Capybaras like their habitats wet. These large rodents thrive in low-elevation wetlands, migrating along creeks and rivers to nibble on foliage and flowers. That’s why researchers were surprised to find an 8.8 million-year-old fossilized capybara tooth in northern Chile’s , one of the driest regions on Earth. In a paper in Scientific Reports, researchers postulate that the Atacama Desert must have had a wetter climate during the , based on this discovery. This is the first time a capybara species has ever been seen in the Atacama region of Chile — today these creatures reside in the marshy lowlands across Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina and Uruguay. Researchers had at one time assumed that the Andean mountain chain on the eastern side of Chile would have prevented these short-legged rodents from ever entering the Atacama region. With this discovery, the authors propose that capybaras were able to follow a wetland trail along the northern part of South America, trekking from Bolivia to Peru into northern Chile. In addition to capybaras, the ancient Atacama region also likely had palms and other flowering plants, according to plant fossils analyzed by a Ģ����Ƶ scientist for the study. These findings challenge the idea that the Atacama was just always a desert, and can help researchers better understand how shifts in climate can drastically affect the environment.

For more information, contact co-author , Ģ����Ƶ professor of biology, at caestrom@uw.edu.������������

A full list of co-authors and funding is . Adapted from a release .

Multitasking gives marine microbes an edge when nutrients are scarce

The world’s oceans teem with tiny organisms that are difficult to study yet critical to account for. The organisms that make up this microscopic community, many of which are protists, have evolved over time to help keep marine ecosystems balanced. A Ģ����Ƶ study in the ISME Journal, found that organisms that can both photosynthesize and eat to generate energy do better in nutrient-limited environments, which includes warmer water. This flexibility may help them cope with changing conditions and could help researchers gauge how marine ecosystems will respond to future warming. Gathering more data from the bottom of the food web is important for understanding the ecosystem-wide impacts of environmental change. The study also debuted a new genetic method for studying energy production versus consumption that may make it easier to study protists. Samples in this study were collected from the North Pacific, near Hawaii and about 1,000 miles north, but the researchers hope to continue expanding the radius to improve global ocean models.

For more information, contact , Ģ����Ƶ research scientist and engineer of biological oceanography at coesel@uw.edu.

The Ģ����Ƶ co-authors are Shiri Graff van Creveld, and . A full list of co-authors and funding is .

Ģ����Ƶ engineers capture behavior of ‘edge waves’ on beaches, putting popular wave models to the test

Coastal engineers and oceanographers often think of the motion of water on beaches as “one dimensional”: waves propagating directly onto the beach from offshore. These simplified wave models are used widely from designing shoreline infrastructure to forecasting coastal flooding. However, some waves propagate along the coast rather than crashing into it, and may push an additional meter of water depth onto the beach. For decades, these “edge waves” have not been accounted for in the one-dimensional models commonly used to understand wave behavior. To find out how edge waves might be impacting model accuracy, researchers at the Ģ����Ƶ and UC San Diego deployed an array of pressure and velocity sensors along a beach in Southern California for 60 days. In a paper in JGR Oceans, the researchers describe a model they built to tease out the influence of edge waves in the larger system. While edge waves contributed a significant amount of energy, the team found that ultimately the one-dimensional models that exclude edge waves remain accurate enough for predicting total water levels at the shoreline.

For more information, contact , a postdoctoral scholar of civil and environmental engineering, at cshender@uw.edu.

A full list of co-authors and funding is .

How Colombian environmentalists use law and democracy to redefine mountain landscapes

In 2013 and 2017, Colombian voters in two towns backed a legal effort to stop a large-scale gold mining project. In doing so, they are making the mountainous areas where they live more visible and politically relevant. The decision allowed environmental advocates to organize around a larger area defined by elevation, massive volume, and subterranean and arboreal features. , Ģ����Ƶ assistant professor of anthropology, a research article in the journal Anthropological Forum that examines how the effort used legal tools for citizen participation to not only voice their opinions on extractive projects, but also reconfigure space in unprecedented ways. The case shows that democratic participation can have far-reaching consequences for how landscapes are defined and lived. The article appears in a special issue, called “Ethnographies of Vertical and Volumetric Worlds,” which was co-edited by Ardila and Steven Schwartz of the University of Rochester.

For more information, contact Castillo at acastil@uw.edu.

Funding information is .

Researchers develop new way to measure how blood clots form

A wound stops bleeding because tiny blood cell fragments called platelets clump together to form a clot. Researchers know that platelets generate forces that help compact and strengthen clots. However, they’ve struggled to understand how blood clots form in real time. To better understand this system, Ģ����Ƶ mechanical engineers created a device that measures how platelet forces and stiffness evolve together during the first minutes of clot formation. in Advanced Healthcare Materials, the research team used the device to apply magnetic forces to clumps of platelets, causing them to strengthen and stiffen through a process called “mechanotransduction” in which cells convert mechanical forces into biological responses. These findings could be used to study how new drugs affect clot formation, how platelets respond to signals when disease is present, and how blood clotting biomechanics contribute to cardiovascular disorders.

For more information, contact , a Ģ����Ƶ professor of mechanical engineering, at nsniadec@uw.edu.

The Ģ����Ƶ co-authors are , , Yoeur-Man Mach and . A full list of co-authors and funding is . Adapted from a story by .

Ģ����Ƶ researchers probe superconducting materials that defy expectations

Most materials resist the flow of electricity to some degree, but unusual materials known as superconductors can carry an electric current with no resistance at all. Superconductors offer a unique window into the physics of materials at tiny scales, and they could one day revolutionize electronics. In recent years, researchers have discovered new forms of superconductivity in stacks of atomically thin materials such as . Resistance typically drops to zero as these materials are cooled, but in some cases it mysteriously levels off at a small finite value, which contradicts expectations of superconductor behavior. In a paper in Nature, Ģ����Ƶ materials scientists tested this behavior with a device consisting of several layers of graphene stacked in a staircase-like pattern. By adjusting voltages applied to the device, the researchers could control whether the graphene exhibited true superconductivity or the more peculiar “failed” form, providing clear evidence that failed superconductivity is real. The team is now working to uncover the origin of this mysterious behavior.

For more information, contact , a Ģ����Ƶ associate professor of both physics and materials science and engineering, at myank@uw.edu..

The Ģ����Ƶ co-authors are , , and . A full list of co-authors and funding is .

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As our skies increasingly crowd with buzzing, hovering, flitting drones, spare a thought for the humble hopping robot.

Hopping, a popular form of locomotion in the insect and amphibian worlds, is nearly two orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than flying. Unlike a mosquito that must constantly expend energy to stay aloft, a flea only works out when it jumps. Those cost savings could also pay off in the world of robotics: A group of small, simple hopping robots could explore a location much more cheaply than flying drones. These robots could find gas leaks in an oil refinery, monitor water and fertilizer usage on a farm, or even explore other planets.

“In my mind, the three hardest challenges for hopping robots are the ability to vary jump length, self-right and reload for multiple hops,” said senior author , a Ģ����Ƶ associate professor of mechanical engineering. “DirectHop clears all three of those hurdles with a totally new design, and we’re well on our way to tackling other challenges like onboard power, steering and navigation.”

Fuller and his team will present DirectHop on Sept 30th at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. .

