Come curious. Leave inspired.

While February might be just 28 days, the UW offers an exciting lineup of more than 40 in-person and online events. From thought-provoking art and music to conversations on culture, history, and science, the UW community invites you to explore, learn, and connect across disciplines throughout the University. In addition, take a look ahead at what’s happening in March.

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ArtSci On Your Own Time

Recorded Lectures: ��(History)
Incarceration is a hotly debated topic in the United States, a country that has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world. Looking at the practice from a historical perspective, what can incarceration teach us about who we were and who we are now? What might histories of incarceration, and the histories of those who have been incarcerated, tell us about power dynamics, belonging, exclusion, struggle, and hope across societies in the past and present? The 2026 History Lecture Series explores the practice of incarceration, tracing its change over time from antiquity to our modern world. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online.

Podcast: (School of Drama)
A lively and opinionated cultural history of the Broadway Musical that tells the extraordinary story of how Immigrants, Jews, Queers, African-Americans and other outcasts invented the Broadway Musical, and how they changed America in the process.In Season One, host David Armstrong traces the evolution of American Musical Theater from its birth at the dawn of the 20th Century, through its mid-century “Golden Age”, and right up to its current 21st Century renaissance; and also explore how musicals have reflected and shaped our world — especially in regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, and equality. Free.

Exhibition: (Henry Art Gallery)
Primarily featuring works from the Henry collection created in the twenty-first century, Figure/Ground reflects a period in which hard-won civil rights and claims to self-determination have been eroded across the US, disproportionately affecting Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized communities. Free.

Book Club: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (UW Alumni)
Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of more than forty novels, collections, novellas and comic books. He is a professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, and an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana. Free.

Recorded Lectures:
Featuring selected lectures from 1996 to today, UW Graduate School’s Office of Public Lectures YouTube features an incredible lineup of artists, scientists, researchers, and more!

Week of February 2

January 29–February 8 | (School of Drama)
In this new translation of Chekhov’s ”serious comedy of human contradictions”, a group of artists and dreamers meet in the countryside and wrestle with the costs of ambition, unspoken longings, and the harsh realities of artistic pursuits. Set against a backdrop of love, passionate aspirations, and the search for meaning,��The Seagull��captures the fierce hopes and quiet heartbreaks of an artistic career.�� Directed by MFA Student Sebastián Bravo Montenegro.

Online – February 2 | ��(Jackson School of International Studies)
Presented by Radhika Govindrajan, Director, South Asia Center and Associate Professor, Anthropology, ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý; Sunila Kale
Professor, South Asia and International Studies ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý; and Milan Vaishnav, Senior Fellow and Director, South Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trump in the World 2.0 is an online series of talks and discussions featuring guest speakers and faculty exploring global perspectives on a second Trump administration. Free.

February 3 | (Asian Languages & Literature)
This is a unique opportunity to learn from UW Professor Zev Handel and get a peek into a linguistic history that has shaped the world. Like the book, this talk will be accessible to everyone—regardless of whether you have any knowledge of Chinese characters or East Asian languages. Free.

February 3 | (Jackson School of International Studies)
A Welcome & Research Presentation with 2025-26 UW Fulbright Canada Special Foundation Fellow, Clinton Westman. Free.

February 4 |
(History)
This lecture explores the evidence for ancient incarceration in vignettes: reading letters that prisoners wrote on papyrus, investigating spaces where they were held, and analyzing depictions of captives in monuments, law courts, and homes. Roman evidence does not model a just society, but it does offer a mirror where we can see modern practices of incarceration in a new light, asking which aspects of contemporary prisons are unique to modernity, and which reflect longer histories. The 2026 History Lecture Series presents “Power & Punishment – Histories of Incarceration,” exploring the practice of incarceration, tracing its change over time from antiquity to our modern world. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 4 | (School of Art + Art History + Design)
Death is a fundamental first step toward rebirth—but this transition can feel daunting without a compassionate guide. In The Book of Zero, our 2026 Jacob Lawrence Legacy Resident indira allegra presents a multimedia, meditative experience shaped by their research into doula work, death care, and the cyclical nature of bodies and environments. Free.

February 4 | (School of Music)
A free lunchtime performance featuring UW School of Music students in the North Allen Library lobby. Presented in partnership with UW Libraries. Free.

