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Elizabeth Chilton named first chancellor of WSU Pullman

Elizabeth Chilton.
Chilton

Elizabeth Chilton, Washington State University’s provost and executive vice president, will also become the first chancellor of the flagship Pullman campus in a phased transition culminating on July 1, 2022.

Chilton, who joined WSU a year ago, said she is “honored and thrilled to take on this expanded role in the next year.” She added, “Our Pullman campus is distinct from the other campuses in its history, size, and local community. It’s our only residential campus and it’s the seat of Cougar Athletics. When it comes to decisions affecting the Pullman campus operations or our relationships with communities and constituencies on the Palouse, the campus needs the same distinctive autonomy afforded our other WSU campuses,” she said.

“As an anthropologist, Dr. Chilton understands the connections between people and place as well as how individual units function as part of a system,” said WSU President Kirk Schulz. “Her cumulative expertise in public university systems makes her the natural choice to become the first chancellor of WSU Pullman.”

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WSU Insider

American Parents Are Way Too Focused on Their Kids’ Self-Esteem

For two kids who share so much of their DNA, my children couldn’t be more different in their displays of self-confidence. My 7-year-old recently got toothpaste on her dress while brushing her teeth, and in response, she burst into tears, dropped to the floor, and rolled around screaming, “I’m the worst person ever!” My 10-year-old, however, acts as though his knowledge already surpasses that of Albert Einstein. Whenever we point out that he’s wrong about something, he disagrees, as if the number of moons orbiting Jupiter is a matter of opinion. Sometimes I wonder if my daughter’s self-esteem is too low and my son’s is too high. How important is having the right amount of self-esteem? Does the right amount even exist?

Chris Barry.
Barry

America’s obsession with self-esteem makes evaluating and encouraging it difficult and messy. U.S. parents often have a hard time estimating how much self-esteem their children have. “It’s a really complex construct in our day-to-day lives,” Chris Barry, a developmental psychologist at Washington State University, told me. For instance, some American kids (and adults) with low self-esteem outwardly project confidence in an attempt to appear self-confident. On top of that, parents tend to overestimate their children’s self-esteem—perhaps both because kids are adept at hiding their issues, and because parents assume that healthy self-esteem is crucial and desperately want to believe their kids are doing fine.

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DNYUZ

Grants fuel research energy

Thanks to a steady influx of grant funding in recent years, Washington State University’s Nuclear Science Center has acquired a raft of state-of-the-art equipment significantly expanding research capabilities.

Liane Moreau.
Moreau

Liane Moreau, an assistant professor of chemistry and research scientist at WSU, said these kinds of instruments are few and far between, noting the closest SAXS is in Berkeley, Calif., so having access to them in one facility is a major advantage to researchers.

“Let’s say we generated a material using the nuclear reactor, we could then directly look at that in our instrumentation here, so it allows us to have capabilities that we don’t have anywhere else,” Moreau said of the SAXS. “To our knowledge there isn’t another instrument in the world that actually exists in the same facility as a nuclear reactor.”

Moreau said there are also major challenges to shipping and transporting radioactive material, and having access to these machines on one site in many cases eliminates the need to move the material from place to place.

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Daily News
Yahoo!News

WSU faculty receive $1.4 million grant for assessment addressing truancy in schools

Several Washington State University faculty are the recipients of a $1.4 million grant from the Institute of Education Sciences to refine and expand an assessment that helps address truancy in K-12 schools.

Nicholas Lovrich.
Lovrich
Paul Strand.
Strand

Paul Strand, WSU Tri-Cities professor of psychology, Brian French, Berry Family Distinguished professor and director of WSU’s Learning and Performance Research Center and Psychometric Laboratory, Nick Lovrich, WSU Regents professor emeritus, and Bruce Austin, research associate in educational psychology and the LPRC, have worked since 2014 to evaluate and refine WARNS. With the grant, the group is also adding the following members to their team to help refine the tool: Chad Gotch and Marcus Poppen, both WSU assistant professors in education, and Mary Roduta Roberts, an associate professor of occupational therapy at the University of Alberta.

Strand said the new grant will allow the team to update the instrument in a few ways. He said a variety of new issues have arisen that have impacted school attendance and performance in recent years. Examples, he said, include the prevalence of vaping and social media use.

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WSU Insider

Other regions have specific plans for heat waves. Experts say Seattle, Puget Sound cities need them too

In our current climate, a heat wave of similar severity could be expected, roughly, once every 1,000 years across the Pacific Northwest, according to a recent study that has yet to receive peer review. But as global warming advances, such a severe heat wave could be expected once every five to 10 years, the research suggests.

Deepti Singh.
Singh

“If you are vulnerable, or if you have vulnerable people in your household, it’s important to have cooling resources,” said Dr. Deepti Singh, a climate researcher at Washington State University – Vancouver, in the days before the heat wave hit.

The cooling sites were distributed across the city, but there were gaps in coverage. There were no sites in Georgetown or Queen Anne, and none below 95th Street in Northeast Seattle, for example, until June 28 — the third and hottest day — when the city opened one in Magnuson Park after residents in a low-income housing development raised concern.

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Seattle Times
The Sacramento Bee
The Columbian