraduate Research Program, which facilitates research experiences for students in all academic disciplines. Symposium attendees are encouraged to search the online proceedings.

The regional McNair conference, co-sponsored by the Early Identification Program for Graduate Studies and the Graduate School’s Graduate Opportunities & Minority Achievement Program, will take place at Mary Gates Hall, the HUB and also at the Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center. The 50 undergraduate scholars include 26 UW students affiliated with the McNair Scholars Program, Presidential Scholars Program, Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation and Initiative for Maximizing Student Development.

Getty Images

Illustration of the Bull-leaping Fresco from the Great Palace at Knossos, Crete

DNA analysis is unearthing the origins of the Minoans, who some 5,000 years ago established the first advanced Bronze Age civilization in present-day Crete. The findings suggest they arose from an ancestral Neolithic population that had arrived in the region about 4,000 years earlier.

The British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans in the early 1900’s named the Minoans after a legendary Greek king, Minos. Based on similarities between Minoan artifacts and those from Egypt and Libya, Evans proposed that the Minoan civilization founders migrated into the area from North Africa. Since then, other archaeologists have suggested that the Minoans may have come from other regions, possibly Turkey, the Balkans, or the Middle East.

Now, a team of researchers in the United States and Greece has used mitochondrial DNA analysis of Minoan skeletal remains to determine the likely ancestors of these ancient people.

Mitochondria, the energy powerhouses of cells, contain their own DNA, or genetic code. Because mitochondrial DNA is passed down from mothers to their children via the human egg, it contains information about maternal ancestry.

Getty Images

One of the buildings in Knossos restored by British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans. Knossos was the major civil center of the Minoans.

Results published May 14 in Nature Communications suggest that the Minoan civilization arose from the population already living in Bronze Age Crete. The findings indicate that these people probably were descendents of the first humans to reach Crete about 9,000 years ago, and that they have the greatest genetic similarity with modern European populations.

Read the scientific paper.

Dr. George Stamatoyannopoulos, University of Washington professor of medicine and genome sciences, is the paper’s senior author. He believes that the data highlight the importance of DNA analysis as a tool for understanding human history.

“About 9,000 years ago,” he noted, “there was an extensive migration of Neolithic humans from the regions of Anatolia that today comprise parts of Turkey and the Middle East. At the same time, the first Neolithic inhabitants reached Crete.”

“Our mitochondrial DNA analysis shows that the Minoan’s strongest genetic relationships are with these Neolithic humans, as well as with ancient and modern Europeans,” he explained.

“These results suggest the Minoan civilization arose 5,000 years ago in Crete from an ancestral Neolithic population that had arrived in the region about 4,000 years earlier,” he said. “Our data suggest that the Neolithic population that gave rise to the Minoans also migrated into Europe and gave rise to modern European peoples.”

Stamatoyannopoulos, who directs the UW Markey Molecular Medicine Center and who formerly headed the UW Division of Medical Genetics in the Department of Medicine, added, “Genetic analyses are playing in increasingly important role and predicting and protecting human health. Our study underscores the importance of DNA not only in helping us to have healthier futures, but also to understand our past.”

Stamatoyannopoulos and his research team analyzed samples from 37 skeletons found in a cave in Crete’s Lassithi plateau and compared them with mitochondrial DNA sequences from 135 modern and ancient human populations. The Minoan samples revealed 21 distinct mitochondrial DNA variations, of which six were unique to the Minoans and 15 were shared with modern and ancient populations. None of the Minoans carried mitochondrial DNA variations characteristic of African populations.

Further analysis showed that the Minoans were only distantly related to Egyptian, Libyan, and other North African populations. The Minoan shared the greatest percentage of their mitochondrial DNA variation with European populations, especially those in Northern and Western Europe.

When plotted geographically, shared Minoan mitochondrial DNA variation was lowest in North Africa and increased progressively across the Middle East, Caucasus, Mediterranean islands, Southern Europe, and mainland Europe. The highest percentage of shared Minoan mitochondrial DNA variation was found with Neolithic populations from Southern Europe.

The analysis also showed a high degree of sharing with the current population of the Lassithi plateau and Greece. In fact, the maternal genetic information passed down through many generations of mitochondria is still present in modern-day residents of the Lassithi plateau.

Co-authors of the study are Jeffery R. Hughey of Hartnell College; Peristera Paschou of Democritus University of Thrace; Petros Drineas of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Manolis Michalodimitrakis of the University of Crete; and Donald Mastropaolo, Dimitra M. Lotakis, Patrick A. Navas, and John A. Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington. The study was partially supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (5T32 GM007454), as well as from private funding.

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Expensive, state-of-the-art medical devices and surgeries often are thwarted by the body’s natural response to attack something in the tissue that appears foreign. Now, University of Washington engineers have demonstrated in mice a way to prevent this sort of response. Their findings were published online this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Lei Zhang, UW

These images show differences in collagen build-up in two tissue samples. Collagen is labeled in blue. The left image shows a thick collagen wall forming in the presence of a material that’s widely used for implantable devices. In contrast, collagen in the right image is more evenly dispersed in the tissue after the UW-engineered hydrogel has been implanted.

The UW researchers created a synthetic substance that fully resists the body’s natural attack response to foreign objects. Medical devices such as artificial heart valves, prostheses and breast implants could be coated with this polymer to prevent the body from rejecting an implanted object.

“It has applications for so many different medical implants, because we literally put hundreds of devices into the body,” said Buddy Ratner, co-author and a UW professor of bioengineering and of chemical engineering. “We couldn’t achieve this level of excellence in healing before we had this synthetic hydrogel.”

