Throughout the pandemic, the WSU Jazz Big Band stayed focused on their craft, leveraging Zoom and other technologies to practice, perform, and record music together while physically distanced. This spring, DownBeat magazine awarded the band its 2022 Graduate College Large Jazz Ensemble Award, recognizing the quality of the band’s asynchronous
Three years ago, Marilou Cassidy, then 78 years old, decided to give herself an 80th birthday present: a college degree. She had earned numerous college credits over the years and WSU Vancouver was just 15 minutes away from her home. Even so, “It took me three or four months and a lot of nerve to […]
The Community and Equity Certificate Program is helping faculty and staff across the WSU system expand their understanding of equity-mindedness and build a toolkit for engaging more effectively with students, colleagues, and community partners. Kara Whitman, assistant professor in the School of the Environment, likened the workshop breakout discussions to a faculty learning community where
Never underestimate the power of an elective, advises Matt Ellison (’92 business) and GurglePot founder. “It gets people out of their comfort zone,” he says. “That’s the beauty of going to college and broadening your knowledge. At some point in life that random class could become the most important one you ever took.” For him, […]
Scattered across southern Ethiopia are thousands of mysterious stone monoliths rising as high as 20 feet. “We don’t know who built the stelae in southern Ethiopia or why,” says Addisalem Melesse, a WSU doctoral student in archaeology. “However, the research we are doing at WSU is starting to shed light on the monument’s history and […]
The Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) at WSU Vancouver is a unique physical space where scholars can study born-digital media on the computers for which the works were originally produced. This spring, Erika Fulop, a senior lecturer at Lancaster University (UK) and a specialist in French e-lit, spent three weeks at
A team of researchers led by Maria Gartstein, professor of psychology, developed a novel research study using machine learning to attempt to classify infants by gender and age. “It was a cool opportunity to do kind of a demonstration study using techniques that require really large data sets and are not very common in social […]
When she was nine and newly arrived in Washington state, Blanca Blanco (’03 psychology) performed scenes with her sisters in the garage in which they lived. Putting on these “homemade plays,” the self-made starlet writes in her new memoir, “was a way to escape our current life.” Acting, she notes, “gave me a sense of […]
Through the WSU Emeritus Society, retired faculty members continue to support student success and empower experiential learning. In 2022, four arts & sciences students were selected to receive an undergraduate research or scholarship award from the society, along with funding to continue their independent projects.
An emerging expert in nuclear thermodynamics, Assistant Professor Xiaofeng Guo recently received an NSF CAREER award as well as an Early Career Achievement award from the WSU College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on materials critically important to the nuclear fuel cycle and the safe long-term storage of nuclear waste. His unique thermodynamic […]