Growing up, Kristi Morgansen dreamed of becoming an astronaut—of unknown worlds and the engineering feats that would allow her to explore them. Today, as chair of the UW Department of Astronautics and Aeronautics, she does all that and more. She didn’t become an astronaut, but she does have her own school of robotic fish, so [...]

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For social work professor Karen Fredriksen Goldsen, the celebration of LGBTQ Pride is a matter of public health. “Invisibility creates vulnerability and tends to lead to very poor health outcomes,” says Fredriksen Goldsen, professor and director of Healthy Generations Hartford Center of Excellence at the University of Washington. She’d know, having served as lead on [...]

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If UW biology professor Greg Wilson had a time machine, he’d dial it back 66 million years to the last days of the late Cretaceous—a period when Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops still thundered across the Montana badlands and small mammals—none larger than a modern raccoon—scurried along the ground. The area he’d visit is known as [...]

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Selim Kuru’s love of literature all started with his mother, Nihal. “She was an avid reader and had a library under lock and key and would release books for me according to my age,” Kuru recalls of his youth growing up in Samsun, a city on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. For Kuru, “reading turned into [...]

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When More Hall was built in 1946 as the new home for UW’s Civil Engineering Department, architects Bebb & Jones emphasized function over form. The building’s art deco design incorporated lighting from large windows to convey the feeling of spaciousness, while the buildings location adjacent to the Northern Pacific Railroad allowed for a spur track [...]

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James Clauss admits he was never much of a student. That is, until he was given the opportunity to teach. Growing up in northeastern Pennsylvania, Clauss recalls being a “below average” student until high school, when, “in order to escape biology and chemistry,” he signed up to take two years of ancient Greek. Much to [...]

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As a college student living in Chicago’s suburbs, I would often cope with the city’s dreary, frigid winters by imagining I was instead living in another similarly snow-bound location—somewhere in Alaska, perhaps, or maybe Finland. There was a romantic quality to imagining oneself into another world entirely; stepping into a mental space where those all-too-familiar [...]

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Growing up, Charlotte Sanders didn’t know what social work was. She did, however, know “what it felt like.” Her mother, a worker with the Department of Social and Health Services, would participate in donation drives for members of the Toppenish farming community on the Yakama Indian Reservation and Charlotte would help out. “She showed me [...]

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If aliens were ever to land, Michael Berry thinks his music theory students would be prepared. “I want my students to be able to figure out what makes their music tick,” Berry says, calling up connotations of the scene in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which aliens and humans communicate through a [...]

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If Adam Warren could time travel, he might head to Mexico City in the 1920s—the period immediately following a decade of revolutionary war that was, in his view, “a moment of radical new ideas and imagining how Mexican society might be transformed.” Then again, Warren says he’d have to consider other areas of his research [...]

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To understand trolls is to understand oneself—and professor Lotta Gavel Adams knows them better than most. But Gavel Adams, professor emerita and Barbro Osher Endowed Chair of Swedish Studies at the University of Washington, insists she’s neither troll scholar nor folklorist. “I am an historian of literature and culture who looks at what trolls look like [...]

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“The pursuit of happiness.” It’s a phrase that helped form our basis as a nation, but could it be that the pursuit of “happiness” is leaving us less happy than ever before? What is happiness, anyway? Those are questions Annie Nguyen explores in the writing classes she teaches as a lecturer at the University of Washington Tacoma; [...]

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