The body’s biological response to implanted devices – medical technologies that often cost millions to develop – has frustrated experts for years. After an implant, the body usually creates a protein wall around the medical device, cutting it off from the rest of the body. Scientists call this barrier a collagen capsule. Collagen is a protein that’s naturally found in our bodies, particularly in connective tissues such as tendons and ligaments.

If a device such as an artificial valve or an electrode sensor is blocked off from the rest of the body, it usually fails to work. Physicians and scientists have tried to minimize this, but they haven’t been able to eliminate it, Ratner said.

Ratner’s collaborator and co-author Shaoyi Jiang, a UW professor of chemical engineering, and his team implanted the polymer substance into the bodies of mice. The substance is known as a hydrogel, a flexible biomedical material swollen with water. It’s made from a polymer that has both a positive and negative charge, which serves to deflect all proteins from sticking to its surface. Scientists have found that proteins appearing on the surface of a medical implant are the first signs that a larger collagen wall will form.

After three months, Jiang and his team found that collagen was loosely and evenly distributed in the tissue around the polymer, suggesting that the mice bodies didn’t even detect the polymer’s presence.

For humans, the first three weeks after an implant are the most critical, because by then the body will show signs of isolating the implant by building a collagen wall. If this hasn’t happened in the first several weeks, it’s likely the body won’t default to an attack response toward the object.

“Scientists have tried many materials, and with no exception, this is the first non-porous, synthetic substance demonstrating that no collagen capsule forms, which could have positive implications for implantable materials, tissue scaffolds and medical devices,” Jiang said.

UW researchers and others have worked for nearly 20 years to find a way to help the body accept implants. In 1996, the National Science Foundation-funded UW Engineered Biomaterials (UWEB) research center opened at the UW, with Ratner serving as director. Since that time, researchers have been trying to make a material that is invisible to the body’s immune response and could eliminate the body’s negative reaction to medical implants.

Now, nearly two decades years later, engineers have found the “perfect” substance, Ratner said.

“This hydrogel is not just pretty good, it’s exceptional,” he said.

The UW researchers plan to test this in humans, likely by working with manufacturers to coat an implantable device with the polymer, then measure its ability to ward off protein build-up.

The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, UWEB and the UW Department of Chemical Engineering.

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For more information, contact Ratner at ratner@uw.edu or 206-685-1005 and Jiang at sjiang@uw.edu. Jiang is traveling this week and is available by email.

Patrick Robinson

Boaters paddle on the Duwamish River while their dog wades in the mudflats.

In February, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a plan to clean up the Duwamish. The new Health Impact Assessment details changes in health that may result from the cleanup. The report also makes recommendations about how to minimize health impacts, maximize health benefits, and reduce health disparities.

“Our findings demonstrate that EPA’s cleanup plan will significantly impact particular communities,” said Dr. William Daniell, an environmental and occupational epidemiologist and associate professor in the University of Washington School of Public Health.

More than a century of industrial and urban waste has contaminated the river with a mix of 41 toxic chemicals. In 2001, the EPA placed it on the Superfund National Priorities List.  Of the chemicals most concerning to human health, polychlorinated biphenyls, more commonly known as PCBs,  carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, arsenic, dioxins and furans top the list. Exposure to these toxins comes from eating resident fish or shellfish and coming into contact with contaminated sediment.

The Health Impact Assessment report was produced by researchers at the UW School of Public Health in collaboration with community health researchers from Just Health Action and the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition/Technical Advisory Group.

In reference to prior assessments done by the agency, Daniell said: “EPA studies focused on disease outcomes and generally fail to identify and evaluate broader health implications. We hope that they will incorporate our findings and recommendations.”

EPA’s proposed plan will reduce health risks, but it will not succeed in meeting the levels obtained in Puget Sound. Nor will resident seafood be safe to eat for subsistence fishers or for Native American tribal members.

The UW report outlines recommendations to protect the health of the Duwamish, Muckleshoot and Suquamish Tribes, who are affected by the cleanup. In particular, the researchers suggest EPA collaborate with these tribes to address their health concerns and restore their safe access to natural resources and fish.

Sarah Fish

William Daniell, a UW environmental and occupation health epidemiologist, helped develop the report on the health impact of the Duwamish waterway cleanup.

In terms of the impact on local residents, construction-related activities and rail and truck traffic could increase air and noise pollution if not properly managed.  In addition, the cleanup may cause gentrification and displacement of local residents. If done correctly, cleanup may generate new jobs and revitalize the South Park and Georgetown neighborhoods.

“Disadvantaged people who have more life stress, such as poverty, exposure to crime, and less leisure time, are more vulnerable to contamination, which can explain some health disparities” said Linn Gould, executive director of Just Health Action. Gould  was the primary author of the Duwamish Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Analysis. It showed that, compared to King County residents, people who live in the Duwamish Valley have a shorter life expectancy, higher mortality from lung cancer, more hospitalizations for children with asthma, higher rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In addition, more Duwamish Vally residents lack health insurance.

“Residents and other people who use the river have real and valid concerns about how to best protect their health during and after cleanup,” said BJ Cummings, community health projects manager for the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition/Technical Advisory Group, which serves as EPA’s Community Advisory Group for the Superfund site cleanup.

“This study helps identify ways we can improve the result, especially for those who are most affected,” Cummings said

A final version of the report, with findings and recommendations for mitigation measures, will be provided to the EPA in June.

Support for the health impact assessment was provided by a grant from the Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Read the full report.

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Pearce, who died April 20, had been with the Book Store since 1990.

His successor, Louise Little, previously the store’s director of human resources, said, “Bryan lived this last year with an incredible amount of focus and determination, not to mention courage. He was a teacher, mentor, friend, and colleague who inspired those of us who worked with him to be the best that we could be. To say he will be missed does not come close to describing the extreme sense of loss we are feeling.”