Most hopping robots are modeled after insects like fleas that are literally spring-loaded. Fleas compress and then release parts of their exoskeletons to . Robots that utilize springs and latches à la fleas can also travel impressive distances, but they have no easy way to calibrate jump distance — discharging a spring is an “all or nothing” action, said Fuller. What’s more, springs and latches are complex bits of machinery that are difficult to build and operate at small scales. 

DirectHop’s solution to those problems is ditching the spring entirely.

“We found that a very small electric motor can accelerate fast enough to power a jump directly, the way a frog’s leg muscles directly power its hop,” said lead author , a Ģ����Ƶ graduate research assistant in mechanical engineering. “We also discovered that by adjusting the current going to the motor, we could make the robot jump specific distances.”

The robot itself consists of a tiny electric motor attached to a tower by a length of fishing line. When the motor accelerates, it spools the line quickly and hoists itself up the tower, pulling the rest of the robot into the air. As the motor rises, three hinged legs extend to keep the motor aligned with the robot’s foot.

Since the robot tends to tumble in the air, the researchers included a roll cage to support it when it lands on its side. From there, the team was able to right it 90% of the time by sending the motor back down the tower, which shifts the robot’s center of gravity and causes it to roll back onto its foot, readying it for another jump.

The design was inspired by box turtles, which can roll themselves upright using a similarly-shaped shell.

The current prototype has some notable limitations. Power is supplied via wires, and it has no way to steer or orient itself beyond random twitching. Wang and Fuller, however, are working on solutions: onboard solar cells and a battery for power, a vibration motor to spin the robot in place, tiny retractable feet to adjust hop angle, and an onboard camera and electronics to navigate. 

“One of our goals is fully autonomous stair climbing,” Fuller said. “A camera looks at the stair, the processor figures out how high the robot has to jump, it steers itself into position, jumps, self-rights, steers again and repeats. It uses a combination of simple sensors and actions to perform a complex task.”

Wang thinks it’s reasonable to imagine producing a fully featured DirectHop bot for about $10 since the individual components are so small and cheap. At that price, the bots could be extremely useful as a semidisposable complement to larger, more capable, more expensive robots.

“We could dispatch 100 or even 1,000 of these robots into the field,” Wang said. “If some are lost or disabled, it’s not really a failure. The team of them can complete the task.”

Yash Talwekar, a Ģ����Ƶ research assistant in mechanical engineering, is a co-author.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation. 

For more information, contact Fuller at minster@uw.edu or Wang at hw328@uw.edu.

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UPDATE Aug. 20, 2026: This story has been updated to include a faculty member who was originally omitted.��

Twelve faculty members at the Ģ����Ƶ have been elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences. They are among 30 scientists and educators from across the state July 16 as new members. Election recognizes the new member’s “outstanding record of scientific and technical achievement and willingness to assist the Academy in providing the best available scientific information and technical understanding to inform complex policy decisions in Washington.”

New WSAS members are selected by current members or by their election to national science academies. All 11 Ģ����Ƶ faculty members were voted on by current WSAS members:��

, chair and PACCAR Endowed Professor of mechanical engineering and adjunct professor of neurological surgery and of aeronautics and astronautics, for “significant contributions to scientific understanding of multiphase and biomedical flows, including the role of fluid mechanics on arterial disease, heart failure, biomedical devices, and surgical planning for respiratory disease, through work combining rigorous experimentation and analysis that has influenced both engineering and clinical practice.”

, professor of materials science and engineering, for “pioneering research on structure–processing–property relationships and the aging of hard tissues that has shaped modern oral health science, and for influential contributions to advanced manufacturing, biomechanics, and bioinspired materials — coupled with exemplary educational leadership — that have made a lasting impact across disciplines and the STEM community.”

, professor of health economics and Stergachis Family Endowed Director of The CHOICE Institute, for “pioneering health economic methods — including causal estimation of personalized treatment effects, cost-effectiveness frameworks, and value-of-information analysis — that have shaped national drug pricing policies, international discussions on the economics of innovation, and the scientific foundations of the economics of precision medicine.”

, affiliate professor of health services and biostatistics and professor in the Public Health Sciences Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, for “pioneering statistical models that transformed cancer early detection and screening policy, reshaping national and global guidelines and advancing equitable public health decision‑making, and for exceptional leadership, cross‑disciplinary collaboration, and mentorship, influencing generations of scientists.”

, Charles O. Cressey Endowed Professor of social work and executive co-director of the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute, for “pioneering research across historical trauma, cultural buffers, and healing; substance use/misuse prevention; indigenous health disparities and family wellness; and youth health interventions.”

, Endowed Professor in Prevention in the School of Social Work and director of the Social Development Research Group, for “contributions to the economic assessment of prevention programs addressing substance abuse and mental health, and for advancing community-engaged research, and effective communication of findings to different audiences.”

, director of and research professor in the Ģ����Ƶ School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, for “leadership and contributions in ecosystem-based management, salmon conservation, urban ecology, and pioneering contributions to the development of social-ecological approaches to environmental problem solving.”

, research professor of epidemiology and associate director for public health sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center for “integrating large‑scale genomic, environmental, and tumor data to advance colorectal cancer prevention and reduce population disparities, and for her leadership at Fred Hutch, shaping precision prevention and population health science.”

, affiliate professor of environmental engineering and chief scientist and laboratory fellow emeritus at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, for “his seminal leadership and sustained contributions to soil and agricultural science and environmental geosciences, spanning basic and applied research, university-level teaching and mentoring, and exceptional service.”

, professor of bioengineering, the Dr. James B. Bassingthwaighte Endowed Faculty Fellow in Bioengineering, director of the Center for Translational Muscle Research, and�� associate chair of research and translation for the Department of Bioengineering, for “internationally recognized leadership in discovering the molecular mechanisms of contractile dysfunction with familial genetic mutations that lead to muscle dysfunction with disease, the design of novel, targeted therapies, and training the next generation of scientists and engineers to have further impact in understanding and treating heart failure and skeletal muscle diseases.”

Dr. , professor and chair of radiology in Ģ����Ƶ Medicine, for “contributions to the science and clinical practice of radiological imaging and for leadership in national programs and professional and scientific societies that advance academic radiology.”

, affiliate professor of civil and environmental engineering and chief scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, for “pioneering the integration of climate science with power systems studies through computational, data-driven, experimental approaches, resulting in significant cost savings for energy customers and a safer, more reliable grid.”

Additionally, Dr. , professor emerita of global health and of medicine and epidemiology in the Ģ����Ƶ School of Medicine, was elected to the WSAS Board of Directors. Wassersheit has been a member of WSAS since 2008. An infectious disease physician and epidemiologist, Dr. Wasserheit played a central role in launching the Ģ����Ƶ Department of Global Health and served as chair from 2014-2022. She also served as co-director for the Ģ����Ƶ Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness. She was the founding chief of the U.S. National Institute of Health’s Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Research Branch, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s STD/HIV Prevention Program and director of the FHCRC-based HIV Vaccine Trials Network. Her work on epidemiological synergy between HIV and sexually transmitted infections has shaped prevention policy worldwide.