Online option – February 5 | 2026 University Faculty Lecture – A breath of fresh air: The science and policy saving lives from America’s deadliest cancer
Lung cancer kills nearly 125,000 Americans each year — more than breast, colon, and prostate cancers combined. UW Department of Surgery Professor and Chair Dr. Douglas Wood is out to change that and will discuss the many ways he and his colleagues are raising lung cancer awareness, increasing access to early detection, and ultimately, working to change lung cancer victims to lung cancer survivors. Free.

February 5 | ��(Asian Languages & Literature)
During the dark centuries between the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 CE and the golden age of reunified China under the Tang and Song dynasties (618–1279), the shi poetic form embraced new themes and structure. Using biography, social history, and literary analysis, Ping Wang demonstrates how the shi form came to dominate classical Chinese poetry, making possible the works of the great poets of later dynasties and influencing literary development in Korea and Japan. Free.

February 6 | (Jackson School of International Studies)
Since the early 2000s, literary scholarship has read Hebrew and Arabic literatures together to find moments of transgression or trespass, challenging logics of partition. In Static Forms: Writing the Present in the Modern Middle East, Shir Alon develops an alternative model for reading Arabic and Hebrew literatures, as two literary systems sharing a remarkably similar narrative of modernization and developing parallel literary forms to address it. In this talk, Alon will discuss the potential of a paradigm grounded in formal and affective analysis for new understandings of transnational modernism, Middle Eastern literatures, and comparative literary studies at large. She will also explore the limits of this approach, when parallel readings of Hebrew and Arabic literatures obfuscate rather than clarify the conditions of the present. Free.

February 6 | ��(Music and American Indian Studies)
UW Ethnomusicology, Department of American Indian Studies, and the UW Symphony collaborate with Lushootseed Research’s Healing Heart Project in presenting this special community event. Following a free screening of the documentary film The Healing Heart of Lushootseed, the UW Symphony (David Alexander Rahbee, director) and soprano Adia S. Bowen (tsi sʔuyuʔaɫ) perform Bruce Ruddell’s 50-minute symphony Healing Heart of the First People of This Land. This powerful work was commissioned by Upper Skagit elder Vi Hilbert (taqʷšəblu) shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a vehicle for, in Hilbert’s words, “bringing healing to a sick world.” Premiered by The Seattle Symphony in 2006, the piece draws inspiration from two sacred Coast Salish songs Hilbert had entrusted to the composer and features a number of percussion instruments native to this region. The performance features soloist and Indigenous soprano Adia S. Bowen (tsi sʔuyuʔaɫ), a UW alumna who graduated in June 2025 with degrees in Voice Performance and American Indian Studies. Free.

February 6 | (Psychology)
Whether you’re married, dating, or flying solo, Dr. Nicole McNichols has some sex advice for you. And you may want to pay attention because McNichols is not only the professor of ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s most sought-after class in its history, she’s one of social media’s most popular educators on the topic of sex. Pulling from her book, You Could Be Having Better Sex, McNichols shares the latest data that shows good sex is one of the most powerful and effective sources of joy.

Week of February 9

Online – February 9 | ��(Jackson School of International Studies)
Presented by Reşat Kasaba, Professor, International Studies, ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and Gönül Tol, Director, Turkish Program, Middle East Institute. Trump in the World 2.0 is an online series of talks and discussions featuring guest speakers and faculty exploring global perspectives on a second Trump administration. Free.

February 10 | ��(Simpson Center for the Humanities)
The production and promotion of so-called “AI” technology involves dehumanization on many fronts: the computational metaphor valorizes one kind of cognitive activity as “intelligence,” devaluing many other aspects of human experience while taking an isolating, individualistic view of agency, ignoring the importance of communities and webs of relationships. Meanwhile, the purpose of humans is framed as being labelers of data or interchangeable machine components. Data collected about people is understood as “ground truth” even while it lies about those people, especially marginalized people. In this talk, Bender will explore these processes of dehumanization and the vital role that the humanities have in resisting these trends by painting a deeper and richer picture of what it is to be human. Free.

February 10 | (QuantumX)
Dr. Krysta Svore is Vice President of Applied Research for Quantum Computing at NVIDIA, joining the company after 19 years at Microsoft, where she served as Technical Fellow and VP of Advanced Quantum Development and pioneered reliable quantum computing through the co‑design of hardware, software, and error correction. She began her career developing machine learning methods for web search before founding Microsoft’s quantum computing software, algorithms, and architecture program. Free.