Pearce served on the boards of the UW Alumni Association, PCC Natural Markets, and University District Parking Associates. He also served on the board of the Independent College Bookstore Association and provided industry and business education throughout the college store industry.

Contributions in his memory may be made to the UW Foundation, Box 359505, Seattle Wa 98195-9505.  Checks should be made payable to the UW Foundation, with notation indicating the Bryan D. Pearce UBS Endowment.

Please RSVP for the event by May 14 to lgroom@uw.edu.

Aqqa Rosing-Asvid / Flickr

Fin whale surfacing in Greenland.

A carcass that washed up on a Seattle-area beach this spring provided a reminder that sleek fin whales, nicknamed “greyhounds of the sea,” are vulnerable to collision when they strike fast-moving ships. Knowing their swimming behaviors could help vessels avoid the animals. Understanding where and what they eat could also help support the fin whale’s slowly rebounding populations.

University of Washington oceanographers are addressing such questions using a growing number of seafloor seismometers, devices that record vibrations. A series of three papers published this winter in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America interprets whale calls found in earthquake sensor data, an inexpensive and non-invasive way to monitor the whales. The studies are the first to match whale calls with fine-scale swimming behavior, providing new hints at the animals’ movement and communication patterns.

The research began a decade ago as a project to monitor tremors on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, a seismically active zone more than a mile deep off the Washington coast. That was the first time UW researchers had collected an entire year’s worth of seafloor seismic data.

John Delaney and Deborah Kelley, UW (taken with remotely operated vehicle Jason)

A seismometer inserted into a hole drilled in seafloor lava. Eight of these instruments were installed at an ocean spreading-center volcano 150 miles off Vancouver Island. A data recording device is enclosed in the yellow sphere. In three years of operation the network detected nearly 40,000 small earthquakes, and hundreds of thousands of fin-whale calls.

“Over the winter months we recorded a lot of earthquakes, but we also had an awful lot of fin-whale calls,” said principal investigator William Wilcock, a UW professor of oceanography. At first the fin whale calls, which at 17 to 35 vibrations per second overlap with the seismic data, “were kind of just a nuisance,” he said.

In 2008 Wilcock got funding from the Office of Naval Research to study the previously discarded whale calls.

Dax Soule, a UW doctoral student in oceanography, compared the calls recorded by eight different seismometers. Previous studies have done this for just two or three animals at a time, but the UW group automated the work to analyze more than 300,000 whale calls.

The method is similar to how a smartphone’s GPS measures a person’s location by comparing paths to different satellites. Researchers looked at the fin whale’s call at the eight seismometers to calculate a position. That technique let them follow the animal’s path through the instrument grid and within 10 miles of its boundaries.

Soule created 154 individual fin whale paths and discovered three categories of vocalizing whales that swam south in winter and early spring of 2003. He also found a category of rogue whales that traveled north in the early fall, moving faster than the other groups while emitting a slightly higher-pitched call.

“One idea is that these are juvenile males that don’t have any reason to head south for the breeding season,” Soule said. “We can’t say for sure because so little is known about fin whales. To give you an idea, people don’t even know how or why they make their sound.”

UW underwater robot team competes Saturday

This year’s challenges involve installing, operating and maintaining a cabled ocean observing system, similar to the one being installed by the UW this summer off the Washington and Oregon coasts.

The UW team will attempt to qualify for the international contest, as will Western Washington University and Skagit Valley’s 4H club. Middle- and high-school teams from Seattle, Tacoma, the Kitsap Peninsula and the San Juan Islands will compete and see who will advance to the next round.

The weekend event is one of 22 regional contests held in the U.S., Canada, Japan, China, Egypt and Scotland. Winners of the regional contests will advance to the 12^th annual international competition, which will take place June 20-22 in Federal Way.

Cecilia Bitz recognized for decade’s worth of work
Cecilia Bitz, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences, was awarded the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel Award. The $10,000 award honors early- to mid-career ocean scientists who have made significant and growing impacts during the previous decade.

Bitz’s research focuses on modeling climate change in snow- and ice-covered regions. She is an author on the last three assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in March she briefed U.S. Congress members on Arctic sea-ice loss. Bitz, a UW graduate with a master’s in physics and doctorate in atmospheric sciences, currently chairs the advisory board of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.

Greenwald, Kuhl among 25 honored as part of 25^th anniversary

As part of Association for Psychological Science ‘s 25th anniversary celebration, the board of directors has named 25 distinguished scientists – including UW’s Anthony Greenwald and Patricia Kuhl – who have had a profound impact on the field of psychological science over the past quarter century.

Greenwald is a psychology professor and Kuhl is co-director of UW’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences and a UW professor of speech and hearing sciences.

In announcing the awards, the association noted that Greenwald’s work with unconscious and automatic thought processes has changed “what had once been a pariah of psychological science — subliminal perception — and turned it into a respectable area of research and even a gold mine for others to excavate.”

The association wrote that Kuhl is “widely known” for research showing how babies’ ability to discriminate speech sounds becomes increasingly specific to their native language as they age and that social skills play a critical role in language learning.

Tim Summers

The 2013 MFA Dance Concert will be May 15-19 in the Meany Studio Theater.

The arts are everywhere you look on campus this week. There’s experimental music, a string quartet, photos about food, a health-minded art walk, student exhibits and the combined talents of the Dance Program and School of Drama present the annual MFA Dance Concert.

