A year after the idea was first proposed to the Pullman City Council, a mural promoting racial equality is complete and can be viewed downtown on Main Street.
It contains the words “Black Lives Matter,” “End Racism Now” and “Pullman, WA — You Are Welcome Here” on a colorful backdrop of flowers and rolling hills.
Hedges
“We are just over the moon,” project manager Joe Hedges, assistant professor of fine art, said about finishing the painting.
Hedges said the process has been a struggle, “but there were a lot of people in town that never really gave up and were inspired by larger cities and small towns nationwide that had come together to create some kind of public display of a commitment to ending racism.”
Lisa Roman of Langley, British Columbia, who graduated from Washington State University with a bachelor of science degree in psychology and a minor in human development and sports management, won a Gold medal for Team Canada.
Roman rowed in the women’s eight. Washington State University has a massive women’s rowing program that is cranked out several high-level oarswoman.
A few minutes from the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia sits a small peach orchard that’s home to some unusual experiments. Contrary to first appearances, the subjects of the experiments are not the peach trees themselves, each of which is protected by a two-meter-cubed tent of fine mesh material. Instead, researchers are interested in the hundreds of tiny fruit flies living on the trees and the even tinier bacteria living inside the insects’ guts.
Rudman
The setup was designed with a deceptively simple question in mind: Do the microbes in an animal’s digestive tract help shape their host’s evolution? Washington State University evolutionary biologist Seth Rudman says that it would make sense if they did. “Microbiomes [can have] a huge effect on host fitness, and hence could have a huge effect on adaptive trajectories of populations,” says Rudman, who helped construct part of the site in 2017 while a postdoc in evolutionary ecologist Paul Schmidt’s lab at UPenn. Despite broad scientific interest in the microbiome, few researchers had tackled these kinds of evolutionary questions experimentally.
Rudman, meanwhile, has been carrying out more research in Drosophila and also plans to work with stickleback fish, a species commonly used in adaptive evolution studies, he says. Designing experiments that capture as much of a species’ ecology as possible will be particularly important, he adds, not only for understanding how microbiomes influence host genomes, but for determining the extent to which this influence matters, among all the other forces at play, in driving host evolution in the real world. “I think the jury’s out on that,” he says. “The data will hopefully guide us—and that’s the way science should go.”
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.”
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?
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.