February 11 | ��(Chemistry, Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, and Bioengineering)
Explore how cutting-edge research is driving material innovation in the built environment. Faculty whose work spans chemistry, engineering, and architecture examine how living systems can be integrated into material design to address pressing challenges related to sustainability, resilience, and the future of construction. Free.

February 11 | (History)
This lecture explores the wide variety of carceral practices in medieval Europe and examines how the recovery of Roman law and the concept of the state in the twelfth century began to transform those practices. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 11 | (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies)
Navigating Academia as a Transnational Scholar from the Global South: Treasuring All the Knowledges brings together the voices of 16 women and non-binary scholars who began their postgraduate journeys as non-elite international students and (un)documented migrants in countries positioned as economically more powerful than their places of origin. Inspired by the book’s creative and relational approach to knowledge, this event will also open a collective space for poetry and storytelling. Participants are invited to write and share short poetic or narrative reflections that speak to their own experiences of abundance, survival, care, and knowledge-making within academic spaces. Free.

February 12 | (Sociology)
The future will be old; Europe, the Americas and Asia will soon have the oldest populations ever known to humanity. Can we cope? It will require major changes in the way we think about youth, women, immigration, and globalization to avoid disaster. Free.

February 12 | ��(Jackson School of International Studies)
In Ghost Nation: the Story of Taiwan and its Struggle for Survival, Chris Horton compares Beijing’s claim that Taiwan has been Chinese territory “since time immemorial” with Taiwan’s actual history. Several different groups have controlled some or all of Taiwan over the last 400 years — the Dutch, Spanish, Tungning, Manchu, Japanese, Chinese, and now, Taiwanese. By looking at those who have ruled Taiwan, Horton also tells the story of the Taiwanese people, highlighting their intergenerational quest for self-determination — and the existential threat posed by an expansionist Chinese Communist Party. Free.

February 12 | (Simpson Center for the Humanities)
Athletes with ancestral ties to the Pacific Islands are dominant fixtures in some of the world’s most visible sports and over several generations have produced a modern sports diaspora. Tracing Samoan transnational and diasporic movement along divergent colonial pathways, this talk examines the relationship between embodied experiences of racialization and the emergence of Pacific sports excellence in three settler colonial countries (United States, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia). It then considers what recent efforts to mobilize Indigenous practice inside and outside sport tell us about the uses and importance of culture in contemporary sport. Free.

February 12 | ��(School of Music)
Faculty pianist Robin McCabe joins forces with guest artist Maria Larionoff in an evening of high octane duos for violin and piano. On the launch pad: Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, Beethoven’s Sonata in G major, Opus 96, and Faure’s impassioned Sonata in A Major.

Online – February 13 | 2026 Provost’s Town Hall
Join UW Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Tricia Serio as she discusses the state of the University from an academic perspective and the singular role that public research universities — and the UW in particular — play in our society. Featured speakers include Jodi Sandfort, dean of the Evans School, and Sarah Cusworth Walker, research professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Ted Poor, associate professor in the School of Music, will introduce the provost.

February 13 | (Open Scholarship Commons)
Douglass Day is an annual transcribe-a-thon program that marks the birth of Frederick Douglass. Each year, sites across the country gather thousands of people to help create new & freely available resources for learning about Black history. A transcribe-a-thon is an event in which a group of people work together to transcribe a collection of digitized historical materials. The primary goal of a transcribe-a-thon is to make the materials more easily accessible, but these events also serve to promote awareness of parts of Black history – and especially Black women’s history – that remain too-little-known. Free.

February 14 | (Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
Celebrate Valentine’s Day with 8x Grammy nominee and NAACP Image Award winner The Baylor Project — featuring vocalist Jean Baylor and drummer Marcus Baylor. Steeped in the heart of jazz, with dynamic performances that are soulful to the core, their musical roots are deeply planted in gospel, blues and R&B. Their eclectic sound and infectious chemistry provide the perfect backdrop for a memorable evening filled with vibrant, spiritual, feel-good music.

Week of February 16

February 17 | (School of Art + Art History + Design)
Our question to consider: what does the work of indira allegra offer us when thinking about the project of liberation? This program is part of the year-long Liberation Book Club series exploring liberation through shared texts, art, film, music, and workshops. Free.

