The latest news from the UW

The University of Washington has received notification from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research that it will receive $3.5 million for a Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Research and Training Center, renewable every five years.

A team of American and British researchers studying 2-year-old twins has found that genetics, not the environment, plays the major role in the delayed acquisition of language among children who are having the most difficulty learning to speak.

Dr. Steven G. Gabbe, professor and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Washington School of Medicine and an international authority on high-risk pregnancy, has been elected to the Institute of Medicine.

David Salesin’s resume keeps getting longer as he makes room for his ever-expanding list of honors and awards. The latest addition comes from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, which has named Salesin the 1998-99 Washington Professor of the Year.

Emergency preparedness, ecological contamination, worker health and groundwater quality in and around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation are among topics to be addressed during a two-day conference Nov. 3 and 4 in Richland, Wash.

Educational institutions must work more closely with government and industry if they are to succeed in the increasingly competitive global environment. That is the motivation behind the Pacific Northwest Regional Roundtable for Enhancing Engineering and Technology Education, which will hold its first meeting from 1 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 19, at the University of Washington Husky Union Building.

Grateful for the excellent care he received in 1994 at Harborview Medical Center after a serious foot injury, a California man has donated $500,000 to the University of Washington School of Medicine to create an endowed professorship in the Department of Orthopaedics.

The University of Washington School of Medicine has established the Ray and Grace Hill Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology, funded through contributions of $1.5 million from Grace E. Hill and her late husband, Ray Hill, who graduated from the UW in economics in 1924.

People have taken more than 33,000 tests that measure unconscious components of prejudice and stereotyping in the first week since twin Web sites were opened to the public by psychologists from the University of Washington and Yale University.

Everyone in the Northwest talks about the weather. Now a University of Washington atmospheric scientist and the state Department of Transportation plan to do something about it.

Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University and the co-author of a book that is the most comprehensive analysis of the effects of racial preferences in higher education, will be a guest speaker at the University of Washington Board of Regents Academic and Student Affairs Committee meeting, 8:30 a.m. Friday, Oct. 16 in the Walker-Ames Room.

Recent rumors that Western Washington is in for its severest winter in 50 years are nothing more than unsupported hype that goes well beyond current forecast abilities, according to University of Washington atmospheric scientists.

Two new studies of avalanches in Snoqualmie Pass in the Washington Cascades near Seattle could bring about more accurate predictions that will safeguard travelers in quickly changing conditions.

Two Wyoming towns, Powell and Buffalo, have been chosen as family practice training sites for third-year University of Washington (UW) medical students. Beginning in July of 1999, selected medical students will take their required, six-week clerkship in family medicine in these towns.

The University of Washington is poised to become the first institution anywhere to launch a doctoral program specifically geared to train scientists to search for life on celestial bodies such as Mars or Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter.

The pervasiveness of prejudice, affecting 90 to 95 percent of people, was demonstrated today in a Seattle press conference at the University of Washington by psychologists who developed a new tool that measures the unconscious roots of prejudice.

The University of Washington today announced two major milestones in advanced Internet connectivity for the Pacific Northwest. Both developments are part of UW’s Pacific Northwest Gigapop project, the recipient of significant support from the 1998 Washington State Legislature.

A lecture series celebrating the “International Year of the Ocean” will feature UW faculty who’ve traveled to the seafloor in tiny submersibles, studied salmon from the wilds of Alaska to the heart of Seattle, and collected samples from some of the coldest and hottest spots on earth in search of unusual microorganisms.

A powerful new psychological tool that shows a shocking number of people — as many as 90 to 95 percent — display the unconscious roots of prejudice will be demonstrated at a 10 a.m. press conference Tuesday Oct. 2 at the University of Washington by its developer, UW psychology professor Anthony Greenwald.

A four-year, $1.3 million grant to the University of Washington will be used to encourage students who might not think of higher education to include college in their plans for the future.

A recently completed study shows that calcitonin-salmon nasal spray reduced by 36 percent the incidence of new spinal fractures in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis.

Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have shown that older women’s response to treatment with GHRH (a synthetic form of growth hormone releasing hormone) is directly related to the dosage.

In an effort to narrow the digital divide that separates many American Indians from the technological resources available to the rest of the population, the University of Washington announced Microsoft has donated $75,000 cash plus more than $500,000 in software and training to The American Indian Science Technology Education Consortium (AISTEC) to increase technological access at three tribal colleges.

University of Washington basketball stars Jamie Redd and Donald Watts will travel to Tacoma later this month to talk with kids about the way sports has shaped their lives and given them educational opportunities.

The University of Washington received $557 million in grant and contract awards for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1998–an increase of nine percent over the previous year and the highest level of awards ever received at the university.

The University of Washington today was awarded a four-year, $1.2 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to support undergraduate education in the biological sciences

The Foundation for International Understanding Through Students (FIUTS) will celebrate its 50th anniversary with a series of events Oct. 1-4.

American society needs to take a critical look at treatment programs for men who batter their wives or girlfriends and stringently test them to make sure that they actually work to end domestic violence, says one of the foremost researchers of abusive relationships.

Can you trust medicines derived from plants? Will the Microsoft antitrust case aid consumers or simply benefit the company’s competitors? Are ballot initiatives a sign of the strength or weakness of our democratic system? These are some of the issues that will be addressed by distinguished faculty from the University of Washington at Saturday Seminars, which are held before four home football games this year.

In remote rural towns, parents and school districts often are at a disadvantage in obtaining expert consultations for their children with special needs, because most centers for childhood disabilities are in major cities, many miles away. A three-year grant from the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services of the U.S. Department of Education will help several rural districts overcome these obstacles. The project, “Telepartners in Early Diagnosis and Intervention for Children with Disabilities,” will use interactive videoconferencing to connect rural educators and health professionals with special education experts, child psychologists and UW clinicians.

UW President Richard L. McCormick announced today new titles for the chief executive officer of its campuses in Bothell and Tacoma. The titles of the heads of the University of Washington, Bothell and the University of Washington, Tacoma will become “Chancellor and Dean,” recognizing the dual roles these individuals play in campus management and external relations, as well as academic, budgetary and capital matters.

The exact location of Fort Clatsop, Lewis and Clark’s winter camp near the Oregon Coast, has eluded searching archaeologists for more than half a century. This month, anthropology professor Julie Stein heads a team of archaeologists from the University of Washington and its Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture who are joining the hunt for the fort.

A team of archaeologists from the National Park Service, the Museum of the Rockies and the University of Washington will show how they are trying the find the precise location of Lewis and Clark’s winter camp and what they learned so far at a media briefing.

The first major monument in the United States to American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War will be dedicated at 2 p.m., Oct. 14 in the auditorium of the Husky Union Building (HUB) at the University of Washington.

Despite a raging but reluctant debate about exactly what kind of relationship the President had with a White House intern, many Americans wish the whole public discourse about sex would just quietly go away. That’s not necessarily a good thing, says Pepper Schwarz, coauthor of a new book, “What I’ve Learned About Sex: Wisdom from Leading Sex Educators, Therapists and Researchers.”

The University of Washington Center for Women in Science & Engineering has been selected to receive a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.

The University of Washington was recently selected as one of ten American universities to host newly established European Union Centers which will promote the study of the EU, its institutions and policies, and EU-US relations through teaching programs, scholarly research and outreach programs.

The world’s oldest known fossil of a toothless whale, a previously unknown genus and species, has yielded clues about the evolution of the ocean-going giants. Now, after five years of study and preparation, it is on public display at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington.

An experiment to devise a new method for tracking large-scale changes in ocean temperature associated with events such as El Niño and with global warming indicates that scientists can successfully use low-frequency sound transmissions to measure the temperature of vast expanses of ocean.

The University of Washington received $170.3 million in private gifts and grants during the 1997-98 fiscal year, a new record. Gifts alone were $84.8 million, the second highest total in University history.