At the UW, Theberge is co-principal investigator of the with Erwin Berthier, UW affiliate professor of chemistry. They study the chemical signals that cells use to communicate with one another. The organization of our bodies, with different types of cells taking on discrete functions, depends on this biochemical language.

“I am very grateful for this funding which will enable us to explore new research directions with the goal of both better understanding molecular mechanisms and improving patient care,” said Theberge, who is also an adjunct faculty member in the UW Department of Urology.

“This award is a testament to the visionary interdisciplinary research program led by Professor Ashleigh Theberge, which lies at the intersection of analytical chemistry, chemical biology, and human health,” said , professor and chair of chemistry at the UW.

Theberge’s research has numerous applications in medicine, environmental science and beyond. She is pursuing the chemical mechanisms underlying asthma, allergy, infectious diseases, urologic conditions, kidney disease, rheumatic conditions and environmental exposure to different substances. Her team’s efforts include developing analytical chemistry tools to advance medicine, such as biomimetic microfluidic systems for integrated cell culture and analysis and at-home sampling tools for diagnostics and environmental monitoring.

Theberge has formed dozens of collaborations in other fields since joining the UW faculty in 2016. She works closely with clinicians, for example, to investigate how chemical processes are linked to patient symptoms. A related, emerging area of research centers on using at-home sampling tools to ask molecular questions that are not possible with traditional, in-person studies. Early funding for this new research direction was provided by the UW’s and the . Theberge leveraged results from those studies in her Schmidt Sciences Polymath proposal.

In the Schmidt Sciences Polymath Program, Theberge plans to “explore the potential of tailoring drug treatments and doses based on individual biochemistry using remote specimen collection, data analysis and AI to map molecular pathways at the cellular level,” according to the award announcement.

“The Schmidt Sciences Polymath Program allows bold, creative thinkers to pursue knowledge across boundaries and in doing so, to help all of us better understand the deep interconnections between people, planet and universe,” said Schmidt Sciences co-founder Wendy Schmidt.

Theberge, who will be promoted to professor on Sept. 16, holds numerous patents and has received several awards. Among them are a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry, a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award from the National Institutes of Health and a Kavli Microbiome Ideas Challenge Award. Theberge’s efforts in mentoring — which promote values of and diversity, equity, and inclusion — have earned her a UW Undergraduate Research Mentor Award, the��Department of Chemistry Faculty Award for Excellence in Student Mentoring and recognition as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Gilliam Mentor.

Theberge earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Williams College and a doctoral degree in chemistry from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the UW faculty, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Cauce’s election to the NAM is “for exemplary and visionary leadership in public higher education administration; innovations in health research, education, and service systems that enhance pathways for women and underrepresented groups; initiatives to address interconnections between health equity, population health, and climate change; and pioneering behavioral health intervention research on Latinos.”

“This is truly an unexpected and amazing honor which, in fact, is the recognition of work undertaken by many, many people beyond myself,” Cauce said.

The Academy recognizes those who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement in medicine and public health, and election to it is considered among the highest honors in these fields. New members are elected by current members in recognition of major contributions to the advancement of the medical sciences, health care and public health.

“This extraordinary class of new members is comprised of exceptional scholars and leaders who have been at the forefront of responding to serious public health challenges, combatting social inequities, and achieving innovative discoveries,” said National Academy of Medicine President Victor J. Dzau.��“Their expertise will be vital to informing the future of health and medicine for the benefit of us all.��I am truly honored to welcome these esteemed individuals to the National Academy of Medicine.”

A professor of Psychology and American Ethnic Studies, with secondary appointments in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and the College of Education, Cauce’s research focuses on adolescent development, with a special emphasis on at-risk youth.

Cauce was named the 33rd president of the UW on Oct. 13, 2015, after serving as interim president for seven months and having previously served as provost and executive vice president. The following year, she launched the UW’s Population Health Initiative with an emphasis on interdisciplinary research and collaboration as the key to addressing some of our most vexing health challenges. Recognizing that the health of an individual or a community is not just the absence of disease, Cauce urged researchers across disciplines to explore the underlying issues affecting health, including poverty and inequity, access to care, climate change and governance.