Also, the English department welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Kay Ryan for the 50th annual Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Reading. Over the years, this series has featured such greats as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, Carolyn Kizer, Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, Seamus Heaney and Archibald MacLeish, plus the UW’s own Heather McHugh and Colleen McElroy. As one staff member aptly put it, “I’m sure Roethke’s ghost is grinning somewhere.”

“Dreamlogs: Artists’ Books by Genie Shenk,” through Sept. 27. Shenk records her dreams in visual form, from circular prints and collaged paper to adaptations of illustrations found in antique atlases and dictionaries. This exhibit, highlights Shenk’s extensive career. Allen Library south basement and north first floor bacony.

Photography: “Foodland Security,” through June 3. An exhibit by Ottawa-based photographer Barry Pottle about the challenge of Inuit in urban settings gaining access to “country food,” or food from the land. In the Allen Library’s north lobby. Presented by the Jackson School’s Canadian Studies Center.

Music of Today, 7:30 p.m., May 9. An evening of improvised experimental music in Meany Hall by School of Music faculty members Luke Bergman (bass), Richard Karpen (piano), Juan Pampin (electronics) and Cuong Vu (trumpet), with special guests Matt Ingalls (clarinet) and Greg Sinibaldi (saxophone). Presented by the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media. Tickets are $20 ($12 for students and seniors). 206-543-4880.

Joanne DePue

The Oceana Quartet will perform May 11 in Brechemin Auditorium.

Oceana Quartet, 7:30 p.m., May 11. Members of the School of Music’s scholarship string quartet for 2012-13 are Emily Choi and Rochelle Nguyen (violins), Romaric Pokorny (viola) and Sonja Myklebust (cello). The quartet will perform works by Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven and Greg Sinibaldi, UW graduate student in jazz studies. Tickets are $5, cash or check at the door. 206-543-4880.

Faculty Recital: Carole Terry, organ, 2 p.m., May 12. The UW organ professor will perform works by Bach, Mendelssohn, Sweelinck, Franck, and Widor in a concert on the Flentrop Organ at St. Mark’s Cathedral, 1245 10^th Avenue E., in Seattle. The Flentrop Organ, as perhaps you know, contains 3,944 pipes ranging in size from less than 1 inch to 32 feet.Tickets are $15, cash or check at the door.

Hall Health Art Walk, 5:30-7 p.m., May 13. A public art walk showing 100-some works by UW students, alumni, faculty and staff. Some artists will be on hand to discuss  their work. “It’s much more than just making our newly remodeled building look nice,” said Mark Shaw, director of health promotion. “It has been shown that art in a clinic can promote patient healing.” In fact, he’ll speak on that subject at 6 p.m. in the center’s ground floor conference room. To learn more, contact Shaw at 206-616-8476 or mshaw@uw.edu.

• Hall Health call for art: Any size and media of work by UW students or employees will be considered with a limit of two digital submissions per artist to hhpccweb@uw.edu by June 14. $100 cash prizes for the top three juried works, to be hung in the 2013-14 school year.

Art by Jacob Johns, May 13 – July 12. Paintings, drawings and sculptures by Johns, a Native American artist, will be exhibited in the first floor gallery at the School of Social Work. There will be a reception from 12:30 to 2 p.m. May 15, in the gallery. Both show and reception are open to the public.

School of Art graduation exhibits, through May 23.

• Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media students receiving bachelor of fine arts degrees exhibit in the Jacob Lawrence Gallery May 14-23. Reception 4-7 p.m., May 14.
• Three Dimensional Forum master’s of fine arts student Stephanie Klausing exhibit at the Ceramic and Metal Arts Building May 14-18. Reception 6 p.m., May 14.
• Several School of Art students will participate in the 2013 Undergraduate Research Symposium, 11 a.m.-5:45 p.m. May 17, in Mary Gates Hall. Free and open to the public.

MFA Dance Concert 2013, 7:30 p.m., May 15-19. The UW Dance Program’s annual event, in the Meany Studio Theater with choreography by seven master’s of fine arts candidates, in collaboration with masters students from the School of Drama and professional artists from the community. Advanced undergraduate dancers peform. Learn more online. Tickets are $10-$16, $2 more if purchased at the door. 206-543-4880.

Kay Ryan

Roethke Memorial Poetry Reading: Kay Ryan, 8 p.m., May 16. This 50^th annual Roethke reading will be in 130 Kane Hall, the Roethke Auditorium. Ryan has written several poetry collections, including “The Best of It: New and Selected Poems,” which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Yale Review and many other journals and anthologies. Yale Review editor J.D. McClatchy called her poems “compact, exhilarating affairs” and Ryan “an anomaly in today’s literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.” Free. Doors open at 7 p.m.

The University Ranking of Academic Performance employs six measures:

• Number of scientific articles published and indexed by the Web of Science;
• Research impact of these articles as measured by the number of times the articles were cited by others;
• Sustainability and continuity of scientific productivity;
• Research quality as measured by the impact of the journals in which articles appeared;
• Research quality as determined by the impact of received citation quality;
• International collaboration, measured by the total number of publications made in collaboration with foreign universities.

Information was gathered from 2,500 higher education institutions worldwide, making it one of the most comprehensive university ranking systems in the world.

Harvard University was ranked first, followed by the University of Toronto, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, University of California Berkeley, University of Michigan and Oxford. The UW’s ranking was behind Oxford by just six hundredths of one point.

The University of Washington has been ranked 16^th in the Academic Ranking of World Universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and 24^th by the Times (UK) Higher Education World University Rankings. It was also ranked as 46^th best university by US News & World Report, and 17^th best value among public colleges by Kiplinger’s.

Luc Viatour

All varieties of peppers are in the same botanical family as tobacco. A new study shows that eating peppers may reduce the risk of Parkinson’s disease.

