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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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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The No. 15 Washington women’s tennis team is off to the best start in program history and hosts a pair of key Pac-12 matches this weekend, welcoming No. 13 USC on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and closing out the home portion of its 2019 schedule against No. 10 UCLA on Sunday at noon. Both USC [...]

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Richard Cordova recalls asking himself in eighth grade, “What am I going to do with my life?” Decades later, Cordova, who is now the executive director of UW’s Internal Audit, is helping other eighth graders do the same, only with an even greater sense of direction and purpose. For the last twelve years, Cordova has [...]

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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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Over the course of his career, Joe Grojean has navigated some dangerous situations and extreme conditions. There was that time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Burundi when he had to be airlifted home with a broken leg after an errant taxi swiped him off his motorcycle. Or that job at a military base on [...]

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Two years into law school at Seattle University, Shondell Reed knew he had to make a change. “I knew I didn’t want to practice law,” says Reed, who today serves as Senior Associate Athletic Director at the University of Washington. “But I also knew my law degree would be helpful in another career.” Growing up [...]

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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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