Dean Luethi has been named director of Washington State University’s School of Music. Luethi is an associate professor and coordinator of music education at the school, teaches choral music methods and choral conducting classes and directs WSU’s tenor/bass choir and treble choir. He is currently working on a virtual choral conducting series for distribution to conductors in India.
Fish research at Washington State University could help scientists better understand some developmental disorders that cause facial deformities.
Jim Cooper, a WSU Tri-Cities assistant professor of biological sciences, studies “jaw protrusion,” a biomechanical ability shared by many fish. For a fish, pushing its jaw out allows it to more easily catch prey, and is an evolutionary advantage comparable with the ability of most birds to fly, Cooper said. The difference is, there’s about twice as many fish with the ability as there are living bird species.
“If you’re talking about biomechanical abilities that have been useful in terms of promoting diversification of lots of species, jaw protrusion is a champ,” he said.
Washington State University Tri-Cities realized an average enrollment growth of 12 percent annually throughout the last four years. As that upward trend continues, so does our expansion of on-campus housing, program development, world-class faculty and specialization in research.
Among the many WSU Tri-Cities faculty accomplishments this year:
Paul Strand, professor of psychology, is one of a team of WSU faculty leading the online implementation of a k-12 truancy prevention program that benefits schools statewide. WSULearning and Performance Research Center houses the online implementation of the Washington Assessment of the Risks and Needs of Students.
Peter Christenson, assistant professor of fine arts and digital technology and culture, developed a scholar residency program at WSU Tri-Cities that welcomes artists, engineers, urban planners and more to campus, where students and community members learn first-hand from their expertise.
Gregory W. Yasinitsky, Regents professor and director of the School of Music at Washington State University, is winner of the 2017-18 The American Prize in Composition in the pops/light music division.
Yasinitsky’s composition “Jazz Concerto for Piano and Orchestra” was selected over applications from across the United States. It is a “third stream work which blends classical music and jazz,” he said.
Yasinitsky wrote the concerto for Willis Delony, pianist and professor of jazz studies at Louisiana State University, who premiered it last year with the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Timothy Muffitt. Delony and Muffitt subsequently nominated the work for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
The concerto “is a unique work in the American orchestral canon, and most deserving of recognition,” Muffitt said.
Flipping through the pages of a dusty, yellowing paperback in his office, James “Jim” Short, Jr., WSU professor emeritus of sociology, pointed to a black-and-white photograph.
“That’s on the westside (of Chicago),” the 94-year-old gang researcher said as he pointed out several well-dressed figures in the photo. “That’s where the Vice Lords were located.”
The photo depicts several young men walking their dogs down a bustling street. All were members of one of the many street gangs Short studied in the 1950s and 1960s. His research, half a century after his historic study on the rise of supergangs like the Vice Lords, is still impacting sociology today.
Short remains as interested as ever.
“That’s why I became a sociologist,” he said. “I was curious about the world around me.”