Eating peppers — which are in the same botanical family as tobacco — may reduce the risk of Parkinson’s disease. The findings are reported in the May 9 edition of the Annals of Neurology, a journal of the American Neurological Association and Child Neurology Society.

Nearly one million people in the United States are living with Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that results from the loss of dopamine-producing brain cells. In early stages, Parkinson’s is characterized by difficulties in controlling movement. Initial symptoms include hand tremors, limb rigidity, and problems walking. As the disease progresses, cognitive problems may develop and advance into dementia.

Dietary sources of nicotine may prove protective.

“Eating peppers twice or more per week was consistently associated with at least 30 percent reduced risk of developing Parkinson’s disease,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Susan Searles Nielsen, a research scientist in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the UW School of Public Health.

The investigation of dietary sources of nicotine stems from the puzzling epidemiologic findings that repeatedly show that people who have regularly used tobacco have about half the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, explained Searles Nielsen. In 2012, she published a study that suggested that second-hand smoke also might reduce risk of the disease.

Sarah Fish

Dr. Susan Searles Nielsen, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, researches the effects of dietary nicotine.

“It’s possible that people predisposed to Parkinson’s disease simply don’t respond well to tobacco smoke and therefore avoid it.  However, if tobacco is actually protective, and if the reason is nicotine as some experimental studies suggest,” said Searles Nielsen, “then our hypothesis was that other plants in the Solanaceae family that contain nicotine might also be protective.”

The subjects interviewed for the study included 490 Parkinson’s patients newly diagnosed at the UW Neurology Clinic or Group Health Cooperative between 1992-2008.  The control study subjects were 644 unrelated, neurologically normal people.

While she and the study co-authors investigated the association between Parkinson’s and the subjects’ dietary consumption of a variety of vegetables, including nicotine-containing peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes in the Solanaceae family, peppers showed the greatest protection.  The decreased risk of disease grew stronger with increasing pepper consumption and occurred mainly in people with little or no prior use of tobacco, which contains much more nicotine than the foods studied.

Searles Nielsen cautions that further studies are needed to confirm these findings and explore whether a similar but less toxic chemical shared by peppers and tobacco might be equally or more protective than nicotine.

Study co-authors included Dr. Harvey Checkoway and Dr. Gary Franklin from the UW Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and Dr. W.T. Longstreth and Dr. Phillip Swanson from the Department of Neurology in the UW School of Medicine.

Funding for the study was provided by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, in part through the UW Superfund Research Program.

Northwestern University

Just as people take roads to gather in cities, some bacteria follow trails to congregate in colonies.

Bacteria may draw other bacteria to a site of infection by laying down trails of a “molecular glue” that lead free-swimming individuals to come together and organize into colonies.

In the study, researchers were looking at how a species of bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa attach and move about on surfaces. P. aeruginosa is a common cause of serious, often difficult-to-treat infections.

One reason they are so difficult to treat is their ability to mass together and surround themselves with matrix of proteins, DNA and polysaccharides, called a biofilm, that protects them from antibiotics and the body’s immune attack.

The study was the result of a collaboration of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

The findings were published May 8 in Nature in a paper titled, “Psl trails guide exploration and microcolony formation in Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms.”

Kun Zhao. from the UCLA Department of Bioengineering and Boo Shan Tseng from the UW Department of Microbiology are the paper’s lead authors. The senior authors are Gerald C. L. Wong, professor of bioengineering at the California Nanosystems Institute at UCLA;  Matthew R. Parsek,  UW  professor of microbiology, and Erik Luitjen, at Northwestern University.

In earlier studies, the researchers had noticed that when individual, free-swimming P. aeruginosa attached themselves to glass and began to crawl along the surface they left a trail of a polysaccharide called Psl.

“This was surprising because in the bacterial world this is somewhat unusual,” said Parsek,. “And it looked cool. But the question was whether it was biologically important.”

For this study, the researchers used a specially designed chamber that allowed them to watch how free-swimming P. aeruginosa attached to and moved about on a glass surface. They then used video microscopy to track and analyze the behavior the bacteria.

“Some of the bacteria remained fixed in position,” said Parsek. “But some moved around on the surface, apparently randomly but leaving a trail that influenced the surface behavior of other bacteria that encountered it.”

Once enough of the bacteria had gathered, about 50 or so, their behavior changed: they abandoned their wandering ways and began to organize into small structures called micro-colonies, the first step in biofilm formation.

If there are ways to inhibit the formation of these trails or block their effect, it may be possible to inhibit the formation of biofilms, Parsek said. This might help prevent infections or make them easier to treat.

The researchers are also interested to learn whether other bacterial species also take these polysaccharide trails as a signal to congregate. Pseudomonas infections often involve other bacterial species and this might explain how these polymicrobial infections get started.

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The UW portion of the study was supported by National Institutes of Health grants R01HL087920, R01AI077628, R01AI081983, R56AI061396 and National Science Foundation grant MCB0822405.

“Washington’s housing market is clearly recovering,” said Glenn Crellin, the center’s associate director for research. “However, the pace of sales activity is being held back somewhat by the limited inventory of homes available for sale.”

Crellin said this shortage of listings brings “classic supply and demand pressure on prices, consistent with the observed price increases.”

Existing home sales during the opening quarter of 2013 increased 5.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012 and 14.7 percent from a year ago, reaching a seasonally adjusted annual sale rate of 88,440 homes, meaning that if the sales rate for the quarter continued for a year, that number of homes would be sold.

Quarter-to-quarter home sales increased in 28 of Washington’s 39 counties at seasonally adjusted annual rates. Some counties with a slower sales pace were urban markets such as King County, which entered recovery mode earlier than some smaller communities.