February 18 | (History)
In 1942, the U.S. government incarcerated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps based on the racist argument that they were likely “disloyal” to the United States. In the ensuing years of World War II, though, the U.S. government simultaneously sought to demonstrate the “loyalty” of Japanese Americans to American democracy. By placing U.S. wartime policies and Japanese American responses in different historical contexts, this lecture will interrogate the meanings of loyalty, democracy, and national security—during World War II and in our own time. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 18 | (Digital Arts & Experimental Media)
DXARTS presents an evening of 3D music, featuring recent work and world premieres by current staff and graduate students. Free.

February 18 & 19 | & (School of Music)
UW Jazz Studies students perform in small combos over two consecutive nights of original tunes, homage to the greats of jazz, and experiments in composing and arranging. Directed by Cuong Vu, Ted Poor, John-Carlos Perea, and Steve Rodby.��Free.

February 19 | ��(Henry Art Gallery)
Poet, musician, and scholar Rasheena Fountain presents Speculative Land Blues, a blues guitar, poetry, and DJ set. Developed in collaboration with Adeerya Johnson, Associate Curator at the Museum of Pop Culture, the Henry presents Speculative Landscapes. Free.

February 19 | (Burke Museum)
Read the book ahead of time, or join to learn more about the selection. The February book is Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State by Elizabeth A. Nesbitt and David B. Williams. Free.

February 19 | (Jackson School of International Studies)
John Johnson is a recently retired Senior Foreign Service Officer whose career included leadership roles in Brussels, Afghanistan, and with the U.S. Mission to NATO. Since joining the State Department in 2002, he has served in Europe, Asia, and Washington, D.C., earning multiple awards for his service. A Seattle native and UW graduate, John speaks several languages and lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest. Free.

February 20 | ��(Political Science)
The Center for Environmental Politics hosts Amanda Stronza, professor in Texas A&M University Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, and co-founder of the Applied Biodiversity Science Program. Free.

February 21 | ��(Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
yMusic — named for Generation Y — is a genre-leading American chamber ensemble renowned for its innovative and collaborative spirit. yMusic has a unique mission: to work on both sides of the classical/popular music divide, without sacrificing rigor, virtuosity, charisma or style.

Week of February 23

Online – February 23 | ��(Jackson School of International Studies)
Presented by Ambassador Michelle Gavin who is currently Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies, Council on Foreign Relations. Trump in the World 2.0 is an online series of talks and discussions featuring guest speakers and faculty exploring global perspectives on a second Trump administration. Free.

February 23 | ��(Asian Languages & Literature)
UW Asian L&L and the Seattle International Film Festival co-host an award winning filmmaker Ash Mayfair at the SIFF Cinema Uptown for the screening of Skin of Youth (2025). A Q&A moderated by Assistant Professor Ungsan Kim will follow the screening.

February 23 | ��(School of Music)
UW music students perform music from the Baroque era under the direction of Tekla Cunningham. Free.

February 24 | (Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
Join us for a feature documentary that traces the remarkable history and legacy of one of the most important works of art to come out of the age of AIDS –choreographer Bill T. Jones’s tour de force ballet “D-Man in the Waters.” There will be a post-screening discussion with Bill T. Jones and Berette S Macaulay. Free.

February 24 | ��(Jackson School of International Studies)
Can political elites shape public opinion by influencing the tone of news coverage, even when they cannot dictate what gets covered? This study addresses that question using text analysis of more than five million Japanese news articles from 2004–2024, showing that rising negativity in legacy media closely corresponds with declines in cabinet approval. A newly compiled dataset of prime ministers’ daily schedules further reveals that periods of intensified elite engagement with journalists coincide with less negative coverage. Together, these findings suggest that incumbents may still temper media tone through proactive outreach, though this influence appears to weaken in the age of fragmented, digital media. Free.

February 25 | (History)
Prison is more than a place of punishment. It is also an archive. Yet the official story found in sentencing reports and conduct reviews is only part of the story. Incarcerated people generate a parallel counter-archive of resistance and transformation. The Washington Prison History Project is a multimedia digital effort to document this counter-archive at a local level. Across a series of publications, programs, and protests, incarcerated people have shown prison to be a central feature in the development of Washington State and the country. An examination of this archive tells a different history of our state—and its possible futures. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 25 | (American Indian Studies)
Featuring Oscar Hokea(Cherokee Nation and Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma). Storytelling offers a spiritual connection, a sharing of sacred breath. Literature, similarly, preserves human experience and ideals. Both forms are durable and transmit power that teaches us how to live. Both storytelling and reading aloud can impact audiences through the power of presence, allowing for the experience of the transfer of sacred breath as audiences are immersed in the experience of being inside stories and works of literature.��Free.

