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 [...]
Coaches’ Corner: Jennifer Cohen
One of the first things Jennifer Cohen did on becoming athletic director of the University of Washington last May was shelve the hardware. The UW’s previous athletic director, Scott Woodward, had kept an array of championship rings displayed on a wall over a conference table in his office in Graves Hall. In making the space [...]
Stepping Out with the Tuesday Trekkers
Seven years ago, Sandy Wood joined the UW Faculty Auxiliary and quickly discovered the Tuesday Trekkers. “It was a dream come true,” she says. A UW graduate and the wife of a retired faculty member, Wood was looking for an healthy ways to fill her days in addition to spending time with friends, grandchildren, gardening, [...]
Coaches’ Corner: Elise Ray
If there is such a thing as a fifth act in the drama of American athletics, Elise Ray just opened hers to a standing ovation. This past April, Ray closed the books on her first season as head coach of UW Gymnastics, leading the GymDawgs to a program-record eighth-ranked finish nationally, ten spots ahead of the [...]
Staff Story: Gene Woodard
Gene Woodard is a man on the move. The director of the Building Services Department at the University of Washington used to joke that he might be one of the few people who has been in every bathroom on the UW’s Seattle campus. “Then I realized the plumbers probably have me beat there,” he says. [...]
Faculty Friday: Kristi Straus
Somewhere along the way to hauling yet another five-liter jug of water up to her second-floor room in a small village high in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, Kristi Straus decided enough was enough. She paused and looked around, reflecting on the community of subsistence farmers with whom she’d spent the past two years as a 22-year-old Peace Corps volunteer. “The people [...]
#UWTimeOff: Featured Photos and Prize-winners
When we put out the call in November asking you to share your favorite moments from your time off from work, we couldn’t fathom the response it would get. From chance encounters with a bagpiper in a Hungarian forest to bike rides through the Washington countryside to Incan ruins and otherworldly ossuaries, you delivered first-in-class [...]
Faculty Friday: Marcos Llobera
Much as museums might make it seem, the past is not static. Its inhabitants no less frozen in amber or suspended in action poses as part of some done-up diorama than the scene outside your window at this very moment. Indeed, if there is one constant throughout history, it’s that humans move. In the process, [...]
Faculty Friday: Wadiya Udell
Upon earning her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Columbia University, what Wadiya Udell wanted most was to give back to first-generation students in a small liberal arts college atmosphere like the one she had experienced as an undergraduate at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She had her eye on just the place. Perched high atop [...]
Faculty Friday: Zoe Barsness
If you want something done, do it yourself. But if you want something done right, do it together. That’s the driving ethos behind Zoe Barsness’ work as chair of the Faculty Senate, the legislative body of faculty consisting of 122 elected senators who, together with the president, formulate regulations and procedures that govern and guide [...]