Crellin said he has revised the statistics for seasonally adjusted sales retroactively to 2004 to make the numbers consistent with other data sources such as the 2010 American Community Survey and recent data from county assessors. Given that recalibration, he said, the first quarter of 2013 actually saw the highest seasonally adjusted sales rate since the third quarter of 2007.

The statewide median home price was $237,600, which is 14.1 percent higher than this time in 2012. Despite the steep single-year price gain, this median was seasonally lower than the final two quarters of 2012. County-level medians ranged from a high of $412,500 in San Juan County to a low of $65,000 in rural Lincoln County.

Despite the increased median prices, continued declines in mortgage interest rates allowed improvement in the Housing Affordability Index. This measures the ability of median-income families to buy median-price homes, assuming a 20 percent down payment and 30-year mortgage at prevailing rates.

Crellin said the index shows that middle-income families, at an annual income of $73,150, could qualify for a home priced well above the statewide median. Only San Juan County had an all-buyer index below 100, meaning that a typical middle-income family there could not quite afford a median-priced home in the county. King County had the second-lowest affordability at 134.6, meaning the typical family could afford a home priced about 35 percent above the local median.

Meanwhile, the statewide first-time buyer index reached a record high of 104.4 during the first quarter, meaning a household earning 70 percent of the median household income could just afford a typical starter home.

Regionally, housing affordability varied widely. Statewide, the most affordable community was Lincoln County where the index stood at 481.5 (where 100 means the median income family can barely qualify for the median price home) to a low of 92.1 in San Juan County. For first-time buyers in metropolitan areas, Benton County was again the most affordable and King County the least affordable.

“The biggest current impediment to the housing market remains a shortage of homes available for sale,” Crellin said. “Construction activity is improving, but builders cannot improve availability overnight. Lenders need to release properties which have been foreclosed, but are still owned by the lender to allow the market to stabilize and prevent renewed bubble conditions.”

Mark Kitabayshi, president of Washington Realtors, which produces home sales statistics in partnership with the Runstad Center, said, “If prices continue to rise the expectation of higher mortgage rates by late 2014 will result in greater challenges to first-time buyers who wait.”

Each of the Runstad Center’s quarterly releases coincides with information from the National Association of Realtors regarding median home prices by metropolitan area. Sales, median home prices and affordability data for each of Washington’s 39 counties are available at the center’s website.

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For more information, contact Crellin at 206-685-8020 or crellin@uw.edu.

UW outcompetes PAC-12 schools

Among all the 270 colleges and universities competing in the grand champion category, UW ranked 83. In the category for food services organics, which considers the weight of food waste composted per person on campus, UW was 38^th. Considering the total weight of paper and mixed containers recycled on campus, the UW was 35^th. And considering the weight of paper and mixed containers recycle per person on campus, UW was 183^rd.

In addition to the national competition, UW Housing and Food Services sponsored a competition between UW residence halls. During the two month period, McMahon had the highest waste diversion of all residence halls (highest recycling and compost combined, lowest garbage). Poplar came in second for the highest diversion rate even though it has no dining facility.  McMahon also had the highest compost rate of all the residence halls, followed by Terry/Lander. Hansee had the highest recycling rate of all residence halls.

MIT engineering professor to speak on research, career journey
Many seasoned academics can point to circuitous paths and serendipitous events that led to a successful, perhaps unexpected career in research. One professor’s take on this journey is the topic of this year’s annual Dean Lytle Electrical Engineering Endowed Lecture Series.

Alan S. Willsky, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will speak twice for the UW community. His first talk at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, May 14, in the Electrical Engineering Building (room 105) will be a more technical lecture titled “Learning and Inference for Graphical and Hierarchical Models: A Personal Journey.”

Then on Wednesday, May 15, Willsky will address a general audience with his lecture “Building a Career on the Kindness of Others” at 3:30 p.m. in the Paul G. Allen Center‘s Microsoft Atrium.

Both talks are free and open to the public.

Willsky’s work on large-scale data fusion has been applied in areas such as object recognition, oil exploration, remote sensing in the ocean and groundwater hydrology.

The Dean Lytle lecture series is the electrical engineering department’s largest annual event, usually featuring speakers in the field of communications and signal processing. Lytle came to the UW in 1958 and served for 40 years as a professor of electrical engineering.

Pharmaceutical science association recognizes Rodney Ho
Rodney Ho, professor of pharmacy, will receive the Research Achievement Award in Biotechnology from the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists at its annual May meeting. The award, among the highest the association confers, recognizes the quality of his work and its impact. Ho studies the relationship between drug localization in tissues and cells and the links to disease progression. His nanotechnology and device innovations have helped make anti-infective agents, such as anti-HIV drugs, pain medications and cancer drugs, more potent with fewer side effects.

Herbert Blau

Blau’s six-decade theater and academic career was extraordinary for a Brooklyn-born plumber’s son who studied engineering as an undergraduate and attended not a single play while growing up.

He earned both a master’s degree in speech and drama and a doctorate in English and American literature from Stanford University. Though a longtime professional theater practitioner, Blau was ambivalent at best about academic theater departments.

A stage experimenter, Blau co-founded and co-directed the Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco from 1952 until 1965 with partner Julius Irving, overseeing a famous production of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” at California’s San Quentin State Prison.

He co-directed the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York until 1967. After a brief stint as provost of the then-new California Institute for the Arts, Blau founded another experimental theater group called Kraken, borrowing the name from a letter Herman Melville wrote to Nathanial Hawthorne.

At the UW, Blau was the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities and professor emeritus of English and comparative literature, with an adjunct appointment in the School of Drama.

