September 27, 2007
ETC: campus news & notes
LEADING WOMEN: Three UW staffers are among 13 women being honored for having “not only set the standard or raised the bar in their professions and/or community leadership, but also having established legacies, including the mentoring of other women of color to take over and surpass their achievements.” The three UW honorees are Sandra Madrid, assistant dean for students and community development in the law school; Sheila Edwards Lange, vice president for minority affairs and diversity; and Cynthia Del Rosario, director of graduate, minority recruitment and retention in the College of Education. The women were honored by Women of Color Empowered, a volunteer group of diverse civic, business and community leaders sponsored by the Northwest Asian Foundation.
HEALTHY REPORT: The UW gets a 3.73 grade point on the nationwide Sexual Health Report Card compiled by Trojan, the makers of Trojan brand condoms. Trojan ranked 139 colleges and universities representing each state and NCAA Division I athletic conference, and the UW came out number three, behind the University of Minnesota and the University of Wyoming. Researchers polled student health centers and reviewed Web sites to assign a grade point average for sexual health resources across 11 separate categories: Sexual health awareness programs, condom & contraception availability, HIV testing, other Sexually Transmitted Infection testing, student health center hours of operation, drop-in vs. appointment-based service, navigability and usability of Web-based sexual health information, anonymous advice/newspaper columns, lecture outreach programs, student peer groups and sexual assault programs. The UW ranked 57th in last year’s survey.
GERONTOLOGY STAR: Amy Ai, associate professor in the School of Social Work, has been chosen by the Association for Gerontology Education in Social Work to receive its prestigious Leadership Award. The award recognizes a faculty member who has made significant contributions in research related to aging and in teaching and scholarship. Ai is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and the American Psychological Association. Her award will be presented at the Gerontological Society of America’s annual scientific meeting in November.
HISTORY IN MOTION: The Seattle Channel has recently been putting up historical films from the Seattle Municipal Archive and the Museum of History and Industry in a series called “History in Motion.” The series came about as a result of the UW Libraries Special Collections’ grant-funded Washington State Film Preservation Project, through which Uw libraries’ staff preserved film for nine other local institutions. The Seattle Municipal Archive folks were very excited about being able to see and use their films, so they teamed with the Seattle Channel to show some of them — for example, The Bombing of Seattle, which depicts a major civil defense drill on June 13, 1943. The drill, which showed how Seattle would respond if it were bombed, took place in Husky stadium. The Seattle Channel is also showing several films from the libraries’ collection, including Fighting Ships for Fighting Men, which shows the Todd Shipyard in the 1940s.
BRANDED FOR SCIENCE: You know the days of nerds with pocket protectors are over when a blog carries news of science tattoos. That was the case on The Loom, a blog by science writer Carl Zimmer that featured, among others, UW chemistry graduate student Jessica Pikul. Pikul explained that she has celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder triggered by eating gluten. “The tattoo on my leg is one of the segments of the gluten protein that I cannot digest,” she said. “The ball and stick molecule is of a proline-serine-glutamine-glutamine peptide that I can’t break down, which then stimulates T-cells to start the fun chain reaction that ends in my small intestine villi being attacked by antibodies The background to the molecule is an artsy spacescape. I chose this to speak to the universality of the physical laws that govern the microscopic and macroscopic, an idea that has kept me excited about chemistry and in the lab to this day.”
COUGAR PRIDE: Architecture Chair Dave Miller (and Robert Hull, his partner in Miller/Hull Partnership) are co-recipients of the Washington State University Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus Award for 2007.
MOVIE MAGIC: The UW gets a plug in a documentary film that is currently playing — The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. The film is about a competition for the world record on classic arcade games with a focus on Donkey Kong, and one of its stars is Steve Wiebe, who lives in Redmond and is an alumnus of the College of Engineering. Not only is Wiebe the good guy in the movie, but he’s wearing different UW shirts for almost half of its running time.
EUROPEAN CHALLENGES: Kevin DeSouza, assistant professor in the Information School and director of the UW Institute for National Security Education & Research, was a panelist in the second annual conference of the Bled Strategic Forum “European Union 2020: Enlarging and Integrating,” Aug. 26-27 in Bled, Slovenia. The conference brought together politicians, EU officials, private sector leaders and others to discuss key challenges that Europe is facing.
