John Thompson wins award from CASE for his design and construction of GAIA Web site

John Thompson (University Communications) received a CASE Bronze award in web design for the construction of GAIA, online at http://www.onlinefast.org/gaia/, a new Web site focused on telling external audiences about the research the faculty, undergrads and graduate students are doing at Western in the life, earth, marine and environmental sciences.

As a comprehensive university sitting in the shadow of the University of Washington's massive research efforts to the south, WWU's own research often gets overlooked; moreover, attracting Seattle-area media to do stories on WWU research when they have a Research 1 university five minutes from them is not an easy task. But, increasingly, the Office of University Communications is working to become its own publishers, and to disseminate its own content without using the intermediary of traditional media, which is where new-media outlets like GAIA come in. More than 10,000 unique viewers have logged on to GAIA since its inception.