Online option – February 25 | The Office of Public Lectures presents: America’s Character and the Rule of Law with George Conway III��(Public Lectures)
This talk will explore the idea that the endurance of the rule of law in the United States relies not solely on the provisions of the Constitution—its structural framework, the institutions it established, or the rights it enshrines—but fundamentally on the character of its citizens. Qualities such as public-spiritedness, tolerance, moderation, empathy, mutual respect, a sense of fair play, and, ultimately, intelligence, honor, and decency form the foundation of constitutional democracy. Free.

February 26 | (School of Art + Art History + Design)
In this talk, Rachael Z. DeLue will share insights from her current research and teaching on the relationship between art and science in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, focusing on a suite of extraordinary chromolithographs created in the 1880s by the astronomer and illustrator Étienne-Leopold Trouvelot. Based on his work at the Harvard Observatory and the United States Naval Observatory, the chromolithographs represent the cross-pollination of art and science in an attempt to generate knowledge about astronomical phenomena that eluded perception and resisted visualization. Prof. DeLue will consider Trouvelot’s prints in relation to other such attempts on the part of fine artists and scientific illustrators to picture the celestial sphere at a time when technology was limited and space travel was still the stuff of science fiction. Free.

February 26 | ��(Stroum Center for Jewish Studies)
In this talk, Paris Papamichos Chronakis discuss his new book, The Business of Transition – Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule, and shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) skillfully managed the tumultuous shift from Ottoman to Greek rule amidst rising ethnic tensions and heightened class conflict. Bringing their once powerful voices back into the historical narrative, he traces their entangled trajectories as businessmen, community members, and civic leaders to illustrate how the self-reinvention of a Jewish-led bourgeoisie made a city Greek. Salonica’s merchants were present in their own—and their city’s—remaking. Free.

February 26 | ��(Simpson Center for the Humanities)
Taiwan is a unique site of innovation in disability rights. Despite being barred from becoming a States Party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) according to the diplomatic exclusion faced by Taiwan, it has become a model for the localization of the CRPD through its use “domestic review mechanisms.” Furthermore, Taiwan demonstrates the ways in which fundamental divides within human rights discourse, such as Western individualism and East Asian familialism, can be bridged using strategic adaptation that reimagine disability rights as a post-colonial hybrid. Free.

February 26 – March 1 | (Dance)
Presenting seven original student-choreographed works. This platform gives students the opportunity to express their creative voices through choreography and costume design, as well as collaborating with lighting designers and mentors.

February 26 – 28 | (Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
Thirty years after its historic premiere, the groundbreaking dance theater work by Bill T. Jones returns to the stage. Still/Here shatters boundaries between the personal and the political, exemplifying a form of dance theater that is uniquely American. At the heart of the piece are “survival workshops” Jones conducted with people living with life-threatening illnesses.

ArtSci Roundup goes monthly!

The ArtSci Roundup is your guide to connecting with the UW—whether in person, on campus, or on your couch.

Previously shared on a quarterly basis, those who sign up for the Roundup email will receive them monthly, delivering timely updates and engaging content wherever you are. Check the roundup regularly, as events are added throughout the month. Make sure to check out the ArtSci On Your Own Time section for everything from podcasts to videos to exhibitions that can be enjoyed when it works for you!

In addition, if you like the ArtSci Roundup, sign up to receive a monthly notice when it’s been published.

Do you have an event that you would like to see featured in the ArtSci Roundup? Connect with Lauren Zondag (zondagld@uw.edu).uw.edu).

Targeted drug delivery is a powerful and promising area of medicine. Therapies that pinpoint the exact areas of the body where they’re needed — and nowhere they’re not — can reduce the medicine dosage and avoid potentially harmful “off target” effects elsewhere in the body. A targeted immunotherapy, for example, might seek out cancerous tissues and activate immune cells to fight the disease only in those tissues.

The tricky part is making a therapy truly “smart,” where the medicine can move freely through the body and decide which areas to target.

Researchers at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý took a significant step toward that goal by designing proteins with autonomous decision-making capabilities. In a proof-of-principles study in Nature Chemical Biology, researchers demonstrated that by adding smart tail structures to therapeutic proteins, they could control the proteins’ localization based on the presence of specific environmental cues. These protein tails fold themselves into preprogrammed shapes that define how they react to different combinations of cues. In addition, the experiment showed that the smart protein tails could be attached to a carrier material for delivery to living cells.

