The latest news from the UW

David Shields, UW professor and New York Times best-selling author, was at the center of a Dec. 2 article by Adelle Waldman in The New Yorker titled “An Answer to the Novel’s Detractors.” Waldman places Shields among those detractors, but does not entirely disagree with him. “It’s no coincidence that many of the most exciting novels to have appeared in recent years … have been distinctly un-novelistic,” Waldman wrote, “featuring protagonists who share many biographical details (and sometimes names) with…

Kathleen Fearn-Banks, UW associate professor of communication, drew upon her 21 years of experience as a publicist in network television to write her 2005 “Historical Dictionary of African American Television.” This fall, an expanded second edition of the book was published. Banks was NBC’s first African-American publicist and second-ever female publicist when hired there in 1969 after working in journalism. She spent two years researching the book, ranging from the 1939 broadcast of the “Ethel Waters Show” to current television…

University of Washington computer scientists have partnered with members of the Carbon Washington grassroots campaign to create an online tool that lets residents calculate how a state carbon tax swap proposed by the organization would impact them financially. The calculator offers information users can’t find elsewhere and is meant to be a neutral, unbiased tool. “The tool should be very useful to voters trying to decide their position on the carbon tax policy. Many people will have broader societal motivations…

Marine mammal expert Kristin Laidre, a polar scientist at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory and in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, studies Arctic mammals in their native habitat. She focuses on polar bears and narwhals, an Arctic whale with a distinctive spiral tusk. In spring 2013 she invited Seattle watercolor artist Maria Coryell-Martin to join an expedition to West Greenland and share an artist’s perspective on what it’s like to do research in the far north. (Coryell-Martin is…

The co-director of the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences is among officials from around the country participating in today’s White House Summit on Early Education. Patricia Kuhl, a world-renowned scientist in early language and brain development, joins state and local policymakers, school district superintendents, community leaders and others for the summit. Participants are expected to share their ideas about best practices and effective strategies, with the goal of expanding access to high-quality early education for children nationwide. Kuhl…

Superheroes are generally assumed to be healthy and virtually immortal, tending their superpowers as they save the planet time and again. But a new book by José Alaniz, UW associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures, seeks to redefine the contemporary image of the superhero. “Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond,” published this fall by University of Mississippi Press, draws on DC and Marvel comics from the 1960s to the 1990s to investigate how death and…

Jane Heinrichs is a doctoral student in piano performance at the UW School of Music and will perform in two of the three concerts that comprise the three-part series “Music from the War to End All Wars.” The series begins Sunday, Dec. 7, in Brechemin Auditorium, and continues on March 3 and May 8, 2015. So, does knowing the historical context of a piece of music affect how she approaches and performs it? Not exactly, Heinrichs said, “but it is…

Andrew J. Boydston, a UW associate professor of chemistry, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation. The award is intended to support junior faculty who “exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research,” according to the NSF. Boydston received the award for his proposal to develop materials that apply mechanical force to drive chemical reactions that release small organic molecules. Those small molecules could be…

Join some of the world’s leading experts on the Southern Ocean for a webinar on Thursday, Dec. 4, from 11 a.m. to noon Seattle time. Viewers can log on here with a Google account, or watch on YouTube. “UW-built sensors to probe Antarctica’s Southern Ocean” UW Today | Sept. 11, 2014 The Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project, based at Princeton University, is a six-year collaborative effort to improve understanding of the Southern Ocean’s role in climate….

Four University of Washington researchers have received the Allen Distinguished Investigator award for their work in artificial intelligence research. The awards, totaling about $2.7 million to the UW from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, will fund early stage research in several areas of artificial intelligence. The recipients from the UW are Jeffrey Heer, an associate professor of computer science and engineering; Ali Farhadi, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering; Hannaneh Hajishirzi, a research scientist in electrical engineering;…

Seattle-based criminal defense attorney Jeff Robinson will join the University of Washington School of Law in a discussion of factual, ethical and legal issues relating to the use of deadly force by law enforcement officers in communities of color. He will be joined by Washington Supreme Court Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud. The event is titled “‘You Can Observe a Lot Just by Watching’ — The Killing of Michael Brown and the Transparent Grand Jury Investigation” and will take place from…

