Where you live can say a lot about your health. “Neighborhoods are one way that people are sorted, if you will, into areas that have varying access to infrastructure and services that promote health,” said Wendy Barrington, an assistant professor in the School of Nursing. Barrington first came to the UW for the Ph.D. program in epidemiology in 2007. Her dissertation explored how the neighborhoods in which people live and work can affect their stress levels and obesity rates.

We all know planting trees is good for the environment, but does it matter where we plant them? Yes, according to UW’s Ecoclimate Lab, which explores how vegetation in one part of the world can affect the climate in other, far-off places. “If we added a bunch of forests across North America and Asia, that can actually cause the circulation in the atmosphere to shift, which can make it rain in the tropics,” said lab leader Abigail Swann, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Atmospheric Sciences.

In most architecture programs, students learn how to design new buildings. If you take a class with Kathryn Rogers Merlino, you’ll be asked to think about working with old ones. “We spend so much time recycling our glass and our paper and our plastic, yet we typically don’t have the same ethic when it comes to buildings,” said Merlino, an associate professor in the Department of Architecture.

Ryan Calo has a lot to say about robots. The School of Law professor doesn’t make them or test them, like some of his colleagues who are engineers. Instead, he looks at the legal and policy aspects of modern machines, from drones to driverless cars. “The conversations we have about new technology are often legal ones,” said Calo, a co-director of UW’s Tech Policy Lab. When we think about drones, for example, we look to the Federal Aviation Administration for guidance. When our cell phones come out with a revamped GPS system, we wonder if it might compromise a right to privacy.

Beatrice Arduini is an assistant professor in the Department of French & Italian Studies. She teaches several levels of Italian, and while she speaks a total of three languages, it’s not hard for her to relate to struggling students. “I don’t consider myself particularly gifted in learning languages,” she said. “But I think it’s like learning a new sport. Once you manage to master the basics, it’s fun.”

When you’re a professor, researcher, inventor, entrepreneur, and MacArthur fellow, it can be hard to introduce yourself to the person sitting next to you on an airplane. Shwetak Patel keeps it simple. “I always say professor at the University of Washington. Everything else comes out of that,” said Patel, who has a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering. “I’m passionate about teaching, research, and mentoring students. The other stuff, like being an inventor, is all part of being a professor.”

It's been a while since David Shields followed the NBA. The UW English professor and bestselling author took a sabbatical to cover the Seattle SuperSonics for a season in 1994. The result was Black Planet, a book that probes into race relations and professional sports. Seattle has since lost its team, and Shields his interest in the game. But he can't resist tuning in for this year's NBA Finals, as LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers spar with Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors. "Thrilling theater," Shields calls it.

Lauren Hartzell Nichols is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy with appointments in the Program on the Environment and the Program on Values in Society. She teaches about environmental ethics, climate change, and animal welfare. “Students think that I’m going to tell them what the right thing to do is,” Hartzell Nichols said. “Instead, I give them 10 or 12 arguments about what the right thing is, and they all conflict. And I push them to sort through it.”

Joseph Babigumira is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Health with an adjunct appointment in the School of Pharmacy. After several years of practicing medicine in Uganda, his home country, Babigumira moved to America to pursue healthcare and pharmaceutical degrees in 2004.

Amanda Lock Swarr is an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies. Since 1997, she has researched and written about people who fall outside of the gender binary in South Africa. Her current work looks at sexual violence and masculinity in particular. “African masculinities get represented in really problematic ways in international media, especially in very racist ways,” Swarr said. “I’m thinking about what it means to be in a newly democratic society since the end of apartheid, to have that new space to re-conceptualize masculinity.”

In 1991, Michio Tsutsui started the Technical Japanese Master’s Program at UW. It sought to provide an increasingly global economy with a niche workforce: bilingual engineers. This two-year program, which began admitting students from other disciplines in 2000, is the only one of its kind in America. It will shut down when Tsutsui retires in December. “You have to have a pool of bilingual specialists in key fields,” said Tsutsui, a professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering. “And most likely those people shouldn’t just be used as translators. The benefit is so limited. Rather, they should be working in the field.”

Amelia Gavin is an associate professor in the School of Social Work and the director of the bachelor of arts in social welfare program. Her research explores racial and ethnic disparities in birth outcomes. "I'm very interested in why black women are nearly twice as likely as their white counterparts to deliver a low-weight or pre-term infant. That disparity looks worse for Native American women," Gavin said. "We've had all these innovations in technology around what to do in pregnancy, but we still have these disparities. What could explain them in a resource-rich place like the United States?"