October 27, 2014
“I’ve had my leg crushed; been in a full-leg cast for 16 months; put more of my buddies six feet under than I care to think about; been frost bitten and treated for heat exhaustion; and had every one of my fingers and most of my toes broken. [But] when I’m at the top of that mountain of one of those perfect mornings and the sun is just cresting the ridge, nothing else really seems to matter. I guess I…
October 24, 2014
When Thomas Jarboe and Derek Sutherland took their concept for an economically feasible fusion reactor into the public sphere two weeks ago, they expected some negative loud mouths and naysayers. After all, this is fusion physics, a field that seems so inaccessible to most people that it carries a certain mystique and inspires an almost religious fervor to see it succeed or fail. That’s the playing field that Jarboe, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, and Sutherland, a graduate student,…
The University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies will host a daylong conference titled “Kurdistan and the Changing Middle East” on Thursday, Nov. 6, in the Peterson Room on the fifth floor of Allen Library. Reşat Kasaba, Jackson School director, will give introductory remarks and moderate panels titled “Regional Dynamics” and “State-Society Relations in Northern Iraq.” Arbella Bet-Shlimon, UW assistant professor of history, also will participate in the latter panel. The keynote address, “Kurdistan, the Changing Middle East, and…
The UW won Seattle Business Magazine’s 2014 Community Impact Award for Sustainability in Business Operations this week for demonstrating how businesses can have a beneficial impact on their communities. Seattle Aquarium and Harley Marine Services won silver awards for their sustainable business operations. UW’s award recognizes its overall environmental stewardship, Climate Action Plan, many LEED certified buildings and the connection to the UW Business Diversity Program. “This award reflects the terrific work by the entire UW community over the past…
A state-of-the-art imaging machine is coming to the University of Washington for use by researchers in a variety of disciplines.
The UW has an $8 million, four-year contract to develop technologies that can harness waves, tides and currents to power naval facilities worldwide.
October 23, 2014
Brewster Denny, great-grandson of Seattle and University of Washington founders Arthur and Mary Denny, rang the Denny Bell for UW homecoming ceremonies nearly every autumn for 51 years. He died in 2013 at the age of 88, but his family is carrying on the tradition. Denny’s daughter Maria Denny will gather with her mother, Patricia, husband, Jim Kodjababian, and their children, Jacob and Ella, at 4 p.m. Friday, Oct. 24 — at Denny Hall, of course — to ring the…
October 22, 2014
Drama, lectures, dance and exhibitions fill this especially busy week in the arts. From the closing of the Mad Campus exhibition to the start of the UW World Series collaboration with Noche Flamenca on a new work, “Antigona,” there’s plenty to see and do.
Energy researchers at the UW will expand their work in making high-efficiency, printable solar cells and solar inks with the help of a competitive grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. Researchers say these printable solar cells could be twice as efficient as today’s standard solar technologies. This, in turn, could drive down the cost of solar installations and solar power as a clean energy source. Hugh Hillhouse, a professor of chemical engineering, and Alex Jen, professor and department chair…
Foreign policy looms large as the 2014 midterm elections approach. But traditional conservatives and their tea party counterparts may bring different concerns and motivations to the November ballot, according to a University of Washington political scientist. While traditional conservatives seem most motivated by concern over American security, Christopher Parker, UW professor of political science, suggests that those identifying as tea party conservatives have somewhat more mixed motivations, linked with agitation over the Obama presidency and stemming from a feeling of…
Seats are still available for three of the four UW Graduate School Public Lectures of 2014, presented in cooperation with the UW Alumni Association. The lectures are all free, but advance registration is required. The series begins with a lecture by Olympia Snowe, a former U.S. senator from Maine, who will speak at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 6, in Room 130 of Kane Hall. Her lecture is titled “Anything is Possible — How to Overcome Obstacles and Make a Difference.”…
October 20, 2014
UW faculty, other academic personnel and senior graduate students are being invited to apply for the chance to visit the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia during 2015. There is financial support for two UW participants staying for two to four weeks. Each is expected to give lectures, interact with Slovenian students and collaborate with Slovenian faculty members in their field of study. The visits must be completed by the end of 2015 and should take place during the spring or…
Enrollment for the three University of Washington campuses increased nearly 3 percent in the new school year, according to the finalized Fall 2014 census of enrolled students released by Philip Ballinger, associate vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions.