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New design process accelerates the discovery of advanced materials

Flexible materials that combine mechanical flexibility with high thermal or electrical conductivity are essential for wearables, stretchable electronics and soft robotic systems. To identify new composite materials with those properties, researchers typically create and test many different material formulations, a process that can be time-consuming, expensive and lead to waste. , Ģ����Ƶ researchers developed a new “inverse design framework” that reverses the standard design process to speed up the discovery of multifunctional materials. The framework starts with the desired material properties for a specific application — such as wearable electronics — and works backward to determine the optimal material composition using physics-based modeling and machine learning. Experiments showed that a material identified by the framework achieved about 60% higher thermal conductivity while reducing material cost by about 10%, compared to materials that were previously used.��

For more information, contact senior author , Ģ����Ƶ assistant professor of mechanical engineering.��

The other co-authors are Lijun Zhou, Yunsik Ohm, Ren-Mian Chin, Olivia Kerr and Krithika Manohar.

Climate models get a vote of confidence in a new Ģ����Ƶ study mapping tropical ocean temperature over time

Climate models help researchers understand how conditions are changing over time to forecast what is likely to happen in the future. Predicting extreme heat, drought or flooding years in advance can give people time to prepare, but the accuracy of these predictions varies. Scientists test models by asking them to recreate past climate and comparing those predictions with observational data. Although modern climate models get a lot of things right, they often fail to replicate recent temperature change in the tropical Pacific Ocean, a key region for global weather. This has concerned scientists, but a Ģ����Ƶ study offers a glimmer of hope. The researchers found that climate models could successfully replicate temperature trends in the equatorial Pacific when they expanded the window of observation by 20 years. Including more data allowed the models to better account for climate variability, which can create long-lasting fluctuations in temperature and precipitation that aren’t always indicative of a general trend.��

For more information, contact senior author Matt Luongo, Ģ����Ƶ postdoctoral fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, & Ecosystem Studies and School of Oceanography at mluongo@uw.edu.

The other Ģ����Ƶ co-author is . A full list of co-authors is .

Paternal body odor increases brain-to-brain synchrony with infants

Infant brains recognize their fathers as unique social partners, showing stronger brain-to-brain synchrony with their fathers compared to unfamiliar males during social interactions. A new study also shows that when infants interact with unfamiliar males while exposed to their fathers’ body odor, their brain synchrony increases to levels similar to those seen with their own fathers. Further, exposure to paternal body odor increased infants’ positive arousal. These findings suggest that infants use their fathers’ scent as an important social cue, even when the father is not physically present. Researchers also found that father-infant synchrony involved a different neural rhythm than previously observed in mother-infant interactions, suggesting that mothers and fathers may support development through complementary neural pathways. Combined, these findings reveal a previously unknown role of paternal body odor as a sensory signal that contributes to early social and brain development.

For more information, contact , co-author and a research scientist in the Ģ����Ƶ Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.��

The other co-authors are Linoy Schwartz and Ruth Feldman.

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Plants may not appear aggressive, but they can still defend themselves while under attack. When caterpillars chomp the leaves of bean plants, these plants release gases that lure predatory wasps. The wasps prey on the caterpillars, saving the plants from further destruction. In a paper , a Ģ����Ƶ-led team demonstrated that this defense strategy is run by a protein called INR, or inceptin receptor. The researchers grew bean plants with naturally occurring mutations in the INR gene alongside plants with functional INR in an experimental field in Oaxaca, Mexico. The knock-out plants didn’t emit gases and attracted far fewer wasps. This result helps explain a previous study by this team that first identified the biochemical pathway behind this defense mechanism. These results also showcase how the tiny actions of a single protein can affect the behavior of wasps and caterpillars, and in turn, protect the health of the plant. This could benefit nearby plants as well, the researchers said. Beans are often grown alongside “,” such as corn, with the idea that each plant provides a benefit for the others. Beans help make the soil richer for their companions, and, through the actions of INR, could also protect their neighbors from pests.

For more information, contact senior author , Ģ����Ƶ associate professor of biology, at astein10@uw.edu.����

The other Ģ����Ƶ co-authors are , , , and . A full list of co-authors and funding is included .

Decades of satellite data show Himalayan rivers migrating rapidly in response to climate change

The movement of rivers is often described in terms of flowing water, but the path a river takes can also change. Some migration is normal, but in the Himalayas, rivers seem to be scrambling faster than scientists anticipated. In a study , researchers show that rivers in the Tibetan Plateau moved twice as much from 2000 to 2020 as they did from 1980 to 2000. As glaciers melt and frozen ground thaws in response to rising temperatures, rivers are inundated with silty meltwater from surrounding glaciers. The water picks the path of least resistance through softening ground. The “movement” includes small lateral shifts, big swings that cut off entire sections of river and occasionally, . The international team attributes their observations to climate change, which is driving temperatures up faster here than many other places. More than 2 billion people rely on these rivers for fresh water and researchers are concerned about communities downstream, as well as the potential for similar patterns that may play out elsewhere.

For more information, contact co-author , Ģ����Ƶ professor of Earth and space sciences at bigdirt@uw.edu.����

A full list of co-authors and funding is .

Researchers shrink eye-catching structure down to the nano scale��

made using a network of freestanding bars suspended by a web of thin, tense cables. The organization of the bars and cables allows the network of tension and compression forces to lock everything into place, creating a lightweight yet stiff structure. Tensegrities of different sizes are common in nature — examples include and the that help living cells maintain their shape — as well as in diverse manmade structures like , and . Now, a team of engineers at the Ģ����Ƶ have found a way to create tensegrities as small as five micrometers across — roughly a tenth of the width of a human hair. in the aptly-named journal Small, researchers used a specialized and a resin compound to print bar-and-cable structures about 30 micrometers across. They then heated the materials to 900 degrees celsius, causing the structures to shrink by over 80%. As they shrank, the thinner cables constricted more than the bars, resulting in nanostructures with specific, locked-in levels of stress that were up to 250% stiffer than the starting structures. The team is now working on ways to build larger materials composed of tiny tensegrities, which could eventually usher in a new class of stiff, light and impact-resistant materials.

For more information, contact lead author , a Ģ����Ƶ doctoral student of mechanical engineering.

Other Ģ����Ƶ co-authors are , , Zainab S. Patel, , and . Funding information is included .��

Scientists find a key water source for atmospheric rivers

In December 2025, brought a seemingly endless onslaught of precipitation to Washington that caused and washed away roads and homes. In published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, Ģ����Ƶ researchers help explain where all that water came from. They describe a link between the , a weather pattern that brings moisture east across the Pacific, and atmospheric rivers. Hypotheses about this connection have emerged from previous studies, but researchers couldn’t physically draw it until now. By tracking precipitation and wind patterns from 2000 to 2024, the Ģ����Ƶ researchers show that heavy rainfall and flooding are more likely when MJO is active, which happens several times a year. By identifying the MJO as a key moisture source for powerful atmospheric rivers, the researchers hope to improve forecast accuracy and give people more lead time to prepare for incoming storms.

For more information, contact co-author , Ģ����Ƶ professor of atmospheric and climate science at shuyic@uw.edu.

Other Ģ����Ƶ co-authors are and . Funding information is .