Blau was the author of dozens of articles and many books, notable among them being “The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto” in 1964, and “As If: An Autobiography (Volume 1),” in 2011.

He was annoyed by productions that played “Godot” for laughs, and preferred it when the audience didn’t know what to expect.

Interviewed by A&S Perspectives in 2011, Blau said, “I often say to my students, ‘When I know what I think, I couldn’t care less. It’s when I don’t know what I think, when I’m utterly baffled, that I really like it, because that’s when I have to keep thinking. It keeps the mind going.”

A memorial is being planned, possibly for June 22. Memorial contributions may be made to the Joseph and Yetta Blau Fund for Graduate Fellowships at the UW.

• Listen to a Katz Lecture Blau gave for the Simpson Center in 2004.
• Read Blau’s obituary in The New York Times.

The University of Washington in collaboration with Washington State University is developing an “academic redshirt” program that will bring dozens of low-income Washington state high school graduates to the two universities to study engineering in a five-year bachelor’s program.

The first year will help incoming freshmen acclimate to university-level courses and workload and prepare to major in an engineering discipline. The students will receive extra advising and a detailed course plan to help lay a strong foundation in engineering. At the UW, they will earn a spot in one of the school’s 10 engineering departments starting their second year.

Dawn Wiggin

Math Academy students from 2012 are shown after a workshop. The summer program at UW could be a feeder program for the new “academic redshirt” initiative.

“Engineering education needs to adapt to the tortoises, not just the hares,” said Eve Riskin, UW associate dean of engineering and program lead for the UW. “We’re talking about investing an extra year in what will hopefully be a 30-year engineering career.”

The initiative, called the Washington State Academic RedShirt in Engineering Program –STARS, for short – is funded by a National Science Foundation grant awarded May 8. Eight other colleges and universities also will receive grants to help increase retention of undergraduates in engineering and computer sciences.

Under the five-year grant, the UW and WSU will enroll 32 freshmen from Washington high schools each year for a total of 320 students after five years. Both universities will hire a person to oversee the program, and they hope to keep it running indefinitely. The first 64 students will begin this fall.

“More and more, we’re seeing students who are bright, but they’ve gone to a high school where the college preparation isn’t good,” said Bob Olsen, a WSU associate dean of engineering and lead of the redshirt program at WSU.

The program specifically targets low-income, motivated high school students in Washington state who are eligible for federal Pell Grants – financial aid based on family income and the cost of attending a university – or go to high schools where a high percentage of the students are on free or reduced-price lunches. Such students usually have a lower retention rate at the university level and are more likely to struggle in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“Pell Grant students receive engineering degrees at significantly lower rates than non-Pell Grant students,” Riskin said. “This is unfortunate, because low-income students could most benefit from a lucrative engineering career.”

The Mathematics Academy, a summertime month-long intensive at the UW for high school students, could be a feeder for this new program in the state.

The UW will receive $970,000 over five years from the National Science Foundation to offer this program to incoming freshmen, and WSU will receive $700,000. Students in the UW cohort will get at least $2,000 in additional assistance from the College of Engineering as well as funding from traditional scholarship sources. These students will live in an engineering residential community.

The National Science Foundation partnered with Intel Corp. and General Electric Co. to fund the nine institutions for a total of $10 million in a grant called Graduate 10K+. Other funded schools include Cornell University, Syracuse University and California State University Monterey Bay. The Washington program is modeled after the Engineering GoldShirt Program at University of Colorado Boulder, now headed into its fifth year.

The UW will hire a full-time staff member to work with students in the five-year program. Dawn Wiggin and Scott Winter, associate directors in engineering’s student academic services, are collaborators.

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For more information, contact Riskin at riskin@uw.edu or 206-685-2313. She is traveling on Wednesday, May 8, but will be reachable by email.

Clare McLean

Family physician Dr. Alisa Hideg is checked by a UW Medical Center nurse after receiving her shots in a UW tumor vaccine trial. Hideg was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 2011.

In June 2011 Dr. Alisa Hideg was a 42-year-old mother and family physician in the prime of her career practicing at Group Health in Spokane when she was diagnosed with estrogen and progesterone receptor negative/HER 2 positive breast cancer.

Breast cancer in young, premenopausal women is usually aggressive. So even after chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, and radiation, with her cancer in remission, Hideg wasn’t ready to take it easy. Both the type of breast cancer and the fact that it happened at a young age made her chances of relapse higher. This knowledge led her to experimental trials, and to the UW’s Tumor Vaccine Group.

Hideg found the UW Tumor Vaccine Group on the National Institutes of Health clinical trials website, ClinicalTrials.gov. She had heard about a trial at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelmen School of Medicine, where the use of gene-transfer therapy converted the patients’ own immune cells into weapons aimed at cancerous tumors. All 12 patients had advanced stage leukemia; nine of the 12 responded positively to the treatment, and two of the first three patients treated have been in remission for two full years.  The Perlelmen results encouraged her to seek out a UW study to see if she qualified.

The UW Tumor Vaccine Group currently offers clinical trials for patients with breast, ovarian or colon cancer. Hideg is in a very desirable trial with very specific criteria, and being approved to participate wasn’t easy. The goal of the clinical trial is to allow the patient to make and keep enough antibodies to quash any future HER-2 expressing breast cancer.

Dr. Nora Disis, UW professor of medicine and principal investigator of the study, explains how the vaccine may work.

“The vaccine is designed to stimulate a particular cell of the immune system, the T cell, to recognize the HER2 protein (that causes cancer),” Disis said. “If effective immunity is generated, the T cell activated by the vaccine should be able to hunt out tumor cells wherever they may be and destroy them.  This particular study is testing the use of an immune stimulator, ampligen, which may be able to activate the T cells more effectively than other agents we have used before.“

Clare McLean

The injection site for the tumor vaccine being tested raises four small dots on Dr. Hideg’s forearm.