“Ana Mari is richly deserving of this honor, and the Academy’s recognition reflects her visionary leadership in launching the Population Health Initiative,” UW Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Mark Richards. “She is a��thoughtful, compassionate and brilliant champion for creating impact for healthier people and communities everywhere.”

The UW’s efforts to improve health and well-being align with NAM’s work to advance “innovative approaches to advance knowledge and accelerate progress in science, medicine, policy and health equity.”

To date, the Population Health Initiative has engaged about 12,000 students, funded more than 200 student awards, engaged about 1,300 faculty members, funded more than 130 faculty projects and supported more than $42 million in grant-supported applications.

“I’m especially pleased to receive this honor because it is a recognition of the fact that medicine and health are broad constructs that encompass both behavioral health and a population health perspective,” Cauce said.

The initiative has��influenced��a shift in culture��at the UW at both the leadership and faculty levels. Several schools and colleges at the UW have embedded population health concepts into courses and curriculum, while others have updated the names and missions of departments and degree tracks to be more oriented around the concept of population health. Interdisciplinary collaboration is embraced more broadly across the university, including a faculty-led push for increased recognition of interdisciplinary research in promotion and tenure considerations.

“I’m deeply grateful to the Academy for their outstanding work to advance knowledge and discovery in health and medicine,” Cauce said, “and I look forward to being part of the UW’s ongoing work in that shared mission.”

, ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, .

The fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation comes with an $800,000 stipend, commonly known as the “genius grant,” for recipients to use as they see fit. The Chicago-based foundation announced the 25 fellows on Wednesday.

Choi uses to develop artificial intelligence systems that have the ability to reason and can understand the implied meanings in human language. AI often uses rules-based models, such as logic or probability. But Choi says that these rules are too rigid to make sense of the nuances that most people take for granted when they talk to each other.

“When I received the phone call from the Foundation, I thought they were going to ask me to do some consulting work,” Choi said. “My heart almost stopped beating when I heard ‘congratulations’ instead. This is such a great honor because there have been only two other researchers in the natural language processing field who have received this award.”

Choi is still working on the exact plans for the award, but hopes to use it to pursue impactful, though potentially risky, research ideas.

“Taking the road less traveled may seem exciting at first, but sustaining this path can be lonely, riddled with numerous roadblocks and disheartening at times,” Choi said. “This fellowship will power me up to go ahead and take that adventurous route.”

Choi has already made advancements in several areas to push the field of natural language processing forward. One example is combining both visual and text inputs for these systems. Traditionally, these models are trained solely with text inputs, but Choi has designed models with both text and image inputs that reinforce each other to better mimic how people acquire knowledge about the world.

In another line of work, Choi uses computational linguistics to help AI identify deceptive intent or sentiment in writing. For this project, the research team designed a method to automate accurate detection of fake online consumer reviews. Then Choi extended this work to include assessing news articles based on intent to deceive as well as categorizing the articles as “hoax,” “satire” or “trustworthy.”

Recently Choi’s team developed , a research prototype designed to make AI more ethically informed. When presented with a moral dilemma — such as ignoring a supervisor’s phone call during working hours — Delphi weighs in on whether the situation is OK. Choi led the Delphi project through a joint appointment at the .

In announcing the award, the MacArthur Foundation said, “Choi’s research brings us closer to computers and artificial intelligence systems that can grasp more fully the complexities of language and communicate accurately with humans.”

After receiving a doctoral degree from Cornell University, Choi was an assistant professor in the computer science department at SUNY Stony Brook before joining the Allen School faculty in 2014.

“The MacArthur Foundation could not have picked a better candidate than Yejin Choi,” said , UW professor and director of the Allen School. “Yejin epitomizes what the ‘genius grant’ is all about — she is fearless about breaking down barriers, asking hard questions and pushing AI in exciting new directions.”

