Robyn Reeve, doctoral candidate in the School of Biological Sciences, took third place and a $500 travel grant in the WSU-wide 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) competition. Reeve also won first-place and People’s Choice awards in the CAS 3MT preliminary.
3MT competitors present their research in no more than three minutes to judges who rate their performance on ability to connect with the audience and to present the technical details of their research in a way non-specialized audiences can understand.
Rebecca Craft was one of the first researchers to study how marijuana could affect males and females differently, back when use both for medicinal and recreational purposes was still widely considered taboo. Through this continued work, Craft hopes to learn whether medicinal marijuana dosages need to be adjusted based on sex, or if there is a biological gender connection to drug abuse, both in cannabinoids and opioids.
As a professor of psychology at Washington State University, Craft currently teaches several psychology courses, including behavioral pharmacology.
This spring, Craft was scheduled to present a series of lectures on marijuana across the Inland Northwest in May for Humanities Washington’s Speakers Bureau program. Due to COVID-19, however, Craft’s lectures — titled “Marijuana: Evil Weed or Medical Miracle?” — have been canceled, though she hopes to reschedule later this year. We chatted with Craft about her presentation and her marijuana research. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Walking along the soggy banks of the Palouse River near Pullman, Washington, Linda Russo an assistant professor of English, listened to the squish of mud under her feet and felt the cool wetness seep into her shoes. As the water rose around her heels and toes, her mind was flooded with thoughts about the past, present and future of the riverfront and other “wild edge” spaces.
“Almost 11 years ago, I went down to the muddy Palouse riverbank and my feet sunk in, setting a course,” Russo said about the genesis of EcoArts on the Palouse, her newest community project which brings together environmental history, ecology and creative expression.
“EcoArts on the Palouse invites the community to engage in exploration, discussion and discovery of the Palouse’s wild edge spaces by calling out the details in the languages of environmental science and different creative and healing arts to see what image of the landscape emerges and what new connections might arise,” she said.
A similarly collaborative, cross-disciplinary current runs through Russo’s other teaching and outreach activities. The projects allow her to reach students inside and outside the humanities and to help them engage with complex, challenging ideas.
Canada lynx are losing ground in Washington state, even as federal officials are taking steps to remove the species’ threatened status under the Endangered Species Act.
Thornton
A massive monitoring study led by Washington State University researchers has found lynx on only about 20% of its potential habitat in the state. The study, published recently in the Journal of Wildlife Management, covered more than 4,300 square miles (7,300 km) in northeastern Washington with camera traps but detected lynx in only 29 out of 175 monitored areas.
The results paint an alarming picture not only for the persistence of lynx but many other cold-adapted species, said Dan Thornton, an assistant professor in WSU’s School of the Environment.
King
To document the elusive animals, WSU graduate student in the School of the Environment, Travis King, the lead author on the study, covered thousands of kilometers and spent two summers in the field. He also relied upon many partners and volunteers, ranging from government natural resource agency employees and conservation groups to hikers and citizen scientists. The researchers and volunteers deployed and collected 650 camera traps which generated more than 2 million images which were, in turn, sorted with the help of dozens of WSU student volunteers.
A glimpse into a day in the life of Mount St. Helens researcher John Bishop who has studied the landscape’s transformation from decimation to revitalization since 1990, 10 years after the 1980 eruption. Bishop, a biologist with Washington State University Vancouver, has dedicated the better half of his professional career to studying the slow-growers and creepy-crawlies of the pumice plain. This collection of photographs documents one research day with Bishop and his students on the pumice plain during July 2019.
