Two UW professors — Alex Luedtke and Tyler McCormick — are among 60 researchers the National Institutes of Health has named recipients of its 2019 Director’s New Innovator Awards.
November 26, 2019
The latest news from the UW
Six UW faculty members named AAAS fellows
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has named six faculty members from the University of Washington as AAAS Fellows, according to a Nov. 26 announcement. They are part of a cohort of 443 new fellows for 2019, all chosen by their peers for “scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.”
Dads in prison can bring poverty, instability for families on the outside
A new University of Washington study finds that families with a father in prison tend to live in neighborhoods with higher poverty.
November 25, 2019
ArtsUW Roundup: Professor Chadwick Allen presents Earthworks Rising, annual School of Music CarolFest, and more
This week in the arts, Three Sisters closes, Professor Shannon Dudley bridges campus and community, Burke Open Doors allows chatting with researchers, and more! Exhibition: In Plain Sight November 23 – April 26, 2020 | Henry Art Gallery This group exhibition engages artists whose work addresses narratives, communities, and histories that are typically hidden or invisible in our public space (both conceptually and literally defined). The presenting artists approach the exhibition’s theme from a range of directions, varying across all media…
UW astronomy professor Paula Szkody elected to American Astronomical Society leadership
Balancing the needs of open science with national security and journal sustainability, and respecting the beliefs of native populations near observatories are among current issues for the American Astronomical Society, said Paula Szkody, University of Washington professor of astronomy. She has begun a term as president-elect of the AAS, and will serve as the society’s president in 2020-2022.
Grants awarded: Studying ‘culturally sustaining pedagogies,’ dual-credit coursework; teaching global perspective in architecture
University of Washington faculty members have been awarded grants for research to be conducted over the next few years. Django Paris, an associate professor in the College of Education, has been awarded a $1 million grant from the Spencer Foundation. With the four-year grant, Paris will work with H. Samy Alim, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, to study the strengths and limitations of “culturally sustaining pedagogies” — practices designed to foster cultural pluralism — implemented in…
New ‘UW Notebook’ section will tell stories of UW faculty and staff
Welcome to UW Notebook, a new section of the UW News site dedicated to telling stories of good work done by faculty and staff members at the University of Washington.
November 21, 2019
More Washington residents part of University of Washington’s fall 2019 entering class
The new class of undergraduates at the University of Washington this fall contains the largest number of Washington state residents in the UW’s history, according to the finalized fall 2019 census of enrolled students released by all three campuses.
November 20, 2019
Emissions from electricity generation lead to disproportionate number of premature deaths for some racial groups
UW researchers have found that air pollution from electricity generation emissions in 2014 led to about 16,000 premature deaths in the continental U.S. In many states, the majority of the health impacts came from emissions originating in other states.
November 19, 2019
UW drives $15.7 billion of state’s economy; sustains more than 100,000 jobs
Across its three campuses, the University of Washington generated a total impact on the state’s economy of more than $15.7 billion in FY 2018, according to an economic contribution analysis released today. The study further concludes that the economic activity of the UW system supported or sustained 100,520 jobs throughout the state.
November 18, 2019
Among transgender children, gender identity as strong as in cisgender children, study shows
New findings from the largest study of socially-transitioned transgender children in the world, conducted by researchers at the University of Washington, show that gender identity and gender-typed preferences manifest similarly in both cis- and transgender children, even those who recently transitioned.
November 15, 2019
UW aerospace engineer part of $1.7M grant to study corals
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from multiple institutions — including the University of Washington — has received a two-year $1.7 million National Science Foundation grant to study coral growth.