“Natural language processing, and AI more broadly, have become deeply intertwined with all aspects of society,” Balazinska continued. “It is critical that we deeply understand its capabilities and limitations, and that we push those capabilities in the interest of social good. Yejin does exactly that, and she does so in such creative and sometimes astonishing ways. I can’t wait to see what she will accomplish next, thanks to this award.”

In winning the MacArthur Fellowship, Choi joins 13 others who were current ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý faculty at the time of their awards. The most recent winner was , affiliate associate professor of genome sciences and of epidemiology at the UW, who .

“We are delighted and proud that Yejin has received this significant acknowledgment of her innovative leadership in AI research,” said , Frank & Julie Jungers Dean of the UW College of Engineering. “Yejin is a creative, gifted computer scientist whose expertise in natural language processing is advancing AI systems’ capacities. We are eager to see how her work will further transform computer-human interactions and advance engineering for the public good.”

The fellowship is awarded, in the words of the Foundation, to “talented individuals in a variety of fields who have shown exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits.” Winners have been nominated anonymously by leaders in their fields and chosen by an anonymous selection committee.

“It’s been several weeks since I learned about this award, and it still feels so surreal,” Choi said. “I feel like the universe is sending me this message that it’s OK to be imperfect, it’s OK to try many ideas and fail along the way, as long as I continue learning and don’t give up.”

For more information, contact Choi at yejin@cs.washington.edu.

Four faculty members at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The new members from the UW are:

• , professor and chair of physiology and biophysics
• , professor of microbiology
• Dr. , professor of genome sciences
• James Truman, professor emeritus of biology

They are among 120 new members and 30 international members to the National Academy of Sciences this year. Election “recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and — with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine — provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations,” according to an May 3 by the academy.

is noted for her research on the neural mechanisms behind learning and remembering. She studies how a system of structures in the brain, including the hippocampus and its surrounding cortical regions, set up new memories and how this system functions during memory retrieval. These structures are the first to be affected in Alzheimer’s disease. Lesions within these structures are associated with profound memory deficits. Her work may help improve the understanding of what foreshadows the onset Alzheimer’s and other dementias. She has a particular interest in how the brain maps surroundings, because getting lost in familiar locations is a common early symptom of Alzheimer’s. Buffalo earned her doctoral degree at the University of California, San Diego and did postdoctoral training in neuropsychology at the National Institute of Mental Health. She received the 2011 Troland Research Award for her innovative studies from the National Academy of Sciences.

is known for his research on how bacteria interact with each other in the environment and in our bodies. Much of his work focuses on the battles that occur within communities of bacteria. He examines the arsenals they deploy to attack each other and defend themselves. Among his areas of study are antibacterial toxins that disable target cells in a variety of ways, secretion systems that mediate antagonism between bacteria, and the toxins that virulent bacteria secrete to overcome host defense strategies. His laboratory also studies the densely populated mammalian gut microbiome, where conflict rages among microbes as bacteria compete for resources and struggle to survive. His lab is hoping to harness the antimicrobial tactics of bacteria to develop new therapies for infections and other purposes. Mougous earned his doctoral degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a researcher at the UW Medicine Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine. In 2021, he received the National Institute of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology for his pioneering studies in microbiology.

Dr. ’s research group has pioneered a variety of genome sequencing and analysis methods, including exome sequencing and its earliest applications to gene discovery for Mendelian disorders and autism; cell-free DNA diagnostics for cancer and reproductive medicine; massively parallel reporter assays; saturation genome editing; whole organism lineage tracing; and massively parallel molecular profiling of single cells. He has received numerous awards, including the 2012 Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics, a 2013 National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award and the 2019 Richard Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Shendure has been an advisor to the NIH Director, the U.S. Precision Medicine Initiative, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and the Allen Institutes for Cell Science and Immunology. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in 2007 from Harvard Medical School, where he trained with geneticist and molecular biologist George Church on advancing DNA sequencing techniques. He is currently an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, director of the Allen Discovery Center for Cell Lineage Tracing and scientific director of the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine.

