Raise the Bar: Summer Spotlight Week 1
We’re well into Week 2 of our 60-day Raise the Bar challenge and one thing is clear: the consistent level of creativity and commitment across the University of Washington as groups work together to promote wellness in the workplace. Just like wellness, your strategies have taken many forms: “wellness walls” that promote healthful office environments; [...]
Faculty Friday: Jennifer Stuber
As humans, we leave little room for tragedy in our lives. When tragic events do occur—invading the idyll of the everyday and shattering our confidence in common bonds—we all too often attempt to cope by burying associated memories deep beyond reach: suffering stifled, pain pent up, and the confusion sown by death, disease, and mental [...]
Faculty Friday: Luke Tornabene
Luke Tornabene hovers above the abyss, suspended somewhere between fathomless darkness and daylight 800 feet above. A thin layer of condensation has formed on the interior of the five-person submersible—the product of warm air within the cockpit reacting to increasingly cold water without as the research vessel slips ever deeper into the dusk-colored Caribbean waters [...]
Staff Story: Alysun Deckert
Alysun Deckert knows what it means to run fast. She always has, dating back to high school in Salinas, Kansas where she won nine state championships running cross-country and as a track athlete in the 1600m and 3200m. Turned marathoner after college, she also knows what it means to sustain performance at the highest levels—not [...]
Staff Story: Zhuou Li
When Zhuou Li emigrated from China to Seattle in 1992, everything was new—everything, that is, except for the journey itself. It was a passage Li’s father had made twelve years before him and one his grandfather had completed some four decades before that. “They’d work here and then go back to China, marry, then apply [...]
Call for Submissions: Faculty Friday
Every week, The Whole U spotlights the life and work of a UW faculty member in our recurring profile feature, Faculty Friday, with the aim of telling the “story behind the story” of that faculty member’s path to the University of Washington, while also sharing their research with a wider audience. The depth and breadth of talent at [...]
Faculty Friday: Ellwood Wiggins
We can learn a lot from the world’s worst villains—that is, if we only spare some sympathy to take a moment to see things their way. If that strikes you as an inflammatory suggestion, it’s supposed to be. For Ellwood Wiggins, assistant professor of Germanics at the University of Washington, it’s an essential exercise in [...]
Faculty Friday: Pedro Domingos
Most computer scientists seek to empower machines. Pedro Domingos would rather empower people. “You may not be interested in technology, but technology is interested in you,” he says, using a witting corruption of Leon Trotsky’s famous quip about politics to underscore why he believes it’s increasingly important for people to take an active interest in how artificially intelligent technology is coming to influence everyday life. A professor [...]
Staff Story: Bethany Staelens
Few who undertake the transition from actor to activist manage to continue to do both well. Bethany Staelens, on the other hand, has always performed where it counts. By night, Staelens sings at the front a 19-piece big band, but once the footlights fade and the next day dawns, she can be found at the [...]
Staff Story: Thomas Kuljam
When a veteran leaves a branch of the armed forces, it is often seen as a time to get on with the business of living. But for military veterans, the transition to civilian life is not always easy. That’s where Thomas Kuljam comes in. As director of UW Tacoma’s Veterans Incubator for Better Entrepreneurship (VIBE), [...]
Artist Spotlight: Deborah Conger Hughes
Sometimes an artist comes along whose passion for a given medium is as infectious as she is talented. Enter Deborah Conger Hughes. A UW alumna and longtime UW employee, Hughes began working at the UW in 1984. She retired in 2008 and passed away in 2015, but not before leaving an indelible legacy at the UW, both in the form of images [...]
Faculty Friday: Bruce McCormick
The moment Bruce McCormick was first moved to dance, the dancers hardly moved at all. “I remember just looking up and all the dancers all looked so tall and were smiling and I was completely in awe,” McCormick says, recalling the feeling of standing at the foot of the stage as a 7-year-old during a dress rehearsal [...]