November 13, 2019
Founder of World Justice Project, former top Microsoft lawyer Bill Neukom to chair advisory board for UW Population Health Initiative
Known for his decades-long leadership of Microsoft’s law and corporate affairs team and then at the American Bar Association, his success as CEO of the San Francisco Giants and founder/CEO of the World Justice Project, Bill Neukom will now chair the external advisory board for the University of Washington Population Health Initiative. The university initiative is a 25-year, interdisciplinary effort to bring understanding and solutions to the biggest challenges facing communities, and revolves around three major pillars — human health, environmental resilience…
November 12, 2019
ArtsUW Roundup: Public opening of ‘In Plain Sight,’ view ALTAR: Ritual, Prayer, Offering — and more
This week in the arts, join poet Cedar Sigo at the Burke, learn about the translation of comics, attend a performance by Gabriel Kahane and School of Music faculty, and more! Closing Reception for ALTAR: Ritual, Prayer, Offering November 22, 6:30 – 8:30 pm | Jacob Lawrence Gallery Altars are often erected to pay homage to an ancestor or to honor (a) God or a saint. This exhibition takes the altar out of its religious context and interrogates photography as…
New Weill Neurohub will unite UCSF, UC Berkeley, UW in race to find new treatments for brain diseases
With a $106 million gift from the Weill Family Foundation, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and the University of Washington have launched the Weill Neurohub, an innovative research network that will forge and nurture new collaborations between neuroscientists and researchers working in an array of other disciplines — including engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry and mathematics — to speed the development of new therapies for diseases and disorders that affect the brain and nervous system.
November 7, 2019
ArtsUW Roundup: Olmstead in Seattle, the Music of Somalia’s Disco Era, Artist Talk with Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and more
This week in the arts, see a mind-blowing troupe of wildly creative and physically daring dancers at Meany Center, learn about Somali funk, disco, soul and reggae of the 1970s and 80s, and more! Olmstead in Seattle November 12, 7 pm | Center for Urban Horticulture Seattle has one of the most extensively developed Olmsted park systems in the United States, yet the story of how it came into existence has never been fully explored or described – until now,…
Team uses golden ‘lollipop’ to observe elusive interference effect at the nanoscale
A team led by scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Notre Dame used recent advances in electron microscopy to observe Fano interferences — a form of quantum-mechanical interference by electrons — directly in a pair of metallic nanoparticles.
November 6, 2019
Mailed self-sampling kits helped more women get screened for cervical cancer
Signaling a potential major change in cervical cancer screening options for American women, a new study found that mailed self-sampling kits that test for HPV — the virus that can cause cervical cancer — helped significantly more women get screened for the cancer. The study involving nearly 20,000 women was conducted by researchers from the University of Washington and Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute and was published Nov. 6 in JAMA Network Open. In the study, women within the…
November 5, 2019
Fall storms, coastal erosion focus of northern Alaska research cruise
A University of Washington team is leaving to study how fall storms, dwindling sea ice and vulnerable coastlines might combine in a changing Arctic.
Soundbites & b-roll: HuskySat-1
‘HuskySat-1’ is among seven student-built satellites from around the country that launched Saturday morning, Nov. 2, from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast.
November 4, 2019
Swordfish as oceanographers? Satellite tags allow research of ocean’s ‘twilight zone’ off Florida
UW marine scientists are using high-tech tags to record the movements of swordfish — big, deep-water, migratory, open-ocean fish that are poorly studied — and get a window into the ocean depths they inhabit.
Single discrimination events alter college students’ daily behavior
UW researchers aimed to understand both the prevalence of discrimination events and how these events affect college students in their daily lives. Over the course of two academic quarters, the team compared students’ self-reports of unfair treatment to passively tracked changes in daily activities, such as hours slept, steps taken or time spent on the phone.
Light-based ‘tractor beam’ assembles materials at the nanoscale
Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a method that could make reproducible manufacturing at the nanoscale possible. The team adapted a light-based technology employed widely in biology — known as optical traps or optical tweezers — to operate in a water-free liquid environment of carbon-rich organic solvents, thereby enabling new potential applications.
November 1, 2019
ArtsUW Roundup: attend the Danish String Quartet concert, observe a Monologue Audition workshop, and more
This week in the arts, celebrate Beethoven’s 250th anniversary with Jonathan Biss, attend the Burke museum for free, catch A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and more. Jonathan Biss – Celebrating Beethoven Pt 1 November 5, 7:30 pm | Meany Center In celebration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, Meany Center presents a selection of his piano sonatas with acclaimed pianist and Beethoven expert Jonathan Biss. In addition to having embarked on a nine-year project to record all 32 of the composer’s piano…
October 31, 2019
Washington’s first student-built satellite preparing for launch
After years of preparation, a tiny satellite built by UW students is scheduled to launch early Saturday, Nov. 2, from a NASA flight facility in Virginia. The launch will be broadcast live on NASA TV.