Truman’s studies have focused on the genes, hormones and neural architecture underlying insect development and evolution. Early in his career, he identified the key hormone in moths that induces molting, as well as the brain-based circadian rhythms that exert overall control over this process. He later studied regulation of molting in the fruit fly and genes that control metamorphosis in moths. Truman earned a doctoral degree from Harvard University in 1970, where he continued as a Harvard Junior Fellow until joining the UW faculty in 1973. He became a full professor in 1978. He retired from the UW in 2007 and became a Group Leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus, where he studied nervous system metamorphosis in fruit flies. In 2016, Truman returned to the UW as a professor emeritus, and today continues to study the evolution and development of insects and crustaceans at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories. In 1970, he received the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Newcomb Cleveland Research Prize and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1986. Truman was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

With this year’s addition, the National Academy of Sciences now has 2,512 active members and 517 nonvoting international members, who hold citizenship outside of the U.S.

Many people think of a car as a series of mechanical parts that — hopefully — work together to take us places, but that’s not the whole story.

Inside most modern cars is a network of computers, called “electronic control units,” that control all the systems and communicate with each other to keep everything rolling smoothly along.

More than 10 years ago, a team from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and the University of California San Diego investigated whether these computing systems could be hacked and how that would affect a driver’s ability to control their car. To their own surprise —��and to the alarm of car manufacturers —��the researchers were able to manipulate the car in many ways, including disabling the brakes and stopping the engine, from a distance. This work led to two scientific papers that opened up a new area of cybersecurity research and served as a wake-up call for the automotive industry.

Now the team has received the from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The award honors federally funded work that, in the words of AAAS, “may have seemed obscure, sounded ‘funny,’ or for which the results were totally unforeseen at the outset, but which ultimately led, often serendipitously, to major breakthroughs that have had significant societal impact.” The award was established in 2012 to counter criticisms of wasteful government spending, such as the late U.S. Sen. William Proxmire’s .

“It’s an incredible honor to receive this award. Not only for us as individuals, but for the computer security research community,” said , UW professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and one of the project leaders. “More than 10 years ago, we saw that devices in our world were becoming incredibly computerized, and we wanted to understand what the risks might be if they continued to evolve without thought toward security and privacy. This award shines light on the importance of being thoughtful and strategic in figuring out what problems to work on today.”

Kohno and project co-lead , a UC San Diego professor of computer science and engineering, are both computer security researchers who often chatted about potential upcoming threats that could be good to study.

“It became apparent to us when General Motors started advertising its . Yoshi and I had a conversation, saying, ‘I bet there’s something there,'” Savage said. “Moreover, vulnerabilities in traditional computers had fairly limited impacts. You might lose some data or get a password stolen. But nothing like the visceral effect of a car’s brakes suddenly failing. I think that bridging that gap between the physical world and the virtual one was something that made this exciting for us.”

Savage and Kohno formed a super-team of researchers from both universities to dig into these questions. The team purchased a pair of Chevy Impalas — one for each university — to study as a representative car. The team worked collaboratively and in parallel, with researchers letting curiosity guide them.

The first task was to learn the language the cars’ computerized components used to communicate with each other. Then the researchers worked to inject their own voices into the conversation.

For example, the team started sending random messages to the cars’ brake controllers to try to influence them.

“We figured out ways to put the brake controller into this test mode,” said , a research scientist in the Allen School who completed this research as a UW doctoral student. “And in the test mode, we found we could either leak the brake system pressure to prevent the brakes from working or keep the system fully pressurized so that it slams on the brakes.”

The team published two papers in 2010 and 2011 describing the results.

“The first paper asked what capabilities an attacker would have if they were able to compromise one of the components in the car. We connected to the cars’ internal networks to examine what we could do once they were hacked,” said , an assistant professor of computer science at Oberlin College who completed this research as a UC San Diego doctoral student. “The second paper explored how someone could hack the car from afar.”

In these papers, the researchers chose not to unveil that they had used Chevy Impalas, and opted to contact GM privately.

