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?"

Joseph Janes is an associate professor in the Information School and the chair of the Masters of Library and Information Science program. His research looks at the evolving state of libraries and the role information plays in defining the human experience. “We’re an information species,” Janes said. “To most people, a rock is just a rock, but to a geologist it tells you the history of the world. A ticket stub that for anyone else is a piece of garbage might remind you of your first date. We make information all the time, and in return information makes us who we are.”

Carolyn Pinedo Turnovsky is an assistant professor in the Department of American Ethnic Studies with a joint appointment in Law, Societies & Justice. Her research and coursework focus on immigrants in the workplace. “I’m interested in looking at how immigration and labor law intersect with ideologies about race, gender, nation and legality to inform the immigrant experience in the U.S.,” Pinedo Turnovsky said. “To me, the way we understand our sense of belonging is really anchored in our worker identity.”

Kim Martini likes to throw expensive stuff into the ocean. That might sound crazy, but to Kim, it’s science. She’s a physical oceanographer, and the things she tosses overboard measure energy pathways through waves and turbulence. That helps us understand the state of sea. “I grew up around the ocean,” Kim said. “I was pretty [...]

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David Masiello is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and an adjunct assistant professor of Applied Mathematics. He runs a team of chemistry, physics, and applied math graduate students and postdocs called the Masiello Group. “We’re theorists, and we do simulations as well,” Masiello said. “We have no laboratories. Everything we do is paper and pencil, and white boards, and writing computer codes.”

Olga Levaniouk is an associate professor in the Department of Classics. She refers to herself as a Homerist, meaning she specializes in the work attributed to the epic poet Homer. “When I first encountered Homer as a student, it was a big day for me,” Levaniouk recalled. “We spent the whole class on one line of The Iliad, in original Greek, and every word had such amazing depth, there were interesting things to say about every word. We went on for an hour, and I felt we still hadn’t finished everything there was to know about that line.”

Shi Chen is an assistant professor in the Foster School of Business. His research deals with the interface of project management and supply chain management — or, in other words, how to make businesses better. “You can always improve a business,” Shi said. “There is no best outcome. You can always identify some potential problem. You can develop a model that nobody has seen before, and you can analyze this model and present a meaningful result.”

If you’ve ever been to a Whole U event, chances are you’ve seen Sabahat Hussain. He’s taken full advantage of our program since coming to UW from a tech company in 2014. “I came from a corporate culture that was rewarding, but there was less focus on individual employee development,” said Sabahat, who is now [...]

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Eric Ames is a professor in Germanics and Comparative Literature who specializes in cinema. Much of his research explores the enigmatic work of German filmmaker Werner Herzog, known by mainstream moviegoers for documentaries like “Grizzly Man” and “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” Last quarter Ames taught a class on film noir, the genre of dark and moody thrillers that Hollywood churned out after World War II. “I can’t get enough of film noir,” he said. “The first thing I say to my students is, ‘This stuff is candy.'”

Caley Cook is a lecturer in Communications, a multimedia journalist, and a documentary filmmaker. Since joining the UW in 2013, she has primarily taught classes about newsgathering and reporting.