New technique lets researchers map strain in next-gen solar cells
Researchers from the University of Washington and the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in the Netherlands have developed a way to map strain in lead halide perovskite solar cells. Their approach shows that misorientation between microscopic perovskite crystals is the primary contributor to the buildup of strain within the solar cell, which creates small-scale defects in the grain structure, interrupts the transport of electrons within the solar cell, and ultimately leads to heat loss through a process known as non-radiative recombination.
October 29, 2019
UW book notes: Political scientist Megan Ming Francis to edit new series on race, ethnicity, politics
University of Washington political scientist Megan Ming Francis says there is a dearth of academic book series being published on topics of race, ethnicity and politics. Now, she will start to change that. An associate professor of political science, Francis will be the editor of a new series of books from Cambridge University Press called Cambridge Elements in Race, Ethnicity and Politics. Francis, on leave and at Harvard for the 2019-2020 school year, answered a few questions about the new…
Popular third-party genetic genealogy site is vulnerable to compromised data, impersonations
UW researchers have found that the third-party genealogy site GEDmatch is vulnerable to multiple kinds of security risks.
October 28, 2019
Precision mapping with satellite, drone photos could help predict infections of a widespread tropical disease
A team led by the University of Washington and Stanford University has discovered clues in the environment that help identify transmission hotspots for schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease that is second only to malaria in its global health impact.
Video: Spider myths, facts from the Burke Museum’s spider expert
This video features Rod Crawford, the curator of arachnids at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum. He has spent decades studying spiders and says there are many common myths about spiders that he is regularly asked about.
Teen marijuana use may have next-generation effects
A new study by the University of Washington’s Social Development Research Group shows how a parent’s use of marijuana, past or present, can influence their child’s substance use and well-being.
Hubble captures galaxies’ ghostly gaze
An image captured earlier this year by the Hubble Space Telescope may look like a ghostly apparition, but it is not. Hubble is looking at a titanic head-on collision between two galaxies.
October 24, 2019
NSF invests in cyberinfrastructure institute to harness cosmic data
The National Science Foundation awarded the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and nine collaborating organizations, including the University of Washington, $2.8 million for a two-year “conceptualization phase” of the Scalable Cyberinfrastructure Institute for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics.
New fossil trove documents recovery of life on Earth after dinosaur-killing asteroid impact
Scientists have discovered an extraordinary collection of fossils that reveal in detail how life recovered after a catastrophic event: the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
October 23, 2019
UW is most innovative U.S. public university; No. 5 in the world, according to Reuters
The University of Washington is listed at No. 5 on the Reuters Top 100: The World’s Most Innovative Universities, released Wednesday. Now in its fifth year, the list ranks the educational institutions doing the most to advance science, invent new technologies and help drive the global economy.
ArtsUW Roundup: the Paco de Lucia Project, CabLab, Jenny Odell at Town Hall, and more
This week in the arts, kick-off School of Drama’s new season, view local artist’s work at the Center for Urban Horticulture, learn about Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully, and more. Reclaiming our Attention in an Age of Distraction November 1, 7:30 pm | Town Hall Seattle UW Communications Leadership Program presents author and artist Jenny Odell in discussing the impact digital media has on our everyday lives. Joined by political reporter Austin Jenkins, this lecture addresses the dilemma of life in…
UW team sending autonomous surfboard to explore Antarctic waters
This week a UW team is releasing a robotic surfboard to explore the surface ocean around Antarctica.
October 22, 2019
UW is No. 10 on global ranking; No. 2 among US public institutions
The University of Washington maintained its No. 10 spot on the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Global Universities rankings, released this week. The UW is ranked No. 2 among U.S. public institutions.
October 21, 2019
Humpback whale population on the rise after near miss with extinction
A new study finds that the western South Atlantic humpback population has grown to 25,000 whales. Researchers, including co-authors from the University of Washington, believe this new estimate is now close to pre-whaling numbers.
October 18, 2019
ArtsUW Roundup: Music of Today, School of Art faculty lectures, and more
This week in the arts, celebrate flamenco with the Paco de Lucía Project, attend the opening reception for Irreducible Forms, tour the Henry Art Gallery with Ariel Goldberg, and more. Exhibition Opening: Irreducible Forms October 24 – November 9 | Jacob Lawrence Gallery Celebrate work by the second-year Master of Fine Arts students working in and between the media of installation, time-based visual art, painting, and sculpture. Attend the Opening Reception October 23, 5 – 7pm | Jacob Lawrence Gallery Free |…