“In our conversations with GM, they were quite puzzled. They said, ‘There’s no way to make the brake controller turn off the brakes. That’s not a thing,'” Savage said. “That Karl could remotely take over our car and make it do something the manufacturer didn’t think was possible reflects one of the key issues at play here. The manufacturer was hamstrung because they knew how the system was supposed to work. But we didn’t have that liability. We only knew what the car actually did.”

The team’s papers prompted manufacturers to rethink car safety concerns and create new standard procedures for security practices. GM ended up appointing a vice president of product security to lead a new division. The Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE), the standards body for the automotive industry, quickly issued the first automotive cybersecurity standards.�� Other car companies followed along, as did the federal government. In 2012, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched geared toward creating hacking-resistant, cyber–physical systems.

“I like to think about what would have happened if we hadn’t done this work,” Kohno said. “It is hard to measure, but I do feel that neighboring industries saw this work happening in the automotive space and then they acted to avoid it happening to them too. The question that I have now is, as security researchers, what should we be investigating today, such that we have the same impact in the next 10 years?”

, , Brian Kantor, , , and ��filled out the rest of the team. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, a Marilyn Fries endowed regental fellowship and an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship.

For more information, contact Kohno at yoshi@cs.washington.edu, Savage at savage@cs.ucsd.edu, Koscher at supersat@cs.washington.edu and Checkoway at��Stephen.Checkoway@oberlin.edu.

Grant numbers: CNS-0963695, CNS-0963702, CNS-0722000, CNS-0831532, CNS-0846065, CNS-0905384, FA9550-08-1-0352

Five faculty members and one affiliate professor at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý are among 120 new members and 30 international members elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The new members include 59 women, the most chosen in a single year, according to an April 26 by the academy.

• , professor of computer science and engineering
• , professor of biochemistry
• , professor emeritus of applied mathematics
• , professor of biology
• , professor of biological structure

In addition, , a professor of human biology and of public health sciences at the , was elected to the academy. Overbaugh is an affiliate UW professor of microbiology.

,��who holds the Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, works��in��theoretical computer science. She earned a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and a doctoral degree in computer science at Stanford University. Before joining the UW faculty in 1994, she worked for five years at what was then the Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center. At the UW, Karlin is a member of the����group in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Her research centers on designing and analyzing certain types of algorithms — such as��probabilistic algorithms, which incorporate a degree of chance or randomness, and��online algorithms, which can handle input delivered in a step-by-step manner. Karlin also works in algorithmic game theory, a field that merges algorithm design with considerations of strategic behavior. Her studies have also intersected��other disciplines, including economics and data mining. In 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

, who holds the Edmond H. Fischer-Washington Research Foundation Endowed Chair in Biochemistry, studies molecular recognition, particularly how proteins interact in human diseases. One of her laboratory’s efforts is to study the large, multifunctional protein produced by the BRCA1 gene, which when carrying certain mutations can predispose people to inherited forms of breast and other cancers. Klevit’s group also studies small heat shock proteins, which are implicated in certain muscle wasting diseases and some cancers. Cells manufacture these under stress due to heat, lack of oxygen and changes in acidity or alkalinity. Klevit’s team uses different nuclear magnetic resonance approaches to understand the structure and functions of these proteins, which have been difficult to solve. Klevit and her team also use NMR to study a sensor enzyme critical to bacterial virulence. This enzyme responds to environmental signals, such as the presence of antimicrobials, by turning on or off genes involved in infection. Klevit won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1978 — a year after the program was open to women — to study at Oxford University, where she earned a doctoral degree in chemistry in 1981.

