Growing up in Idaho Falls, Kevin O’Brien felt surrounded by science. With thousands of residents employed at the nearby Idaho National Laboratories, the high desert community cultivated an air of intellectualism and sophistication manifest in a community symphony and opera. Occupations ran the gamut. Whereas O’Brien’s paternal grandparents farmed potatoes and his maternal grandparents ran [...]

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A riot of blue and subtle umber, the painting on the wall of Thomas Hawn’s office might easily be mistaken for an abstract effort. But where some see abstract shapes, Hawn knows exactly what he’s looking at: a depiction of Mycobacterium tuberculosis approaching a macrophage white blood cell. In most cases, macrophage immune cells are [...]

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Most people spend summer enjoying the bright, warm weather. Charity Urbanski spent hers hunting monsters. “Mostly my summer has been devoted to monsters—dragons, revenants, werewolves, that sort of thing,” says Urbanski, a senior lecturer in the University of Washington Department of History specializing in France and England in the 12th century. As she prepares to [...]

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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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As a playwright, Holly Arsenault writes mostly comedies, but she takes her work as director of engagement for the UW School of Drama very seriously. “For me, next season has already started,” she says, referring to all the public shows the UW School of Drama will present in the 2019 and 2020 academic year. In [...]

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When you think about the tools of police work, handheld radios, flashlights, and firearms might spring to mind. But two officers with the University of Washington Police Department have found success utilizing a different device—handling their duties as part of the UW Seattle campus constabulary not with handcuffs, but with a healthy dose of humor. [...]

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It’s the University District’s best dance party—and it happens in broad daylight. Twice a week for the past six years, a group of University of Washington faculty, staff, and students have gathered to move, groove, and otherwise get down at a lunch hour dance class from noon to 1pm in a studio space at the [...]

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What will UW Medicine look like in 2025? How can the health system expand and expedite access for patients? What more can be done to help the Northwest’s largest network of hospitals and clinics find firmer financial footing in order to better serve the region? Those are a few of the big-picture questions Lisa Brandenburg [...]

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Pictured above—Front row, left to right—Joya Clark, Thongnee Foosaeng, Leilani Uehara; Back row, left to right: Julius Ordonez, Ken Sawicki, Angelina Quintero; not pictured: Keith Sterling, Kong Yeung Every morning before five o’clock, a surfer, a mother, a gardener, and a rugby referee arrive on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus. Along with four other [...]

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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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Established in 1997 to honor outstanding University of Washington staff, the Distinguished Staff Award is presented at the UW Awards of Excellence ceremony each June. Of the many nominations drawn from the diverse and indispensable contributions of its 24,000 classified and professional staff, five individuals or teams are selected as award recipients based on their [...]

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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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