Alaska attorney Mark Choate, a Western Washington University alumnus, addressed WWU graduates and their families at the Fall Commencement ceremony on Saturday in Carver Gymnasium. About 758 undergraduate and 32 master’s students graduated from Western; congratulations Vikings!
WWU images by Dan Levine
The Western Washington University Cyber Competition team competed against 70 other colleges and universities in the Department of Energy Competition at the Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland on Dec. 1.
The team placed first in Washington state, second in the Pacific Northwest and sixth nationally.
John Krieg has been named director of Western’s new Office of Institutional Effectiveness, said Brent Carbajal, WWU provost and vice president for Academic Affairs.
Western Washington University Professor of English Laura Laffrado has received the 2018 Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) Edition award for her book, “Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature.”
Laffrado was presented the award in early November at the SSAWW conference in Denver.
At the conference, Laffrado was honored for her outstanding contribution to the study of American women writers. Laffrado began work on her book a few years ago and was nominated for the award by her publisher.
Western Washington University’s Wilson Library will host the first "Showcase of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities" from 8:30 a.m. - 6 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 30 in the Reading Room.
The showcase will host 28 sections of English 101 (Writing Your Way through Western) and three sections of English 302 (Technical and Professional Writing). Nearly 350 posters will be on display throughout the day, highlighting diverse undergraduate research.
When Hailey Fagerness of Snohomish was a senior in high school and taking AP calculus, she struggled with deciding what college to go to and what to study.
“I looked at the classes I was taking and what I had taken that I liked,” she said. “I liked calculus and I liked math, which is something most people don’t gravitate toward. “A big reason I fell into the Math major here stemmed from me liking math and just saying, ‘why not?’"
From a young age, many children dream of what they want to be when they grow up. While some hope to become firefighters or teachers, Western’s Michelle Stranges knew from a young age that she was meant to be a piano tuner.
Forty years later, Stranges is Western’s first full-time piano technician, caring for each and every one of the university’s 85 pianos and four harpsichords.
“I’m an ambassador for the instruments, even a doctor, so to speak,” Stranges said. “I maintain their health and fix them when they’re broken.”
A mysterious disease has infiltrated the waters of the West Coast, leaving hundreds of once-healthy sea star colonies dead in its wake. For several years, researchers worked tirelessly to identify the cause, to no avail.
WWU graduate school alumna Chelsea Hutchinson, native of the Tri-Cities, may have gotten us one step closer to understanding the epidemic. Hutchinson recently defended her thesis regarding a potential link between the disease and bacteria.
There comes a time in the life of every young coastal rainbow trout when a combination of factors – genetic makeup, water conditions, its current health and size, and more – cause it to ask itself one very important question: To go to sea, or not go to sea?
Those that opt to leave the river systems of the West and head out into the ocean (their freshwater brethren remain blissfully ignorant of all this drama) become steelhead, with their time in the Pacific spent becoming a jumbo-sized rainbow that weighs 4 to 5 times that of its river- and lake-dwelling kin.
WWU Biology graduate student Megan Russell of Duvall was this past summer named only the third Western student to become a fellow at the Northwest Climate Adaptation Center, a research consortium made up of federal agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, colleges and universities such as WWU, University of Washington and Washington State, and the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians. The center is based at the UW in Seattle.