, who earned a doctoral degree in computer science at Stanford University, came to the UW in 1985 after postdoctoral positions at New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles. While at UW, he was also briefly a faculty member at ETH Zürich. LeVeque’s mathematical research has spanned a variety of topics related to numerical algorithms for solving the partial differential equations that model wave propagation phenomena. He has also developed extensive open source software based on this research. LeVeque’s mathematical and computational studies have impacted fields ranging from biophysics to astrophysics. Much of his recent work has focused on modeling geological hazards, particularly tsunamis, and he is part of an interdisciplinary team performing hazard assessments for the coast of the Pacific Northwest. LeVeque has also taught extensively and authored several textbooks. He is a data science fellow at the , and was previously elected a fellow of both the American Mathematical Society and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

, who holds the Benjamin D. Hall Endowed Chair in Basic Life Sciences and is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, came to the UW in 2018 after 21 years as a faculty member at Stanford University. She earned a doctoral degree in cell biology from the University of California, San Francisco, and was a fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research before heading to Stanford. Theriot’s research centers on the dynamic world within cells. Her work explores how cells self-organize to perform tasks — like change shape, move, respond to stimuli, and shuttle items through their interiors. Theriot has investigated these questions in a variety of biological settings, such as how white blood cells crawl through our bodies and engulf invading microbes, how fish skin heals wounds, and how the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes rearranges the proteins of the human cell’s “skeleton.” She employs many types of experimental approaches, from mathematical modeling to video-based analyses of cellular movements. Theriot has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

, who is chair of the Department of Biological Structure, studies how the circuitries of nerve cells develop, break and reassemble. Her research model is the vertebrate retina, the part of the eye that receives light and converts it into signals sent to the brain. Her team applies a diversity of methods to investigate the structure and connectivity of nerve cells in normal and altered retinas, such as tracking changes in zebrafish retinal neurons from the time they first appear until they form circuits and investigating how retinal neurons rewire during cellular regeneration. In addition, Wong’s team constructs detailed connectivity maps of neurons in the inner and outer retina, and researches how the transmission of nerve signals helps establish and maintain connectivity between retinal neurons. She is collaborating to study how the eyes encode a visual scene. Wong earned her doctoral degree from the Australian National University, and serves on the steering committee for the National Eye Institute’s , which seeks to restore vision lost from damage to the retina and optic nerve.

With these new members, the National Academy of Sciences now has 2,461 active members, as well as 511 international members, who are nonvoting and hold citizenship outside of the U.S.

“We congratulate these incoming members of the Academy for excelling in a broad array of fields; we want to celebrate them and learn from them,” said Nancy C. Andrews, chair of the Board of Directors of the American Academy. “When Academy members come together, bringing their expertise and insights to our work, they help develop new insights and potential solutions for some of the most complex challenges we face.”

Cauce – who was named to the Educational and Academic Leadership section of the Academy’s Public Affairs, Business and Administration class – became the 33rd president of the UW on Oct. 13, 2015 after serving as interim president for seven months and having previously served as provost and executive vice president.

Throughout her career, Cauce has championed access to higher education, including through the , which provides full tuition to eligible Washington students who otherwise could not attend college. As part of her strong belief in ensuring access to higher education for all, just one month into her role as interim president she engaged students in an honest discussion about race and equity, to create a more just and diverse community.

Cauce is a professor of Psychology and American Ethnic Studies, with secondary appointments in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and the College of Education. She maintains an active research program, focusing on adolescent development, with a special emphasis on at-risk youth. She is also a strong advocate for women and underrepresented minorities to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Davis was named to the Cellular and Developmental Biology (including Genetics), Microbiology and Immunology Section of the Biological Sciences Class of the Academy. Davis and her colleagues explore the dynamics of the chromosome capture that occurs in preparation for cell division.

Impressive molecular machinery tries to assure that each cell resulting from the split receives a proper set of chromosomes. Mistakes in sorting, separating and distributing the chromosomes could cause serious problems, such as cancer. Davis’ team looks at how the movement and segregation of chromosomes is orchestrated. This chromosome assembly is trial and error, but cells usually can find and fix mistakes. As chromosomes attach to the separation machinery, checkpoints tune into to the connection and the tension it produces. If this quality assurance detects that a chromosome is incorrectly captured, it is released for another try.

The Davis lab uses many ways of examining this and related controls. These include genetic analysis, proteomics, quantitative microscopy, computational modeling and biochemical assays.

