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Latest news and updates

Latest news and updates

Precision mapping could help predict infections of a widespread tropical disease

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Satellite images, drone photos and even Google Earth could help identify communities most at risk for getting schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease that is second only to malaria in its global health impact. A team led by the University of Washington and Stanford University has discovered clues in the environment that help identify transmission hotspots for schistosomiasis. The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses rigorous field sampling and aerial images to precisely map communities that…

New autoinjector device seeks to make medicine more accessible

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Image of the Epinject device

Through student project-turned-startup MedsForAll, University of Washington materials science and engineering alum Shawn Swanson is developing an affordable alternative to the EpiPen. The MedsForAll approach is to separate the drug from the autoinjector device, allowing the device to be sold separately and pharmacists to load it by inserting a glass ampule of the prescribed drug. Swanson and the MedsForAll team have drawn heavily from the expertise and resources of the UW, including the Department of Materials & Engineering, the Engineering…

Winter 2020 undergraduate course highlights UW population health research

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The Population Health Initiative has again partnered with the University of Washington’s Undergraduate Research Program (URP) to offer a series of lectures during winter quarter 2020 that focus on the three pillars of population health: human health, environmental resilience and social and economic equity. The Research Exposed! (General Studies 391) course will feature faculty from a number of disciplines discussing their population health-related research. Undergraduates may take this course for credit (i.e., one credit/quarter; three quarters max). Each lecture is…

Creating mental health friendly cities for youth

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What would it take to make Seattle a mental health friendly city for young people? What innovations and actions might promote adolescent mental health in Seattle, as a model for other cities? The Population Health Initiative recently partnered with the University of Washington’s Global Mental Health program and Urban@UW to host an in-depth conversation with a multidisciplinary group of participants, including researchers, mental health professionals and young people to begin searching for answers to these question. Adolescence brings unique opportunities…

New UW research evaluates tropical forests as a natural climate solution

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A new research project from the University of Washington and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is investigating tropical forests as a natural climate solution that could help protect human health, create climate-resilient communities and slow the pace of planetary warming. Specifically, the research team aims to estimate the potential benefits of the cooling services that forests provide by quantifying for the first time the large-scale effects of temperature rise on human health and economic productivity. This project was funded by the…

Bill Neukom to chair Population Health Initiative advisory board

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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 (pictured) will now chair the external advisory board for the University of Washington Population Health Initiative. “This is a bold and imaginative initiative of the president of the University of Washington to identify and build up the essential ingredients for functional communities —…

UW student team develops universal eyedrop bottle adaptor to reduce medication waste

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Nearly all eye droppers create droplets that are too big for an eye to absorb. Bigger drops means people go through medication faster, which means they buy more medication more often. To address this challenge, a team of University of Washington students created the Nanodropper, which is a small device that screws on to bottles currently on the market and controls the size of the droplets produced. The team says that, depending on their medications, Nanodropper should save consumers anywhere…

Swinomish Tribe collaborates with the UW to prepare for climate change

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A new research project led by the Swinomish Tribe and the University of Washington Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences is identifying strategies informed by indigenous values to adapt to climate change. Some of the adaptation strategies adopted to date include adding climate-change education to the Tribe’s educational curriculum on traditional harvest practices and increasing aquaculture capacity to help protect wild clam beds from rising sea levels. The results of this project could inform how tribes across the United…

Visualizing the lives of people experiencing homelessness and their animals

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Sparked by a grant from the University of Washington Population Health Initiative, the UW’s Center for One Health Research has created a series of pop-up galleries featuring autobiographical photographs made by people experiencing homelessness with their animal companions. The center’s photo galleries provide windows into the lives of people experiencing homelessness as they navigate the complexities of getting through their days and nights with a service animal, emotional support animal or pet. Earlier this year, One Health researchers also tested…

Assessing community well-being post disaster via physical activity data

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New research from an interdisciplinary team of University of Washington researchers funded by the Population Health Initiative found that biking and walking data may be useful to understand the impact of a disaster on a community and its recovery progress. The research team used counts of the daily number of bicyclists and pedestrians on four commuter and recreation trails around Houston in two six-week spans, before and after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, to test how storm damage impacted levels of…