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At the Ģ����Ƶ Harris Hydraulics Lab, an odd scene plays out. Over and over again, researchers from the Ģ����Ƶ and the (PNNL) pass a small rubber model of a marine animal through a large tank filled with flowing water and fitted with a spinning turbine. On some runs, the model bonks against the turbine blades; on others, it receives a glancing blow or sails past undisturbed. When bonks or knicks occur, a small collision sensor on one of the turbine’s blades detects the impacts and plots the interactions in a computer program.

The researchers are repeatedly simulating something that they hope will rarely happen in the wild: a collision between marine wildlife like a seabird, seal, fish or whale — or submerged debris like logs — and an underwater turbine.��

“We want to make sure we’re minimizing the chances of a collision in the first place,” said Aidan Hunt, a senior research engineer in mechanical engineering at the Ģ����Ƶ and member of the (PMEC). “But if a collision were to occur, we want to be able to detect it, and potentially avoid it, in real time. The available evidence suggests that collisions are rare, but we’re taking a ‘trust-but-verify’ approach.”

Marine energy — power harvested from tides, waves and currents — has enormous potential as a clean, renewable resource. But more information is needed about how large, commercial installations of underwater turbines or power-generating buoys could affect marine wildlife, whether through increased noise in the environment, habitat change or direct interactions with equipment.��

The marine collision experiments are part of the , a collection of projects led by PNNL to study the environmental impact of marine energy.��

The work at Harris Hydraulics follows a by PNNL and the Ģ����Ƶ Applied Physics Lab using a four-foot-tall prototype turbine installed at the entrance to Sequim Bay. In that study, researchers trained an underwater camera on the turbine for 109 days and then catalogued every instance of an animal approaching or interacting with the turbine. The camera captured more than 1,000 instances of fish, birds and seals approaching the turbine blades. There were only four collisions, and all were small fish.��

“This study was a first step, but a promising one,” said co-author , a research scientist at the Ģ����Ƶ Applied Physics Lab. “We �徱���’t see any endangered species in our study, and the risk of collision for seals and sea birds seemed to be quite low. We’re excited to get back out there with the camera and learn even more.”

The Sequim Bay experiment generated hours of valuable data, but that degree of intense monitoring may not be practical in large commercial installations in the future. Cheaper impact sensors, like the ones logging bath toy impacts at Harris Hydraulics, could be a solution, researchers say.����

The project is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hydropower & Hydrokinetics Office, through the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Triton Initiative and the TEAMER program.

For more information, contact Hunt at ahunt94@uw.edu or Emma Cotter at emma.cotter@pnnl.gov.

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UPDATE (Feb. 17, 2026): This story has been updated to note Meza’s work with the NSF I-Corps program and CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund.

Biology is full of architecture. Materials like wood, crab shells and bone all contain microscopic structures such as layers, lattices, cells and interwoven fibers. Those structures give natural materials an ideal combination of lightness and toughness, and they’ve inspired engineers to build artificial materials with similar properties. But how those tiny architectures lead to such tough materials is something of a mystery.

In 2019, , assistant professor of mechanical engineering, set up the at the Ģ����Ƶ to tease out the mechanical secrets of structures that are as small as 100 nanometers, which is about the size of a virus. He arrived with an ambitious plan to build a new generation of nanomaterials, but soon discovered that the field was missing a fundamental understanding of toughness at tiny scales.

“We had to go back to basics,” Meza said.��

In the years since, Meza and his team have flipped the script on nanomaterial toughness. They’re applying what they’ve learned to new kinds of bespoke materials, though along the way they’re still surprised by tiny structures behaving in ways they theoretically shouldn’t.

Meza spoke with Ģ����Ƶ News about his strange and surprising journey into the nano realm.

What questions did you establish your lab to tackle?

Lucas Meza: Very broadly, we’re trying to design better materials, but not by introducing new material chemistries. Instead, we use architecture. This is something humans have done throughout history — think of woven textiles and fabrics, or straw-reinforced mud bricks. These are “architected materials,” where the structure of materials allows us to control useful properties like strength, toughness and flexibility.��

The thing that I was particularly interested in was introducing architecture at the nanoscale. What if, instead of building a wall with bricks, we could use nanoplatelets? Or instead of making fabrics with yarn, we could use nanofibers? How would those properties change?

Engineers have found that nanomaterials are stronger, more flaw resistant and more deformable. The challenge is: How do you actually do something with them? We need to build them into large-scale materials in a way that preserves their unique nanoscale properties.��

What material properties are you most interested in?

LM: We’re using architecture to tinker with a few interrelated properties. The first is a material’s strength, which is how much stress it can take before it permanently deforms. The second is ductility, which is how much a material can stretch before it breaks. Those two features sort of combine to determine a material’s toughness, which is the total amount of energy you have to put into a material to break it.

To give a couple of opposing examples: A ceramic plate is strong, meaning it can take a lot of stress, but it has very low ductility, meaning it barely deforms before breaking. So overall, it’s not a very tough material. Conversely, a rubber band is not strong at all — you can bend and stretch it with very little stress. But, it’s extremely ductile — it can stretch to many times its original dimensions without snapping. So as a result, rubber is very tough.

Credit: Ģ����Ƶ (left) and Envato (right).

Toughness is a particularly interesting property to study because there’s no limit on how tough a material can be. There are very hard limits on how strong and how stiff a material can be, and you can use architecture to optimize them, but you can’t exceed the properties of the base material. On the other hand, you can use architecture to improve the overall toughness of a material.��

Nature has already created a lot of really interesting micro- and nano-structures. Every natural material has to be porous to transport nutrients, and on top of that we see things like lattices in some bone and in sea sponges; shells all have layered architectures; wood and bone are fiber composites; and all of this happens at the micro- and nanoscale.��

There had to be a reason that nature was making these architectural motifs at the micro and nanoscale, and I had a strong hunch that it had to do with toughness.��

What has your lab learned about toughness at the small scale?

LM: Initially, we learned a surprising amount about what we �徱���’t know. My thought in getting into this work was that people know enough about fracture mechanics — how things break and why — so we can just dive into making really complicated architectures and studying their toughness, like l made by my former doctoral student, . We realized the scientific community has some big gaps in their understanding of fracture toughness. So instead, we had to go simple — basically we pulled and pushed and broke a lot of small things to understand what gives a material ductility and toughness.

We learned that all material behavior centers around something called a “plastic zone size.” Basically, when you pull on a part that has a crack, a little ball of energy builds up right at the tip of that crack. That energy ball grows as you add more stress, and at a certain point it shoots through the sample and causes a break. The size of the ball at its breaking point is the material’s plastic zone size, and it’s different for every material.��

We realized that what makes a material ductile or not . If a material is smaller than its plastic zone size, that ball of energy can’t grow big enough to cause the crack to grow, so instead it spreads outward and the material bends.��

The four material samples in this video are all the same size, but structural differences at the nanoscale produce different levels of ductility. In each example, the cyan color represents the sample’s plastic zone size. In less ductile samples, the cyan-colored area remains small and the material snaps, whereas in more ductile samples, the cyan area spreads out and the material stretches. Credit: Dwivedi et. al/Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids

This is the key for how to use architecture to cheat and get more ductility out of a material. If you take a brittle material and make a nanoscale lattice or foam out of it, . The new tougher “architected material” can also have a larger plastic zone size, sometimes as much as 100 times larger, meaning it is likely to be ductile as well. This is why things like fabrics and meshes can be really hard to tear.��

How are you applying what you’re learning to real-world materials?