Davis holds the Earl W. Davie/ZymoGenetics Chair in Biochemistry at UW Medicine. She also heads the UW’s Yeast Resource Center, funded by the National Institutes of Health to develop technologies for exploring protein structure and function.

Toro was named to the Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics section of the Academy’s Mathematical and Physical Sciences class. Her research centers on the premise that objects, which may at first appear irregular or disordered, actually have regular features that are quantifiable. Toro’s work spans geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Toro studies the mathematical questions that come up in systems where the known data are “rough,” as well as interfaces that arise in “noisy” minimization problems.

In addition to her research, Toro has also worked to increase diversity in mathematics. She helped launch Latinx in the Mathematical Sciences, including two conferences through the National Science Foundation highlighting the achievements of Latinx mathematicians.

Toro joined the UW faculty in 1996 and her career includes numerous honors and accolades. Last year, she received the UW’s Marsha L. Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award. In 2017, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Toro has also been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and a Simons Foundation Fellow.

Founded in 1780, the is one of the country’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers, convening leaders from the academic, business and government sectors to respond to the challenges facing the nation and the world.

The new members join the company of Academy members elected before them, including Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton in the eighteenth century; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Maria Mitchell in the nineteenth; and Robert Frost, Martha Graham, Margaret Mead, Milton Friedman, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the twentieth.

Learn more about the Academy’s , , and on its website .

# # #

The Goldwater Scholarship Program supports undergraduates who “show exceptional promise of becoming this nation’s next generation of research leaders” in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The scholarships go toward tuition, room and board, fees and books up to $7,500 annually for one or two years.

The 2020 Goldwater Scholars from the UW are Keyan Gootkin, Parker Ruth and Karen Zhang.

• Gootkin, who is majoring in astronomy and physics, studies how massive stars end their lives and volunteers with the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory, the League of Astronomers, and the UW’s campus and mobile planetariums.
• Ruth is pursuing a double major in bioengineering and computer engineering, and studies computational tools to improve health care access. Ruth plans to pursue a doctoral degree in computer science.
• Zhang, who is studying both microbiology and biochemistry, is interested in “the machineries of life at a molecular level and engineering them to perform novel tasks,” and after graduation would like to obtain a doctoral degree in either bioinformatics or synthetic biology.

The 2020 Goldwater Scholars were selected from a pool of more than 5,000 undergraduate students nominated by 461 academic institutions. A majority of this year’s awardees, 287, are studying the natural sciences, while 59 are majoring in engineering and 50 are majoring in mathematics or computer science. Most say that they intend to pursue a doctoral degree.

The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was established by Congress in 1986 to honor Barry Goldwater, a five-term senator from Arizona and Air Force Reserve major general. Since 1989, the program has provided 9,047 scholarships totaling more than $71 million dollars.

Boersma, a UW professor of biology and director of the , for the 2020 Indianapolis Prize for conservation, to be awarded later this year by the Indianapolis Zoological Society. Moore, a scientist with the center and a UW affiliate professor of biology and of aquatic and fishery sciences, , also known as the Arctic Medal, from the International Arctic Science Committee.

Boersma joined the UW faculty in 1974 and has studied and advocated for penguins in South America for more than three decades — focusing on Magellanic penguins in Argentina and Galápagos penguins in Ecuador. Her efforts have not just gathered scientific information about these birds, but also shifted public opinion and government policy. When she first arrived at Punta Tombo — the stretch of Argentine coastline where hundreds of thousands of Magellanic penguins breed each summer — one company had proposed culling the birds for oil and protein, and to use their hides to make “high-end golf gloves,” said Boersma.

Over the years, Boersma has worked with partners such as the Global Penguin Society to protect Magellanic nesting grounds and welcome thousands of eco-tourists to view the penguins. Strategies have included diverting oil tankers farther offshore and setting up environmental preserves.

Boersma argues that penguins are indicators of ocean health. In the Galápagos, much of her research has focused on how the thousands of penguins there adapt to El Niño and other events in this “predictably unpredictable” region. For the Magellanic penguins, much of her team’s recent research has shifted toward understanding how conditions in the ocean — where they feed outside of the breeding season — impacts their health, well-being and reproductive success at Punta Tombo.