Last month, Hideg received a vaccine dose at UW Medical Center. The process is gentle — a series of four small injections that make a little grid of dots on the upper arm — but the body’s response can be angry. Hideg experienced flu-like symptoms after the first visit. The reaction  may actually be a promising sign that her body is responding to the vaccine.

She’s positive and funny in the face of serious medicine. She tweets pictures of her experience to a network of fans and writes about her cancer in Spokane’s daily newspaper, the Spokesman-Review. In addition to being a doctor, patient and full-time mother, Hideg recently went through a series of intense interviews to add “teacher” to her resume. She has become a clinical faculty member to teach second-year UW medical students at the Spokane WWAMI site.  WWAMI is a regionalized medical education program that covers Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho.

“Teaching has always been a part of my clinical practice,” Hideg said. “I have taught medical students, residents and others in my clinic since I finished my own training. This experience has reminded me how important teaching can be and how much I enjoy passing on what I have learned as a physician, a parent, and as a patient. Whether the vaccine is effective for me or not, I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in the trial and help move the science forward. I believe in the potential of vaccine therapy for cancer and perhaps for other diseases also and I want a future with more options for my daughter and for others.”

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The UW team’s exploits in eight-oar rowing are the stirring centerpiece of “The Boys in the Boat,” a new book (to be published June 4) that’s equal parts sports saga and history.

Author Daniel James Brown largely tells the story through the eyes of Joe Rantz, a Western Washington neighbor who was dying of congestive heart failure when he related the amazing tale to Brown.

In just getting to the UW, Rantz had to overcome obstacles in life – both physical and emotional – that few could even imagine, let alone survive. At the age of 15, at the dawn of the Great Depression, he stood alone in the rain and watched his father, stepmother and younger siblings drive away, abandoning their farm – and him – on the Olympic Peninsula.

For Rantz, rowing was yet another challenge, but one that let him find a place in the world that was all his.

The story of how he came together with eight other students – Gordon Adam, Chuck Day, Donald Hume, George “Shorty” Hunt, Jim “Stub” McMillan, Roger Morris, John White Jr. and coxswain Robert Moch – reflects a deep camaraderie, born of strong trust and determination.

University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UWC0599

This photo from the 1936 Olympic Games shows the University of Washington eight-oar boat (top) crossing the finish line just ahead of second-place Italy and third-place Germany.

Brown draws on the boys’ diaries, scrapbooks, journals, photographs and personal memories to weave the tale of how these sons of farmers, loggers, fishermen and shipyard workers found themselves rowing together. They were no strangers to hard physical labor themselves – a few of them, including Rantz, spent summer weeks helping build the mammoth Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in eastern Washington.

During the school year, led by stoic coach Al Ulbrickson, they trained for long hours on Lake Washington in a shell dubbed “Husky Clipper,” designed and built by the legendary George Pocock.

Vince Stricherz

The Husky Clipper, which the UW eight-oar team rowed to the 1936 national championship and Olympic gold medal, hangs in the Conibear Shellhouse on Lake Washington.

In the dramatic events of 1936, the team faced down archrival California and formidable challengers such as Cornell, Navy and Penn to claim the national title on the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Two weeks later the team rowed to victory over Cal, Penn and the New York Athletic Club to secure the Olympic berth. Or so it seemed.

But it turned out that the U.S. Olympic Committee could not afford to pay for the team’s trip to Germany and demanded that the UW crew raise $5,000 in a week or else the second-place Penn team would go to the Olympics. Within two days the folks back home had raised the cash to truly lock down the Olympic berth.

Brown seamlessly sets the events in the historic context of the people and places of the Depression and the rise of the Third Reich. There are samples of the sometimes-tense relationship between Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, and renowned German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who went to great lengths to document the Olympic Games as a Nazi showcase.

Riefenstahl captured exciting footage as the Husky Clipper, in the far outside lane, came from behind to defeat Italy and Germany – barely five years before the United States would be at war with those two nations.

German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl recorded the eight-oar race in which the UW team won the Olympic gold medal. It begins at about 1:10 of this video, following the four-oar competition.

The taut narrative in the book’s last 50 pages describes the tension of the eight-oar gold medal race, yet another example of unexpected hardship for the UW team to overcome.

The book, which has been likened to “Seabiscuit” and “Chariots of Fire,” will be launched officially at 6:30 p.m. June 4 at University Book Store, 4326 University Way. The Weinstein Co. has also begun development of a script for a film adaptation.

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Braester is a scholar of modern literary and visual culture, with a special interest in China from 1949 to the present. During his tenure as a Guggenheim fellow, Braester will work on three book projects. “Cinephilia Besieged: Film, National History, and Global Consciousness in the People’s Republic of China” traces the development of debates on film in the republic since 1949. “Screen City: Beijing and the Culture of Emergence” explores how cities, and Beijing in particular, are fashioned in new media as emerging environments. “Zhang Yimou: The Director and His Films” will offer the first book-length introduction in English to the now-famous director.

Daniel, holder of the Joan and Richard Komen Endowed Chair, studies the control and dynamics of movement in biology using concepts from neuroscience, engineering and mathematics. He’s previously been named a MacArthur Fellow and received the UW awards of excellence for teaching and graduate mentor. During his tenure as a Guggenheim fellow he will be working on three projects. One will be an online laboratory manual for “animal engineering,” which will complement his educational and research interests in biomechanics.  The other is the development of open source computational codes for understanding the molecular basis of force generation in muscle.