LM: We’re building lots of our material architectures painstakingly at the small scale using resources like the and the Ģ����Ƶ . That “bottom-up” approach — building things one nanofeature at a time — gives us lots of control over the building blocks we’re playing with, but it’s a real challenge to scale.

The “top-down” approach, where you let physics and kinetics just self-assemble things for you, is much easier. One example is “solid state foaming”, a technique my colleague has been working on for decades. Basically, you take a thermoplastic material — something that melts when you heat it up — throw it in a chamber with high pressure carbon dioxide so it saturates the sample, then heat it up so that dissolved gas forms tiny bubbles in the material. With this process we have less control over the precise architecture — it’s a random foam — but by controlling the amount of dissolved gas we can easily control the size of the bubbles. Those materials turned out to be super tough! My doctoral student has , where we show they could even be tougher than the material they were made from. This goes against everything we knew about normal foam fracture processes.��

A plastic nanofoam material created by Kush Dwivedi, a doctoral student in Meza’s lab, seen at 2,500x, 12,000x and 35,000x magnifications. Credit: Dwivedi et. al/Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

I’m currently pursuing an earlier-stage commercialization effort to use tiny foams as a filtration material for biomedical applications. We can make nanoporous filter materials — think of the reverse osmosis system that might be under your sink — but we can do it without using any of the harsh chemical processes that are currently used. We’ve been able to explore this avenue thanks to our participation in the program, which then enabled us to get a award.

I also recently got an NSF CAREER grant to study fracture in architected materials, and we’re exploring ways to make tougher sustainable and biodegradable materials. Think of the last time you used a biodegradable fork that broke off in your food. Materials like wood are actually great alternatives for this, but we’re trying to figure out how to do it without cutting down a tree or harvesting bamboo.��

For more information contact Meza at lmeza@uw.edu.

Source

Come curious. Leave inspired.

While February might be just 28 days, the Ģ����Ƶ offers an exciting lineup of more than 40 in-person and online events. From thought-provoking art and music to conversations on culture, history, and science, the Ģ����Ƶ community invites you to explore, learn, and connect across disciplines throughout the University. In addition, take a look ahead at what’s happening in March.

In addition,��.

ArtSci On Your Own Time

Recorded Lectures: ��(History)
Incarceration is a hotly debated topic in the United States, a country that has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world. Looking at the practice from a historical perspective, what can incarceration teach us about who we were and who we are now? What might histories of incarceration, and the histories of those who have been incarcerated, tell us about power dynamics, belonging, exclusion, struggle, and hope across societies in the past and present? The 2026 History Lecture Series explores the practice of incarceration, tracing its change over time from antiquity to our modern world. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online.

Podcast: (School of Drama)
A lively and opinionated cultural history of the Broadway Musical that tells the extraordinary story of how Immigrants, Jews, Queers, African-Americans and other outcasts invented the Broadway Musical, and how they changed America in the process.In Season One, host David Armstrong traces the evolution of American Musical Theater from its birth at the dawn of the 20th Century, through its mid-century “Golden Age”, and right up to its current 21st Century renaissance; and also explore how musicals have reflected and shaped our world — especially in regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, and equality. Free.

Exhibition: (Henry Art Gallery)
Primarily featuring works from the Henry collection created in the twenty-first century, Figure/Ground reflects a period in which hard-won civil rights and claims to self-determination have been eroded across the US, disproportionately affecting Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized communities. Free.

Book Club: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Ģ����Ƶ Alumni)
Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of more than forty novels, collections, novellas and comic books. He is a professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, and an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana. Free.

Recorded Lectures:
Featuring selected lectures from 1996 to today, Ģ����Ƶ Graduate School’s Office of Public Lectures YouTube features an incredible lineup of artists, scientists, researchers, and more!

Week of February 2

January 29–February 8 | (School of Drama)
In this new translation of Chekhov’s ”serious comedy of human contradictions”, a group of artists and dreamers meet in the countryside and wrestle with the costs of ambition, unspoken longings, and the harsh realities of artistic pursuits. Set against a backdrop of love, passionate aspirations, and the search for meaning,��The Seagull��captures the fierce hopes and quiet heartbreaks of an artistic career.�� Directed by MFA Student Sebastián Bravo Montenegro.

Online – February 2 | ��(Jackson School of International Studies)
Presented by Radhika Govindrajan, Director, South Asia Center and Associate Professor, Anthropology, Ģ����Ƶ; Sunila Kale
Professor, South Asia and International Studies Ģ����Ƶ; and Milan Vaishnav, Senior Fellow and Director, South Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trump in the World 2.0 is an online series of talks and discussions featuring guest speakers and faculty exploring global perspectives on a second Trump administration. Free.

February 3 | (Asian Languages & Literature)
This is a unique opportunity to learn from Ģ����Ƶ Professor Zev Handel and get a peek into a linguistic history that has shaped the world. Like the book, this talk will be accessible to everyone—regardless of whether you have any knowledge of Chinese characters or East Asian languages. Free.

February 3 | (Jackson School of International Studies)
A Welcome & Research Presentation with 2025-26 Ģ����Ƶ Fulbright Canada Special Foundation Fellow, Clinton Westman. Free.

February 4 |
(History)
This lecture explores the evidence for ancient incarceration in vignettes: reading letters that prisoners wrote on papyrus, investigating spaces where they were held, and analyzing depictions of captives in monuments, law courts, and homes. Roman evidence does not model a just society, but it does offer a mirror where we can see modern practices of incarceration in a new light, asking which aspects of contemporary prisons are unique to modernity, and which reflect longer histories. The 2026 History Lecture Series presents “Power & Punishment – Histories of Incarceration,” exploring the practice of incarceration, tracing its change over time from antiquity to our modern world. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 4 | (School of Art + Art History + Design)
Death is a fundamental first step toward rebirth—but this transition can feel daunting without a compassionate guide. In The Book of Zero, our 2026 Jacob Lawrence Legacy Resident indira allegra presents a multimedia, meditative experience shaped by their research into doula work, death care, and the cyclical nature of bodies and environments. Free.

February 4 | (School of Music)
A free lunchtime performance featuring Ģ����Ƶ School of Music students in the North Allen Library lobby. Presented in partnership with Ģ����Ƶ Libraries. Free.

Online option – February 5 | 2026 University Faculty Lecture – A breath of fresh air: The science and policy saving lives from America’s deadliest cancer
Lung cancer kills nearly 125,000 Americans each year — more than breast, colon, and prostate cancers combined. Ģ����Ƶ Department of Surgery Professor and Chair Dr. Douglas Wood is out to change that and will discuss the many ways he and his colleagues are raising lung cancer awareness, increasing access to early detection, and ultimately, working to change lung cancer victims to lung cancer survivors. Free.

February 5 | ��(Asian Languages & Literature)
During the dark centuries between the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 CE and the golden age of reunified China under the Tang and Song dynasties (618–1279), the shi poetic form embraced new themes and structure. Using biography, social history, and literary analysis, Ping Wang demonstrates how the shi form came to dominate classical Chinese poetry, making possible the works of the great poets of later dynasties and influencing literary development in Korea and Japan. Free.