The four evenings that comprise the 2014 History Lecture Series have already sold out, but no one needs to miss the lectures themselves. The lectures will be held from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday evenings from Nov. 5 to Dec. 3, all in Room 130 of Kane Hall. The series topic is “1914: The Great War and the Modern World.” There will be on-site waiting lists each evening and a televised feed will be broadcast in Room 210 of Kane…
October 17, 2014
The University of Washington fosters innovation on its campuses not only because of its deep economic impact “but because, more importantly, we know it can create a world of good,” UW President Michael K. Young said Wednesday at his annual address. “Equally important is the extraordinary advantage that teaching innovation and creativity gives our students, whatever path they ultimately choose to pursue,” Young said. “We do good, and we train the next generation of people who will do good.” The…
With its skeleton revealed in red and cartilage in blue, an image of a scalyhead sculpin fish from biology prof Adam Summers‘ lab is among the winners in this year’s BioArt competition. “Each day, scientific investigators produce thousands of images and videos as part of their research – from collection of image-based data, to the visualization of results,” according to contest sponsor the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. The federation conducts the BioArt competion to “share the beauty…
Fifth and final lecture: Summer 2014 Expedition Thursday, Nov. 13, 7 p.m. Kane Hall 110 Tickets, $20, available here If you missed the UW Alumni Association’s lecture series last spring, “The Global Ocean & Human Culture: Past, Present & Future,” you can now watch the talks on UWTV. John Delaney, a UW professor of oceanography, presented the four lectures last April and May in the UW’s Kane Hall. The talks now available for streaming are: Human Culture, Science of the…
October 16, 2014
The UW World Series presents Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca’s production of “Antigona” — a world premiere — October 23 to 25 in Meany Hall.
Theannual one-day Sustainability Summit this year is the centerpiece of a new weeklong SustainableUW Festival.
If you use high speed Wi-Fi and 4G or LTE on your smartphone, you’ve got Arogyaswami Paulraj to thank. His wireless communications technology – MIMO, or multiple input, multiple output – is the core driver that increases performance in the latest wireless systems. Paulraj will talk about developing this technology and what may be coming next at this year’s annual Dean Lytle Electrical Engineering Endowed Lecture Series. Paulraj, an emeritus professor at Stanford University, will speak twice for the UW…
Human sprawl is usually a threat to wildlife, but some birds buck the trend. Can we help biodiversity take wing in our suburbs? So ponders University of Washington’s John Marzluff in a piece he penned for Aeon, the digital magazine of ideas and culture that posts an original essay every weekday. During a decade of bird counts and research, the UW prof of environmental and forest sciences found an unsurpassed variety of birds in suburbia. Even nearby forest reserves were…
October 15, 2014
New research suggests that considering differences among a variety of cultures can have an impact on how well science and scientific concepts are communicated to the public.
A memorial to celebrate the life of Fred Nick, the longtime director of the Center for Social Science Computation and Research, will be 4-6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 20, in the Walker-Ames Room of Kane Hall. Nick died unexpectedly in early September, just a year after retiring from the UW. He is remembered for his stewardship of the Social Science research center for 38 years, serving faculty, staff and students as a mentor and colleague. In the center’s Autumn 2014 newsletter,…
The Jacob Lawrence Gallery opens its first exhibit of the year, “Industry,” and the School of Drama opens the year’s first production “Cold Empty Terrible” — plus lectures, the World Series and more.
