Humans have been telling stories for thousands of years. At first, they told these stories out loud, then they started to write.
There are more than a hundred million published books on our planet now and to find out which one is best, I visited my friend Matthew Jockers. He’s a professor at Washington State University who combines his love of stories with computer science to research what makes some books bestsellers. » More …
History professor Clif Stratton has been named the new director of WSU’s University Common Requirements Program, known as UCORE.
“It’s a great honor to lead UCORE,” Stratton said. “It is central to the mission of the university. It touches virtually every student on every campus, regardless of their major, from their first-year through capstone courses.
“UCORE meets students’ academic needs by advancing knowledge, understanding, and skill development. It helps them make connections across disciplines. In many ways, UCORE provides a foundation » More …
The WSU Center for Arts and Humanities (CAH) and the Office of Research awarded 2019 fellowships to eight faculty representing fine arts, history, and music, as well as politics, philosophy, and public affairs, and design and construction.
Each award supports faculty professional goals and advances university‑wide arts and humanities initiatives. The fellowships will support exhibitions, music recordings, research travel, and course releases. Many of these activities will lead to publications. In addition » More …
Giddy at the end of another school year, middle schoolers in Nespelem, Washington, will charge into summer with a new way of viewing even their oldest and most familiar things, thanks to a WSU mathematics professor and her students.
Clinical Associate Professor Kimberly Vincent and a small group of aspiring math teachers visited the sixth through eighth graders at their school last fall and used some of the youngsters’ prized possessions—from spiraled seashells to a violin—to teach them about ratios and how to calculate proportions. » More …
Spanning biosynthetic pharmaceuticals, intermedia art, and wildfires, three College of Arts and Sciences faculty have been awarded New Faculty Seed Grants (NFSG) to encourage the development of their research, scholarly, and creative programs.
The grants support projects that will significantly contribute to the researcher’s long range goals by kick-starting a more complex project or idea. The seed funding to junior faculty helps build » More …
Sixteen faculty, six staff, and six graduate students were honored for outstanding achievement at the 2019 College of Arts and Sciences Appreciation and Recognition Social earlier this month.
Professor Mechthild Tegedar, an international leader in plant biology, and Gary Collins, a pioneer in the study of material defects, received the top two faculty awards. Chuck Cody and Paul Wheeler, both in » More …
A curiosity for the world and the yearning to know how it works is what brought Allan Felsot to the world of science. It also inspired his interest in teaching and his passion for sharing his knowledge with students.
The academic director for the CAS math and science sector at WSU Tri-Cities and professor of entomology, Felsot was recently honored with the Entomological Society of America’s Pacific branch award for excellence in teaching. » More …
From creating voice-responsive materials, to enabling regrowth of lost fingers and limbs, to reducing stress on caregivers of autistic children, to unearthing cultural history in Puget Sound, a wide range of high-impact research topics were expeditiously explained in the recent CAS Three Minute Thesis contest.
Eleven Pullman-based doctoral students competed for valuable fellowship prizes by presenting their years of dissertation work in three minutes or less, using just one visual slide, and in language anyone could understand. » More …
The Office of the Provost has selected Maureen Schmitter‑Edgecombe, professor in the Department of Psychology, to deliver this year’s Distinguished Faculty Address. Five other College of Arts and Sciences faculty have also been selected to receive 2019 Showcase awards.
“Outstanding achievements of our faculty serve as an inspiration to our community,” said Provost Dan Bernardo said. “Showcase is an excellent opportunity to pay tribute to some of our colleagues who have made notable contributions to their fields and to the University community.“
Read more about our outstanding faculty: » More …
English major Matthew Jockers wasn’t always a computer whiz. The new dean of the WSU College of Arts and Sciences recalls a class in high school in which he struggled to program a mainframe to print out his name. “It was that tricky,” he says.
A love of reading, writing, and literature led him to become a very good coder indeed. Jockers is an expert in R, a programming language he uses to write the pattern-detecting algorithms at the heart of his research. Jockers uses it to analyze texts—lots and lots of text. One wag wrote that Jockers may be the only literature professor to assign 1,200 novels in a single class. » More …