Advances in synthetic biology also allowed the researchers to manufacture these proteins cheaply and in a matter of days instead of months.

“We’ve been thinking about these concepts for some time but have struggled with ways to increase and automate production,” said senior author , a UW professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering. “We’ve now finally figured out how to produce these systems faster, at scale and with dramatically enhanced logical complexity. We are excited about how these will lead to more sophisticated and scalable disease-honing therapies.”

The concept of programmable biomaterials isn’t new. Scientists have developed numerous strategies to make systems responsive to individual cues — such as pH levels or the presence of specific enzymes — that are associated with a particular disease or area of the body. But it’s rare to find one cue, or “biomarker,” that’s unique to one spot, so a material that hones in on just one biomarker might act on a few unintended places in addition to the target.

One solution to this problem is to seek out a combination of biomarkers. There might be many areas of the body with particular enzyme or pH levels, but there are likely fewer areas with both of those factors. In theory, the more biomarkers a material can identify, the more finely targeted drug delivery can be.

In 2018, DeForest’s lab created a new class of materials that responded to multiple biomarkers using Boolean logic, a concept traditionally used in computer programming.

“We realized that we could program how therapeutics were released based simply on how they were connected to a carrier material,” DeForest said. “For example, if we linked a therapeutic cargo to a material via two degradable groups connected in series — that is, each after the other — it would be released if either group was degraded, acting as an OR gate. When the degradable groups were instead connected in parallel — that is, each on a different half of a cycle — both groups had to be degraded for cargo release, functioning as an AND gate. Excitingly, by combining these basic gates we could readily create advanced logical circuits.”

It was a big step forward, but it wasn’t scalable — the team built these large and complex logic-responsive materials manually through traditional organic chemistry.

But over the next several years, the related field of synthetic biology advanced by leaps and bounds.

“The field has developed exciting new protein-based tools that can allow researchers to form permanent bonds between proteins,” said co-first author , a UW doctoral student of bioengineering. “It opened doors for new protein structures that were previously unachievable, which made more complex logical operations possible.”

Additionally, it became practical to use living cells as factories to produce these complex proteins, allowing scientists to design custom DNA blueprints for new proteins, insert the DNA into bacteria or other host cells, and then collect the proteins with the desired structure directly from the cells.

With these new tools, DeForest and his team streamlined and improved many steps of the process at once. They designed and produced proteins with tails that spontaneously fold into more bespoke shapes, creating complex “circuits” that can respond to up to five different biomarkers. These new proteins can attach to various carriers — hydrogels, tiny beads or living cells — for delivery to a cell, or theoretically a disease site. The team even loaded up one carrier with three different proteins, each programmed to deliver their unique cargo based on different sets of environmental cues.

“We were so excited about the results,” DeForest said. “Using the old process, it would take months to synthesize just a few milligrams of each of these materials. Now it takes us a couple of weeks to go from construct design to product. It’s been a complete game changer for us.”

“The sky’s the limit. You can create delayed and independent delivery of many different components in one treatment,” Ross said. “And I think we could create much, much larger logical circuits that a protein can be responsive to. We’re at the point now that the technology is outpacing what we’ve seriously considered in terms of applications, which is a great place to be.”

The researchers will now continue searching for more biomarkers that proteins could target. They also hope to start collaborating with other labs at the UW and beyond to build and deploy real-world therapies.

The team outlined other uses for the technology as well. The same tools could manufacture therapies within a single cell and direct them to specific regions, a sort of microcosm of how the process works in the body. DeForest also envisions diagnostic tools like blood tests that could, say, turn a certain color when a complex set of cues within the blood sample are present.

DeForest thinks the first practical applications are likely to be cancer treatments, but with more research, the possibilities feel endless.

“The dream is to be able to pick any arbitrary location inside of the body — down to individual cells — and program a material to go and act there,” he said. “That’s a tall order, but with these technologies we’re getting closer. With the right combination of biomarkers, these materials will just get more and more precise.”

