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Three CAS grad students earn top AFW awards

Amber Morczek
Amber Morczek
Amanda Vander Woude
Amanda Vander Woude, right, with Sheila Converse, AFW president and music faculty member
Ellen Preece
Ellen Preece

Graduate and doctoral students in the College of Arts and Sciences won three of six annual awards presented last week by the WSU Association for Faculty Women. AFW’s top honors recognize students whose work benefits the community.

Ellen Preece, a doctoral student in the School of the Environment, won a Harriett B. Rigas Award. Elected president of the Washington State Lake Protection Association, at WSU Preece researches food and water safety issues.

Amanda Vander Woude, a graduate student in vocal performance, won an AFW Founders Award. Vander Woude studies the vocal injuries of professional singers, gives voice lessons to WSU undergraduates, and performs in various ensembles.

Amber Morczek, a doctoral candidate in criminal justice and criminology, received the Karen Depaul Leadership Award. Morczek has participated in violence-prevention programs, including the Prisoner Debate Project, which took WSU undergraduates to the Coyote Ridge Correctional Facility to collaborate with inmates during public debates in the facility about topics in criminal justice.

More about the 2014 AFW awards

Faculty piano duo tours, to record for top composer

Karen and Jeffrey Savage
Karen and Jeffrey Savage

WSU School of Music faculty members Jeffrey and Karen Savage have been tapped by American composer Lowell Liebermann to record his complete works for two pianos this summer for a commercially released CD.

The duo, which performs as 88 Squared, recently completed a concert tour in Singapore, presenting the Asian premieres of several works, including Liebermann’s Sonata for Two Pianos.

“The finale was a double fugue on a perpetual motion theme that seemed almost impossible to play,” wrote Singapore’s national daily newspaper in a review. “In these secure hands, impossibility became not just reality, but totally pleasing music.

More about the work of 88 Squared

How anthropologists help control Ebola outbreaks

Barry Hewlett
Barry Hewlett

When disease strikes in the developing world, like the current Ebola outbreak in Guinea, doctors, nurses and epidemiologists from international organizations fly in to help.

So do anthropologists.

Understanding local customs—and fears—can go a long way in getting communities to cooperate with international health care workers, says Barry Hewlett, a medical anthropologist at WSU Vancouver.

Otherwise medical efforts can prove fruitless, says Hewlett, who was invited to join the Doctors Without Borders Ebola team during a 2000 outbreak in Uganda. There are anthropologists on the current team in Guinea as well.

Before the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders started bringing in anthropologists, medical staff often had a difficult time convincing families to bring their sick loved ones to clinics and isolation wards. In Uganda, Hewlett remembers, people were afraid of the international health care workers.

“The local people thought that the Europeans in control of the isolation units were in a body parts business,” he says. “Their loved ones would go into the isolation units and they would never see them come out.”

Learn more about anthropology’s role in disease control

Spite Is Good. Spite Works.

David Marcus
David Marcus

Research recently published by David K. Marcus, WSU professor of psychology, was featured in a New York Times article about the role of spite in social order.

Reporting in February in the journal Psychological Assessment, Dr. Marcus and his colleagues presented the preliminary results from their new “spitefulness scale,” a 17-item survey they created to assess individual differences in spitefulness, just as existing personality tests measure traits like agreeableness and extroversion.

While psychologists are exploring spitefulness in its customary role as a negative trait—a lapse that should be embarrassing but is often sublimated as righteousness (as when you take your own sour time pulling out of a parking space because you notice another car is waiting for it and you’ll show that vulture who’s boss here, even though you’re wasting your own time, too)—evolutionary theorists, by contrast, are studying what might be viewed as the brighter side of spite and the role it may have played in the origin of admirable traits like a cooperative spirit and a sense of fair play.

The new research on spite transcends older notions that we are savage, selfish brutes at heart, as well as more recent suggestions that humans are inherently affiliative creatures yearning to love and connect. Instead, it concludes that vice and virtue, like the two sides of a V, may be inextricably linked.

Read more about spite studies in the New York Times (subscription required)