February 6 | (Jackson School of International Studies)
Since the early 2000s, literary scholarship has read Hebrew and Arabic literatures together to find moments of transgression or trespass, challenging logics of partition. In Static Forms: Writing the Present in the Modern Middle East, Shir Alon develops an alternative model for reading Arabic and Hebrew literatures, as two literary systems sharing a remarkably similar narrative of modernization and developing parallel literary forms to address it. In this talk, Alon will discuss the potential of a paradigm grounded in formal and affective analysis for new understandings of transnational modernism, Middle Eastern literatures, and comparative literary studies at large. She will also explore the limits of this approach, when parallel readings of Hebrew and Arabic literatures obfuscate rather than clarify the conditions of the present. Free.

February 6 | ��(Music and American Indian Studies)
Ģ����Ƶ Ethnomusicology, Department of American Indian Studies, and the Ģ����Ƶ Symphony collaborate with Lushootseed Research’s Healing Heart Project in presenting this special community event. Following a free screening of the documentary film The Healing Heart of Lushootseed, the Ģ����Ƶ Symphony (David Alexander Rahbee, director) and soprano Adia S. Bowen (tsi sʔuyuʔaɫ) perform Bruce Ruddell’s 50-minute symphony Healing Heart of the First People of This Land. This powerful work was commissioned by Upper Skagit elder Vi Hilbert (taqʷšəblu) shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a vehicle for, in Hilbert’s words, “bringing healing to a sick world.” Premiered by The Seattle Symphony in 2006, the piece draws inspiration from two sacred Coast Salish songs Hilbert had entrusted to the composer and features a number of percussion instruments native to this region. The performance features soloist and Indigenous soprano Adia S. Bowen (tsi sʔuyuʔaɫ), a Ģ����Ƶ alumna who graduated in June 2025 with degrees in Voice Performance and American Indian Studies. Free.

February 6 | (Psychology)
Whether you’re married, dating, or flying solo, Dr. Nicole McNichols has some sex advice for you. And you may want to pay attention because McNichols is not only the professor of Ģ����Ƶ’s most sought-after class in its history, she’s one of social media’s most popular educators on the topic of sex. Pulling from her book, You Could Be Having Better Sex, McNichols shares the latest data that shows good sex is one of the most powerful and effective sources of joy.

Week of February 9

Online – February 9 | ��(Jackson School of International Studies)
Presented by Reşat Kasaba, Professor, International Studies, Ģ����Ƶ and Gönül Tol, Director, Turkish Program, Middle East Institute. Trump in the World 2.0 is an online series of talks and discussions featuring guest speakers and faculty exploring global perspectives on a second Trump administration. Free.

February 10 | ��(Simpson Center for the Humanities)
The production and promotion of so-called “AI” technology involves dehumanization on many fronts: the computational metaphor valorizes one kind of cognitive activity as “intelligence,” devaluing many other aspects of human experience while taking an isolating, individualistic view of agency, ignoring the importance of communities and webs of relationships. Meanwhile, the purpose of humans is framed as being labelers of data or interchangeable machine components. Data collected about people is understood as “ground truth” even while it lies about those people, especially marginalized people. In this talk, Bender will explore these processes of dehumanization and the vital role that the humanities have in resisting these trends by painting a deeper and richer picture of what it is to be human. Free.

February 10 | (QuantumX)
Dr. Krysta Svore is Vice President of Applied Research for Quantum Computing at NVIDIA, joining the company after 19 years at Microsoft, where she served as Technical Fellow and VP of Advanced Quantum Development and pioneered reliable quantum computing through the co‑design of hardware, software, and error correction. She began her career developing machine learning methods for web search before founding Microsoft’s quantum computing software, algorithms, and architecture program. Free.

February 11 | ��(Chemistry, Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, and Bioengineering)
Explore how cutting-edge research is driving material innovation in the built environment. Faculty whose work spans chemistry, engineering, and architecture examine how living systems can be integrated into material design to address pressing challenges related to sustainability, resilience, and the future of construction. Free.

February 11 | (History)
This lecture explores the wide variety of carceral practices in medieval Europe and examines how the recovery of Roman law and the concept of the state in the twelfth century began to transform those practices. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 11 | (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies)
Navigating Academia as a Transnational Scholar from the Global South: Treasuring All the Knowledges brings together the voices of 16 women and non-binary scholars who began their postgraduate journeys as non-elite international students and (un)documented migrants in countries positioned as economically more powerful than their places of origin. Inspired by the book’s creative and relational approach to knowledge, this event will also open a collective space for poetry and storytelling. Participants are invited to write and share short poetic or narrative reflections that speak to their own experiences of abundance, survival, care, and knowledge-making within academic spaces. Free.

February 12 | (Sociology)
The future will be old; Europe, the Americas and Asia will soon have the oldest populations ever known to humanity. Can we cope? It will require major changes in the way we think about youth, women, immigration, and globalization to avoid disaster. Free.

February 12 | ��(Jackson School of International Studies)
In Ghost Nation: the Story of Taiwan and its Struggle for Survival, Chris Horton compares Beijing’s claim that Taiwan has been Chinese territory “since time immemorial” with Taiwan’s actual history. Several different groups have controlled some or all of Taiwan over the last 400 years — the Dutch, Spanish, Tungning, Manchu, Japanese, Chinese, and now, Taiwanese. By looking at those who have ruled Taiwan, Horton also tells the story of the Taiwanese people, highlighting their intergenerational quest for self-determination — and the existential threat posed by an expansionist Chinese Communist Party. Free.

February 12 | (Simpson Center for the Humanities)
Athletes with ancestral ties to the Pacific Islands are dominant fixtures in some of the world’s most visible sports and over several generations have produced a modern sports diaspora. Tracing Samoan transnational and diasporic movement along divergent colonial pathways, this talk examines the relationship between embodied experiences of racialization and the emergence of Pacific sports excellence in three settler colonial countries (United States, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia). It then considers what recent efforts to mobilize Indigenous practice inside and outside sport tell us about the uses and importance of culture in contemporary sport. Free.

February 12 | ��(School of Music)
Faculty pianist Robin McCabe joins forces with guest artist Maria Larionoff in an evening of high octane duos for violin and piano. On the launch pad: Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, Beethoven’s Sonata in G major, Opus 96, and Faure’s impassioned Sonata in A Major.

Online – February 13 | 2026 Provost’s Town Hall
Join Ģ����Ƶ Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Tricia Serio as she discusses the state of the University from an academic perspective and the singular role that public research universities — and the Ģ����Ƶ in particular — play in our society. Featured speakers include Jodi Sandfort, dean of the Evans School, and Sarah Cusworth Walker, research professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Ted Poor, associate professor in the School of Music, will introduce the provost.

February 13 | (Open Scholarship Commons)
Douglass Day is an annual transcribe-a-thon program that marks the birth of Frederick Douglass. Each year, sites across the country gather thousands of people to help create new & freely available resources for learning about Black history. A transcribe-a-thon is an event in which a group of people work together to transcribe a collection of digitized historical materials. The primary goal of a transcribe-a-thon is to make the materials more easily accessible, but these events also serve to promote awareness of parts of Black history – and especially Black women’s history – that remain too-little-known. Free.