The Indianapolis Prize is the highest honor for animal conservation and has been awarded every other year since 2006. As one of six finalists, Boersma will receive $10,000. The winner, to be announced later this year, will receive $250,000. Boersma was previously a finalist in 2016 and 2018.

Moore has been studying whales and marine ecosystems in the Arctic region since 1981, using both visual surveys from aircraft and ships and listening for whales using hydrophones. Recently, she has studied how climate change is impacting the food supply and feeding behavior of bowhead and gray whales. Moore has also worked on mitigation scenarios to protect whales and other large mammals in the Arctic from the effects of shipping and oil and gas development in the region.

Moore began her career conducting Arctic whale surveys and related studies through the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Department of Defense and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1998, she moved to NOAA’s National Marine Mammal Laboratory, and served as its director from 2002 to 2004. Moore’s involvement with the UW began in 2004, as a visiting scholar with the UW Applied Physics Laboratory where she worked to develop passive acoustic systems — like autonomous Seagliders and recorders — to study ocean ecosystems. She became an affiliate UW faculty member in 2006. In 2008, she returned to NOAA, where she led the program and helped to develop the in the Pacific Arctic region. After retiring from NOAA in 2018, Moore joined the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels full time in 2019.

Moore similarly advocates for whales as sentinels of Arctic marine ecosystem health in a region that is warming rapidly due to climate change. She will receive the IASC Medal and deliver an invited lecture March 30 during the in Akureyri, Iceland.

Hellmann, 86, teaches courses on Japanese government and politics, American foreign policy and the international relations of Northeast Asia. He joined the UW in 1967, chaired the Japan Program for several years, overseeing its expansion, and was director of the institute that would later become the Jackson School. He first visited Japan in 1961 supported by the Ford Foundation, and dedicated himself to research on postwar Japanese foreign policy.

A frequent author of papers and books on Japan, Hellmann’s 1969 book “” became a best-seller in its genre in Japan. University of California Press has recently republished the title as part of its series, which brings “important and timeless works of scholarship” back into print to commemorate the publisher’s 125-year history.

The office of the Consulate-General of Japan in Seattle the award Nov. 3 and he will receive the honor in a private ceremony this month. Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun has eight classes, or levels. Hellmann’s is the Order of the Rising Sun Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, which is the He in January 2018.

Hellmann is one of several UW faculty members to receive versions of Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun. Others include of international studies (and author of a recent book on post-World War II Japan); Mary Bernson, longtime director of the Jackson School’s East Asia Resource Center; of mechanical engineering; of American ethnic studies, of geography; and , founder of Asian studies at the UW, in 1905.

UW Notebook asked Hellmann about Japan and its role in international relations.

Prof. Hellmann, how has Japan changed geopolitically since you first visited during the Kennedy administration? ��

The Japan of the 1950s and early 1960s, while prosperous, was still operating under the shadow of defeat in World War II and the seven years of American occupation which had introduced radical political, economic and social reforms including one United States-written “peace constitution.”

Today, Japan has the world’s third-largest national economy — frequently described as “post-modern,” but not one word of the constitution has been changed and the same conservative elite has been continuously in power (e.g., Prime Minister Abe’s grandfather was also prime minister and his father would have been had he not had a fatal illness).��

What lies ahead for Japan in the 21^st century? ��

Japan brilliantly prospered during the Cold War as an elitist democracy in an American greenhouse, but during the almost three subsequent decades matters have been different. While still a rich country, the growth rate has significantly dropped. The conservative elite is still in charge, but has shown little capacity for innovative leadership domestically or in foreign policy. Finally, China’s dramatic economic and international successes has cast a shadow over Japan’s future and permanence of the U.S.-Japan alliance.

For more information, contact Hellmann at��hellmann@uw.edu.

UW Notebook is a section of the UW News site dedicated to telling stories of the good work done by faculty and staff at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý. Read all posts here.