UW Libraries is opening a new study center in its East Asia Library called the Taiwan Resource Center for Chinese Studies. It’s the result of new collaboration between UW Libraries and the National Central Library, in Taiwan. The center will bring valuable Chinese and Taiwanese scholarly publications, and host a new annual lecture series about Taiwan as well. At an Oct. 2 ceremony where a memorandum of understanding was signed, Lizabeth (Betsy) Wilson, UW vice provost and dean of UW…
October 14, 2014
Psychological studies of children who began life in Romanian orphanages shows that institutionalization is linked to physical changes in brain structure. The thinning of the cortex leaves a lasting legacy that can explain impulsivity and inattention years later.
Sometimes a document can be devastating — can ruin lives and change history — even if it doesn’t really exist.
October 13, 2014
The workload and time crunch were comparable to pulling two all-nighters, but you wouldn’t guess that from the energy in the room. Fifteen students, all wearing matching grey t-shirts, buzzed around the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering Monday morning (Oct. 13), clearly excited to show off their designs. They had just finished a 36-hour weekend hackathon, a first for the National Science Foundation-funded center headquartered at the University of Washington. Their mission was to work as teams of three to…
The new Pronto Cycle Share system launched Monday around the U-District, downtown, South Lake Union and Capitol Hill. Pronto is Seattle’s cycle-sharing system featuring 500 bikes at 50 stations, with bikes available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Check out the station map to see all the Seattle locations. Campus stations are at the IMA, the Engineering Library, Meany Hall, Condon Hall, McCarty Hall, the Burke Museum and the Medical Center. Each station has a touchscreen kiosk, station map, helmets, and…
Frances McCue discusses “Mary Randlett Portraits,” a new book from University of Washington Press she created with the well-known Northwest photographer.
A campus landscape framework – meant as a starting point for planning how the UW’s outdoor environment might look in 10, 20, even 50 years – will be unveiled in draft form Oct. 20 as part of a regional symposium on campus landscape planning and design.
Michael Honey, professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at UW Tacoma, has written books about Martin Luther King — now he is blogging about King as well. His writings can be found on the Beacon Broadside, a blog written by authors with Beacon Press, an independent publisher of serious nonfiction founded in 1854. Honey said Beacon asked him to blog about how he got involved with King and the role of the Unitarian Church in civil rights work in the…
October 10, 2014
A group of University of Washington engineering students are winners of the 2014 Ford College Community Challenge, a competition that awards $25,000 per team to student-led groups at 10 universities to fund projects that help build sustainable communities. The UW team’s project is StopInfo, which integrates with the OneBusAway app and provides specific information on location, safety features and stop closures for each bus stop in King County. OneBusAway was developed at the UW and uses real-time data to track when…
The UW Combined Fund Drive raised more than $2 million last year for 1,788 nonprofits. This year’s effort kicks off with a charity fair and silent auction on Thursday from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
The University of Washington’s College of Engineering 2014 fall lecture series will feature faculty researchers in engineering and medicine who are improving cardiac medical care with new technologies.
Better integration of citizen science into professional science is a growing consideration at the UW and elsewhere.
October 9, 2014
Measuring universities on their scientific research productivity, impact and excellence, National Taiwan University named the University of Washington fifth best in the world, and the top public institution in the United States, in its 2014 Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities released Thursday. The NTU Ranking is based on the production and impact of universities’ scientific papers, intended to objectively measure their contributions in the advancement of scientific innovation. “This is yet another international ranking that places the…
It’s impossible not to make this awkward, but here’s our best shot: Welcome to the new UW Today blog. For years, UW Today in various incarnations has provided the news of the University of Washington – from groundbreaking scientific research and awe-inspiring student projects, to ranking updates, awards and roundups of arts events that can be found on campus. So, why start a blog now? To put it simply: Because there’s just too much good stuff happening at the UW…
Tiny animals migrating from the ocean’s surface to the sunless depths helps shape our oceans. During the daylight hours below the surface the animals release ammonia, the equivalent of our urine, that plays a significant role in marine chemistry, particularly in low-oxygen zones.
October 8, 2014
Fall is a busy time for the arts on campus, with a dizzying array of performances and exhibitions to take advantage of.