February 14 | (Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
Celebrate Valentine’s Day with 8x Grammy nominee and NAACP Image Award winner The Baylor Project — featuring vocalist Jean Baylor and drummer Marcus Baylor. Steeped in the heart of jazz, with dynamic performances that are soulful to the core, their musical roots are deeply planted in gospel, blues and R&B. Their eclectic sound and infectious chemistry provide the perfect backdrop for a memorable evening filled with vibrant, spiritual, feel-good music.

Week of February 16

February 17 | (School of Art + Art History + Design)
Our question to consider: what does the work of indira allegra offer us when thinking about the project of liberation? This program is part of the year-long Liberation Book Club series exploring liberation through shared texts, art, film, music, and workshops. Free.

February 18 | (History)
In 1942, the U.S. government incarcerated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps based on the racist argument that they were likely “disloyal” to the United States. In the ensuing years of World War II, though, the U.S. government simultaneously sought to demonstrate the “loyalty” of Japanese Americans to American democracy. By placing U.S. wartime policies and Japanese American responses in different historical contexts, this lecture will interrogate the meanings of loyalty, democracy, and national security—during World War II and in our own time. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 18 | (Digital Arts & Experimental Media)
DXARTS presents an evening of 3D music, featuring recent work and world premieres by current staff and graduate students. Free.

February 18 & 19 | & (School of Music)
Ģ����Ƶ Jazz Studies students perform in small combos over two consecutive nights of original tunes, homage to the greats of jazz, and experiments in composing and arranging. Directed by Cuong Vu, Ted Poor, John-Carlos Perea, and Steve Rodby.��Free.

February 19 | ��(Henry Art Gallery)
Poet, musician, and scholar Rasheena Fountain presents Speculative Land Blues, a blues guitar, poetry, and DJ set. Developed in collaboration with Adeerya Johnson, Associate Curator at the Museum of Pop Culture, the Henry presents Speculative Landscapes. Free.

February 19 | (Burke Museum)
Read the book ahead of time, or join to learn more about the selection. The February book is Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State by Elizabeth A. Nesbitt and David B. Williams. Free.

February 19 | (Jackson School of International Studies)
John Johnson is a recently retired Senior Foreign Service Officer whose career included leadership roles in Brussels, Afghanistan, and with the U.S. Mission to NATO. Since joining the State Department in 2002, he has served in Europe, Asia, and Washington, D.C., earning multiple awards for his service. A Seattle native and Ģ����Ƶ graduate, John speaks several languages and lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest. Free.

February 20 | ��(Political Science)
The Center for Environmental Politics hosts Amanda Stronza, professor in Texas A&M University Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, and co-founder of the Applied Biodiversity Science Program. Free.

February 21 | ��(Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
yMusic — named for Generation Y — is a genre-leading American chamber ensemble renowned for its innovative and collaborative spirit. yMusic has a unique mission: to work on both sides of the classical/popular music divide, without sacrificing rigor, virtuosity, charisma or style.

Week of February 23

Online – February 23 | ��(Jackson School of International Studies)
Presented by Ambassador Michelle Gavin who is currently Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies, Council on Foreign Relations. Trump in the World 2.0 is an online series of talks and discussions featuring guest speakers and faculty exploring global perspectives on a second Trump administration. Free.

February 23 | ��(Asian Languages & Literature)
Ģ����Ƶ Asian L&L and the Seattle International Film Festival co-host an award winning filmmaker Ash Mayfair at the SIFF Cinema Uptown for the screening of Skin of Youth (2025). A Q&A moderated by Assistant Professor Ungsan Kim will follow the screening.

February 23 | ��(School of Music)
Ģ����Ƶ music students perform music from the Baroque era under the direction of Tekla Cunningham. Free.

February 24 | (Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
Join us for a feature documentary that traces the remarkable history and legacy of one of the most important works of art to come out of the age of AIDS –choreographer Bill T. Jones’s tour de force ballet “D-Man in the Waters.” There will be a post-screening discussion with Bill T. Jones and Berette S Macaulay. Free.

February 24 | ��(Jackson School of International Studies)
Can political elites shape public opinion by influencing the tone of news coverage, even when they cannot dictate what gets covered? This study addresses that question using text analysis of more than five million Japanese news articles from 2004–2024, showing that rising negativity in legacy media closely corresponds with declines in cabinet approval. A newly compiled dataset of prime ministers’ daily schedules further reveals that periods of intensified elite engagement with journalists coincide with less negative coverage. Together, these findings suggest that incumbents may still temper media tone through proactive outreach, though this influence appears to weaken in the age of fragmented, digital media. Free.

February 25 | (History)
Prison is more than a place of punishment. It is also an archive. Yet the official story found in sentencing reports and conduct reviews is only part of the story. Incarcerated people generate a parallel counter-archive of resistance and transformation. The Washington Prison History Project is a multimedia digital effort to document this counter-archive at a local level. Across a series of publications, programs, and protests, incarcerated people have shown prison to be a central feature in the development of Washington State and the country. An examination of this archive tells a different history of our state—and its possible futures. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 25 | (American Indian Studies)
Featuring Oscar Hokea(Cherokee Nation and Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma). Storytelling offers a spiritual connection, a sharing of sacred breath. Literature, similarly, preserves human experience and ideals. Both forms are durable and transmit power that teaches us how to live. Both storytelling and reading aloud can impact audiences through the power of presence, allowing for the experience of the transfer of sacred breath as audiences are immersed in the experience of being inside stories and works of literature.��Free.

Online option – February 25 | The Office of Public Lectures presents: America’s Character and the Rule of Law with George Conway III��(Public Lectures)
This talk will explore the idea that the endurance of the rule of law in the United States relies not solely on the provisions of the Constitution—its structural framework, the institutions it established, or the rights it enshrines—but fundamentally on the character of its citizens. Qualities such as public-spiritedness, tolerance, moderation, empathy, mutual respect, a sense of fair play, and, ultimately, intelligence, honor, and decency form the foundation of constitutional democracy. Free.

February 26 | (School of Art + Art History + Design)
In this talk, Rachael Z. DeLue will share insights from her current research and teaching on the relationship between art and science in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, focusing on a suite of extraordinary chromolithographs created in the 1880s by the astronomer and illustrator Étienne-Leopold Trouvelot. Based on his work at the Harvard Observatory and the United States Naval Observatory, the chromolithographs represent the cross-pollination of art and science in an attempt to generate knowledge about astronomical phenomena that eluded perception and resisted visualization. Prof. DeLue will consider Trouvelot’s prints in relation to other such attempts on the part of fine artists and scientific illustrators to picture the celestial sphere at a time when technology was limited and space travel was still the stuff of science fiction. Free.

February 26 | ��(Stroum Center for Jewish Studies)
In this talk, Paris Papamichos Chronakis discuss his new book, The Business of Transition – Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule, and shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) skillfully managed the tumultuous shift from Ottoman to Greek rule amidst rising ethnic tensions and heightened class conflict. Bringing their once powerful voices back into the historical narrative, he traces their entangled trajectories as businessmen, community members, and civic leaders to illustrate how the self-reinvention of a Jewish-led bourgeoisie made a city Greek. Salonica’s merchants were present in their own—and their city’s—remaking. Free.