The Green Seed Fund – a grant fund for campus environmental research projects – is accepting proposals through Dec. 11 for the next round of grants. The Green Seed Fund aims to promote and fund research projects that advance sustainable research while contributing to the university’s sustainability goals. The fund was launched in 2013, and in its inaugural year 15 proposals totaling nearly $1 million were submitted. From that pool, proposals were selected and awarded nearly $279,000 in funding. A…

Influential educator and former University of Washington professor John Goodlad died Nov. 29 at his Seattle home. He was 94. Goodlad came to the UW in 1984 after serving as dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Los Angeles. He created the Center for Educational Renewal at the UW to conduct research on teacher education and school renewal. Additionally, he established the independent Seattle-based Institute for Educational Inquiry to apply research findings to school…

The University of Washington Evans School of Public Affairs will host its namesake, former Washington governor and senator Daniel J. Evans, for a conversation from noon to 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 3, in the Parrington Hall Forum. Evans served as governor from 1965 to 1977, then moved on to the presidency of Evergreen State College. When Senator Henry M. Jackson died in 1983, Evans was appointed in his place, and served in the senate until 1989. In 1993, then-Gov. Mike…

“Militarized Policing and Public Protest: From the WTO Protests to Ferguson” is the topic of a documentary video screening and panel discussion at the University of Washington on Tuesday, Dec. 2. The event, from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center, starts with a screening of “This Is What Democracy Looks Like.” The 72-minute documentary was made from footage shot by more than 100 “media activists” during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle….

University of Washington historian Michael Honey learned about folk singer and union organizer John Handcox through a mutual friend whose name might be familiar: Pete Seeger. Honey tells of the 1985 meeting, and of “Sharecropper’s Troubadour,” the book he came to write about Handcox (with Seeger penning the foreword), in an article in Smithsonian Folkways Magazine. UW Today wrote about Honey’s book in January, 2014. In 1940, Woody Guthrie joined Seeger and folklorist Alan Lomax in collecting Handcox’s work into…

Disintegrating sea stars – a process described as melting, with the arms detaching and crawling away from each other – is being caused by a virus that’s been detected in West Coast waters for more than 70 years. That’s according to new findings published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by 24 co-authors including the University of Washington’s Carolyn Friedman, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences, and Colleen Burge, who earned her bachelor’s and…

Three University of Washington professors will join a congressman, a mountain climber, inventors, architects, advocates, an astronaut and even a barista at this year’s TEDxRainier event, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 22, at Marion Oliver McCaw Hall at Seattle Center. The independently run, one-day event is in its fifth year in Seattle, modeled after the popular TED Talks. The 2014 local event brings together Seattle-area thinkers and innovators to share ideas on the theme “The Known and the…

Do you know an outstanding University of Washington employee, alumnus, student or retiree who contributes to the richness and diversity of the university community? Honor that person with an Awards of Excellence nomination. Nominations are due beginning in November and continuing in succeeding months for the 2015 University of Washington Awards of Excellence categories. Details of awards and nomination procedures follow. Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus Award The highest honor bestowed upon a UW graduate recognizes an outstanding alumnus or alumna, distinguished for service…

We Homo sapiens and our energy-gobbling technologies are changing the very ecology of the Earth. But even as these human-caused changes unfold, some wonder whether we have doomed ourselves to extinction. In a new paper in the journal Anthropocene, University of Washington astronomer Woodruff Sullivan and co-author Adam Frank, a University of Rochester astrophysicist and a UW alumnus, suggest this might not be the first time “where the primary agent of causation is knowingly watching it all happen and pondering…

As you might guess from the name, dark matter is quite elusive. Its particles make up about one-quarter of the mass of the universe and as much as 85 percent of all matter. But it apparently does not interact with light or other matter and so it’s never been directly observed. In a webcast Thursday, Nov. 20, three scientists including University of Washington physicist Gray Rybka will discuss how close we are to actually identifying dark matter. They will talk…

The latest in the Seattle Arts & Lectures SAL U series will look at technologies that could help repair a person’s cognitive or sensory-motor functions. “Brain-Computer Interfaces: Building the Bionic Man” is at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 19, in Kane Hall room 110. The speaker is Rajesh Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering and director of the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering. Rao’s research involves understanding computational principles in the brain’s ability to learn, process and store information, then…