Western Washington University will host a free breakfast for the campus and surrounding communities on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, Jan. 20, from 9-10:30 a.m. in the Viking Commons, and also invites its students, faculty, and staff to engage in a day of community service in conjunction with the Volunteer Center of Whatcom County in honor of the legacy of Dr. King.
In 1989, a new faculty member’s chance discovery on a library shelf at Western Washington University would set in motion three decades of work and help solve one of the biggest anthropological and linguistic puzzles of our time: Where did the Indigenous peoples of the Americas come from?
Western Today recently sat down with Huxley Professor Gigi Berardi to chat about her new book, "FoodWISE," discussing the origins of the project and how it came about to the response it has garnered and what her plans are to support the book. FoodWISE will be released by its publisher, North Atlantic Books, on Jan. 14, with a launch party set for the downtown Bellingham Community Food Co-op at 6:30 p.m. that night.
About 790 students left commencement on Saturday with their diplomas; congratulations, new Viking alumni!
WWU photos by Dan Levine
Ted Pratt, Western Washington University’s longtime dean of students, has retired and he is being honored with a WWU scholarship in his name.
“After 32 years of dedicated and faithful service to Western, Ted Pratt retired on Dec. 5. We will miss him more than I can easily express, and also hope that retirement brings him every good thing!” said Melynda Huskey, Western’s vice president for Enrollment and Student Services.
A $10 million gift from Fred Kaiser and Grace Borsari will support “Building Washington’s Future,” a campaign to raise $20 million for a new building to house growing Western Washington University programs in electrical engineering, computer science and energy science, said Stephanie Bowers, president and CEO of the Western Washington University Foundation.
Western Washington University’s production of “HereToo - WWU,” an original company-created play drawn largely from interviews with young activists confronting the gun violence epidemic in America, has been invited to be performed at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival’s regional festival in Fort Collins, Colorado February 17-21.
Western Washington University realized significant energy savings and rebates last year through a Puget Sound Energy (PSE) program. Under PSE’s Commercial Strategic Energy Manager program, Western documented actual electrical savings of 1.9 million kilowatt hours in fiscal year 2018-19 and avoided costs of $198,861.
In addition, Western received an incentive grant of $65,985 from PSE, which the university will use to fund additional energy saving measures.
Western Washington University Professor of Environmental Science Wayne Landis, director of the university’s Institute for Environmental Toxicology, has secured a $320,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to help scientists better understand the threat posed by plastics to aquatic life in the Pacific Northwest.
As the sun dipped behind Lummi Island across Bellingham Bay from Western’s campus, students, faculty and community members from many corners of the world came together to celebrate one another with food, music, dancing and games as Language and Culture Programs (LCP) hosted its fall International Culture Night on Friday, Nov. 1, in the Viking Union MPR.
