When Val Schweigert meets with a student in a one-to-one advising session, they* seldom lead with their status as a veteran of the U.S. Army Reserve. *Val uses the pronouns she/her and they/them interchangeably. This profile will emphasize this conscious choice by using them interchangeably as well.  Proudly genderqueer and fiercely progressive, Val does not [...]

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Horacio de la Iglesia doesn’t always practice what he preaches. The sleep scientist and UW professor of biology, whose influential sleep research helped demonstrate the benefits of delaying school start times for Seattle high schoolers, knows that he should go to bed at roughly the same time each night. But on weekends, he likes to [...]

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Sean Johnson moved to Seattle in 2010 with two goals in mind: he wanted to go to medical school at the UW School of Medicine, and he wanted to publicly come out as transgender and begin transitioning. He didn’t get into the UW School of Medicine. But he did pursue—and excel in—Master’s degree programs in [...]

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Like many higher education professionals in disability services, Ian Campbell was driven to the vocation because of his personal experience with disability. Ian struggled with academics for years before finally being diagnosed in high school with learning disabilities. He characterizes the struggles before his diagnosis as “aptitude without performance”—the frustrating inability to fully demonstrate his [...]

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Brooke Emrich is what you would call an extreme knitter. The educational seminars coordinator with the UW Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology spends a not insignificant amount time with needles in hand. In 2008, going through a period of creative stagnation, the self-described “knitting addict” picked up her first pair of needles, participating in [...]

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Davon Woodard is an urban guy. Though he spent a few years during grad school in Blacksburg, Virginia—a small college town in the Appalachian Mountains, home to Virginia Tech—most of his life he’s lived and worked in cities: Lansing, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Johannesburg (South Africa) and now Tacoma. In fact, it’s fair to say Davon [...]

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Kristin Jones’s childhood dream of working in the field of pediatrics took a couple of hard right turns on its way to fruition, courtesy of an unplanned teenage pregnancy and an 18-year stint in the telecommunications industry. “I always wanted to be a pediatrician and work with kids—well, until I took a good look at [...]

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Most people are at least nominally interested in neuroscience. It’s cool to be able to talk to someone at a party about your recent dendrite growth, or the impact of a boost of serotonin on your personal cocktail of neurotransmitters, or the latest causal approaches to changing cognitive function. Actually, that would be a party [...]

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Like many first-year college students, Yasmin Ahmed, who uses they/them pronouns, suffered from a bit of imposter syndrome when they arrived at UW in 2014. Although Yasmin was born in Seattle, they hadn’t been in the Pacific Northwest since they were a small child. Their family lived first in Muscat, Oman—where they recall playing in [...]

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Wayne Au was lucky enough to come of age during hip-hop’s golden era. Listening to the stylistic innovations in the late 1980s and early 90s of pioneers like Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, Queen Latifah, Run-D.M.C. and Nas, he was electrified by music bursting with lyrics of protest and Black pride, lyrics demanding solutions to urban [...]

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You could say that Joseph de Veyra did not find nursing – nursing found him. Arriving in the U.S. as a 21-year-old immigrant from the Philippines with just $100 in his pocket, Joseph took advantage of the first opportunity that presented itself: caregiving. This early position quickly morphed into a certified nursing assistant (CNA) role. [...]

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It’s hard to be healthy when you’re poor. It’s hard to be healthy when you’re unhoused. Or when you are hungry, unemployed or underemployed, or unsafe. When you’re disabled or have a chronic illness. Or if you are Black or brown, LGBTQ+, an immigrant or refugee, or if you have other or multiple marginalized identities. [...]

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