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Showcase award winners announced

Washington State University faculty and staff making outstanding contributions to the institution and beyond are being recognized as part of the 2023 Showcase awards.

The outstanding achievements of researchers, faculty members, staff, and leaders are recognized each year in the lead up to Showcase. The annual event is a weeklong celebration of academic excellence that includes research expositions as well as talks from distinguished university representatives, and many other activities.

Cheryl Schulz.
Schulz

This year’s Distinguished Faculty Address will be given by Cheryl Schultz from the School of Biological Sciences within the College of Arts and Sciences. Schultz, who is located on the WSU Vancouver campus, is a renowned conservation biologist specializing in species threatened by habitat loss, invasive species, and global climate change.

Additional Showcase award winners in CAS:

Innovation and Entrepreneurship Award – Danh Pham, School of Music, WSU Pullman

President’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Career-Track Faculty – Vanessa Cozza, English, WSU Tri-Cities; and Sophia Tegart, Music, WSU Pullman

Sahlin Eminent Faculty Award – Keri McCarthy, Music, WSU Pullman

Sahlin Faculty Excellence Awards – Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe, Psychology, WSU Pullman

Emeritus Society Legacy of Excellence Award – Nicholas Lovrich, Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs, WSU Pullman

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WSU Insider 

Ask Dr. Universe: What if there were no predators to eat the birds?

Don’t let the lab coat fool you. I enjoy chattering at birds as much as the next cat. Staring out the window and vibrating my mouth to “chirp” helps me relax after a long day.

My wild cousins do take things a bit further—namely, predation. It’s not pretty, but it’s an important part of keeping life in balance.

I talked about predators with my friend Travis King. He’s a Ph.D. student in the School of the Environment at Washington State University. He studies big cats like lynx and jaguars.

Travis King.
King

“It’s a balancing act between predators, disease, food and space,” King said. “If you take away predators, you lose one of the factors keeping an ecosystem in balance.”

An ecosystem is a community of living things and the world they live in. Rainforests, oceans and cities are all ecosystems. Each ecosystem can support only so many animals. The maximum number it can handle is its carrying capacity.

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Dr Universe

 

A man’s world? Not according to biology or history.

Many of us look at the stranglehold that gender-based oppression has on our societies and wonder if there was a time when men didn’t have this much power, when femininity and masculinity didn’t mean what they do now. When we search for powerful women in ancient history, when we try to identify precedents for equality in the distant past, perhaps we also betray our longing for an alternative in a world in which we fear there may be none.

Patriarchy—giving all power and authority to the father—can sometimes seem like a vast conspiracy stretching into deep time. The word itself has become devastatingly monolithic, encompassing all the ways in which the world’s women, girls, and nonbinary people are abused and unfairly treated, from domestic violence and rape to the gender pay gap and moral double standards. The sheer scale of it feels out of our control. But how old and how universal is it really?

Linda Stone.
Stone

Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and feminists have been fascinated by this question—and as a science journalist, I’ve been preoccupied with it for years.

In most cases, matrilineal societies are framed as unusual circumstances, “beset by special strains, as fragile and rare, possibly even doomed to extinction,” as Washington State University anthropologist Linda Stone puts it. In academic circles, the problem is known as the matrilineal puzzle. Patriliny, on the other hand, is seen to need no explanation. It just is.

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National Geographic 

Glacier National Park could be climate haven for Canada lynx

Glacier National Park is home to around 50 Canada lynx, more than expected, surprising scientists who recently conducted the first parkwide occupancy survey for the North American cat.

Daniel Thornton.
Thornton

The Washington State University-led survey reveals the iconic predator resides across most of Glacier’s 1,600 square-mile landscape, although at lower densities than in the core of its range further north.

“The population in the park is still substantial and exceeded our expectations,” said Dan Thornton, WSU wildlife ecologist and senior author of the study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management. “Our results suggest the park could provide a much-needed climate refuge for the cats in the future.”

Alissa Anderson.
Anderson

“Most surveys for lynx happen in the winter when you can use bait to lure the animals to live traps,” said Alissa Anderson, a recent WSU master’s graduate and first author on the study. “Glacier is sort of unique in the sense that it is a difficult place to survey in the wintertime. There aren’t really maintained roads and you can’t use snowmobiles. It is extremely difficult to access compared to other areas.”

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WSU Insider
Phys.org
Science Daily