February 26 | ��(Simpson Center for the Humanities)
Taiwan is a unique site of innovation in disability rights. Despite being barred from becoming a States Party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) according to the diplomatic exclusion faced by Taiwan, it has become a model for the localization of the CRPD through its use “domestic review mechanisms.” Furthermore, Taiwan demonstrates the ways in which fundamental divides within human rights discourse, such as Western individualism and East Asian familialism, can be bridged using strategic adaptation that reimagine disability rights as a post-colonial hybrid. Free.

February 26 – March 1 | (Dance)
Presenting seven original student-choreographed works. This platform gives students the opportunity to express their creative voices through choreography and costume design, as well as collaborating with lighting designers and mentors.

February 26 – 28 | (Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
Thirty years after its historic premiere, the groundbreaking dance theater work by Bill T. Jones returns to the stage. Still/Here shatters boundaries between the personal and the political, exemplifying a form of dance theater that is uniquely American. At the heart of the piece are “survival workshops” Jones conducted with people living with life-threatening illnesses.

ArtSci Roundup goes monthly!

The ArtSci Roundup is your guide to connecting with the Ģ����Ƶ—whether in person, on campus, or on your couch.

Previously shared on a quarterly basis, those who sign up for the Roundup email will receive them monthly, delivering timely updates and engaging content wherever you are. Check the roundup regularly, as events are added throughout the month. Make sure to check out the ArtSci On Your Own Time section for everything from podcasts to videos to exhibitions that can be enjoyed when it works for you!

In addition, if you like the ArtSci Roundup, sign up to receive a monthly notice when it’s been published.

Do you have an event that you would like to see featured in the ArtSci Roundup? Connect with Lauren Zondag (zondagld@uw.edu).uw.edu).

Source

A statewide initiative to put more healthy, climate-friendly grains on people’s plates has received a $19 million boost, which will sustain every step in building a network from the field to the fork.

The initiative, a public-private partnership led by Washington State University with support from the Ģ����Ƶ, received a $10 million BioInnovation Grant from the and matching funds from several other organizations, including more than $3 million from the Washington Grain Commission.

It targets a global health problem: the lack of whole grains in people’s diets, which contributes to widespread health problems.

The funding will allow WSU researchers to continue developing new crop varieties for farmers. It will fuel efforts to bring more whole grains to the public, including into school lunchrooms and will expand Washington state’s commercial infrastructure for storing, transporting, milling and marketing whole grains. The funding will also support the establishment of a commercial kitchen at the Ģ����Ƶ to help entrepreneurs bring whole-grain foods to market.

“This work is about making sure that nutritious grains reach the people who need them,” said , a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the Ģ����Ƶ. “By understanding the policies, systems, and human decisions that shape food production and the supply chain for school meals, we can help bridge the gap between innovation and impact.”

Two teams of Ģ����Ƶ researchers will contribute to this effort.��

, professor of industrial & systems engineering and of mechanical engineering at the Ģ����Ƶ, will help lead development of ready-to-eat meals and will support private organizations using Ģ����Ƶ facilities to produce sample meals for school breakfast and lunch.��

The Ģ����Ƶ’s implementation science team, which includes Otten, assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences , and assistant professor of epidemiology , will examine how innovations in grain breeding and food product development can be successfully adopted in school settings. They will study what policy, budgetary, and social factors help ensure that new whole grain and legume varieties are embraced across the supply chain and, ultimately, by school-aged children who rely on them for the nutrition they need to grow and thrive.

This team will also lead study-away programs, where students can learn about new whole grains and legumes in both urban and rural areas of Washington state. Curriculum from these five-week summer programs will be made publicly available.��

“The timing of the grant is perfect,” said , a WSU professor of international seed and cropping systems and director of the WSU Breadlab, who will lead the grant work. “We’re right at the stage where we’ve got a critical mass of cross-disciplinary research, encompassing a range of agricultural, food and health sciences. Now we can start commercializing, getting these crop varieties to farmers, getting whole grains on our plates and into schools.”

The grant funding will be matched by contributions from the Washington Grain Commission, the USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council, the American Heart Association, The Land Institute, and food and technology companies.

“This is truly a historic investment for Washington farmers,” said Casey Chumrau, CEO of the Washington Grain Commission.

Adapted from . For more information or to reach the project team, contact Alden Woods at acwoods@uw.edu or WSU’s Shawn Vestal at shawn.vestal@wsu.edu.

Source

The historic Norwegian tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl set sail for San Francisco from the Port of Seattle on Monday, marking the end of and another stop on the to support a sustainable future at sea.

The ship, built in 1914, boasts three towering masts and hails from Bergen, Norway. During the inaugural One Ocean Week Seattle, organized by , it docked at Pier 66 to welcome attendees and members of the public aboard to explore and learn.

The drew hundreds of people to Seattle to discuss marine ecosystems, the seafood industry, shipping and renewable energy, and more. Ģ����Ƶ scientists joined policymakers, educators and industry leaders to define and address priorities in stewardship and ocean science.

, a Ģ����Ƶ affiliate professor and research scientist at the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels, served as a panelist on the “Coast to Coast Collaboration in Research” aboard Statsraad Lehmkuhl on Friday morning.

Moore contributed her expertise as a marine mammal ecologist to help launch the in the Pacific Arctic in 2010, leading to an international effort to establish a network of observatories in the Arctic to track ecosystem health amidst physical changes to the region.

The panel, part of a series hosted by , offered a chance to discuss shared goals as melting ice opens the Arctic up to more traffic.

“It was an important opportunity for international collaboration and public engagement regarding rapid ecosystem changes in Arctic, and local, waters,” Moore said.

, a Ģ����Ƶ professor of mechanical engineering, helped lead a “behind the scenes” lab tour hosted by the , which joins researchers at Ģ����Ƶ, Oregon State University and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

During the tour, researchers showcased marine energy monitoring projects at the , including videos and sonar documenting interactions between marine life and tidal energy turbines, sensors to detect underwater collisions, and systems to monitor how much noise is produced by the devices that help harness energy from waves and currents.

“These tools help us identify and minimize environmental effects associated with harnessing energy from waves, tides and rivers,” Polagye said.

, a Ģ����Ƶ principal research scientist of aquatic and fishery sciences participated in a panel discussion, where he shared his work on habitat in , which borders downtown Seattle. Toft’s lab studies how shoreline development impacts habitat value for young salmon.

“Although the shorelines of Elliott Bay have been heavily modified, restoration efforts have had positive results,” he said. “The panel gave us a chance to discuss the importance of maintaining a healthy shoreline along a major urban working waterfront.”

Despite the density of human activity along the shores of Elliott Bay, these waters are home to key species, including kelp, orcas and salmon. Maintaining functionality without losing habitat is a challenge, requiring input from various stakeholders, and creativity.

, a coastal hazards specialist at , provided an update on observed and projected sea level rise during a Friday workshop bringing together coastal managers and tribes around the Puget Sound region.

“The opportunity to meet in person with that many people who all came for the workshop was invaluable,” he said.

To connect with a Ģ����Ƶ expert in ocean or environmental science, contact Gillian Dohrn in Ģ����Ƶ News at gdohrn@uw.edu.

Source