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Lovrich receives WSU President’s Award for Distinguished Lifetime Service

April 25, 2013

Nicholas P. Lovrich, a Washington State University emeritus professor known as a researcher, mentor, interim chancellor and faculty representative to the state Legislature, recently was honored for a career of significant positive impact on the university.

Lovrich began his WSU career in 1977 as an assistant professor in political science. He served as associate chair and director of graduate studies and became director of governmental studies and services, a position he held for more than 30 years.

Findings from senior thesis published in Appetite journal

February 12, 2013

“The problem is no longer food scarcity, but too much food,” said Halley Morrison, a recent WSU biology graduate and author of an interdisciplinary Honors College senior thesis that was published in the journal Appetite.

Morrison, together with Tom Power, professor and chair of the human development department, analyzed more than 200 mother-child surveys and found that a mother’s eating habits and behavior at the dinner table can influence her preschooler’s obesity risk.

Prison Privatization Can Impede Job Growth

January 30, 2013

Building on earlier research in which they challenged the widespread belief that rural communities can create job growth by hosting state prisons, researchers at Washington State University have now found local job growth is often impeded in communities that become hosts to privately operated prisons.

“Our most recent research, which relies on a large, comprehensive national dataset, is consistent with our prior work showing that prisons really make little contribution to local economic growth,” said Gregory Hooks, professor of sociology at WSU. “Moreover, our study reveals that, in states moving quickly to turn over management of their prison systems to outside companies, the privatization of prisons often has a negative impact on employment prospects in host counties.”

Epigenetic Disease Inheritance Linked to Plastics and Jet Fuel

January 25, 2013

WSU researchers have lengthened their list of environmental toxicants that can negatively affect as many as three generations of an exposed animal’s offspring.

Writing in the online journal PLOS ONE, scientists led by WSU molecular biologist Michael Skinner document reproductive disease and obesity in the descendants of rats exposed to various plastic compounds (including BPA). In a separate article in the journal Reproductive Toxicology, they report the first observation of cross-generation disease from a widely used hydrocarbon jet fuel mixture the military refers to as JP8.

Both studies are the first of their kind to see obesity stemming from the process of “epigenetic transgenerational inheritance.

Worldwide Attention for e-book on Mali

January 18, 2013

Months of onsite investigative journalism by English professor Peter Chilson into al-Qaeda’s takeover of northern Mali last spring have put him in high demand with the national and international media.

“Peter Chilson’s work in Mali is some of the finest crisis reporting we’ve seen in a long time,” said Tom Hundley, senior editor, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. “Peter’s graceful writing, his deep knowledge of the subject, his gift for storytelling and willingness to go to where the real story was unfolding – all of this has made for a very rewarding piece of journalism…that will inevitably inform policy discussions on the future of Mali.”

In his e-book, Chilson recounts how the Tuareg nationalist campaign, mounted with support from al Qaeda-affiliated jihadist groups…

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