Co-authors include , a former UW undergraduate student of chemical engineering; , a UW undergraduate student of bioengineering; and , a UW doctoral student of chemical engineering.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

For more information, contact DeForest at profcole@uw.edu.��

Twelve faculty members at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý have been elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences. They are among 36 scientists and educators from across the state July 17 as new members. Election recognizes the new member’s “outstanding record of scientific and technical achievement and willingness to assist the Academy in providing the best available scientific information and technical understanding to inform complex policy decisions in Washington.”��

The UW faculty members were selected by current WSAS members or by their election to national science academies. Eleven were voted on by current WSAS members:��

, professor, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair, and director of the Paul G. ��Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering, for “contributions in data management for data science, big data systems, cloud computing and image/video analytics and leadership in data science education.”��

professor of civil & environmental engineering and of industrial & systems engineering, for “pioneering work in human mobility analysis and infrastructure resilience, which have transformed transportation systems in terms of both demand and supply, and shaped the future directions of transportation systems research on community-based solutions and disaster resilience.”��

Lloyd and Kay Chapman Endowed Chair for Oral Health and associate dean for research in the UW School of Dentistry, and professor in the Department of Health Systems & Population Health, for “leadership in understanding and addressing children’s oral health inequities through community-based socio-behavioral interventions and evidence-based policies.”��

professor of biology, for “internationally recognized leadership in the biology of sleep, including groundbreaking research on molecular and genetic aspects of the brain, human behavioral studies on learning under varied sleep schedules, and contributions that have shaped policy on school schedules and standard time.”��

, the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel professor of physics and of electrical & computer engineering, for “foundational contributions to fundamental and applied research on the optical and spin properties of quantum point defects in crystals and for service and leadership in the quantum community.” ��

, professor and chair of human centered design and engineering, for “award-winning leadership in HCI computing, whose research has advanced health and education technology, influenced policy, and shaped the HCI field of through impactful scholarship, interdisciplinary collaboration and inclusive, real-world technology design.”��

, professor and associate dean for research in the UW School of Social Work, for “contributions to understanding psychosocial and physiological factors that moderate the effectiveness of their interventions and ultimately improve the health of children with abdominal pain disorders.”��

, professor of medicine in the UW School of Medicine and of pharmacy, “for leadership in health economics and cancer research, including work on financial toxicity, cost- effectiveness, and healthcare policy that has influenced national discussions, improved cancer care access, and shaped policies for equitable and sustainable healthcare.” Ramsey is also Director of the Cancer Outcomes Research Program at Fred Hutch.��

, professor of bioengineering and Vice Dean of Research and Graduate Education in the UW School of Medicine, for “national leadership in biomedical research, research policy, and graduate education, including pioneering novel drug delivery approaches for regenerative medicine applications in the nervous system and other tissues such as bone, cartilage, tendon and skin.”��

, Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of Earth and space sciences, for “revolutionizing our understanding of climate change in Antarctica through pioneering ice core extractions under hazardous Antarctic conditions and their subsequent analyses over two decades, and for applying that expertise to advance climate research in Washington State.”��

, professor of pharmaceutics, for “pioneering contributions to pharmaceutical and translational sciences, including groundbreaking research on drug transporters, PBPK modeling and maternal-fetal pharmacology that have helped shaped drug safety policies.”��

The Academy also welcomed new members who were selected by virtue of their election to the National Academies of Science, Engineering or Medicine. Among them is , the Arthur B. McDonald professor of physics and director of the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics. Hertzog was elected to the National Academy of Sciences last year. ��

Three ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý faculty members have been awarded early-career fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The new Sloan Fellows, announced Feb. 18, are , the Clare Boothe Luce assistant professor of electrical & computer engineering and bioengineering, , an assistant professor of chemistry, and , an assistant professor of computer science in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.��

Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, and including this year’s fellows, 131 faculty from ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý have received a Sloan Research Fellowship, according to the Sloan Foundation.��

Sloan Fellowships are open to scholars in seven scientific and technical fields — chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics — and honor early-career researchers whose achievements mark them among the next generation of scientific leaders.��

The 126  were selected by researchers and faculty in the scientific community. Candidates are nominated by their peers, and fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars based on each candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field. Each fellow will receive $75,000 to apply toward research endeavors.��

This year’s fellows come from 51 institutions across the United States and Canada.��

Orsborn’s research aims to understand how neurons in our brains work together to let us learn to move in many different ways. She uses engineering technologies like brain-computer interfaces to manipulate how neural activity relates to movement, which gives researchers new ways to link neural activity to computations related to how they believe the brain may perform. She also uses collaborations with theorists to build models that help researchers bridge from experimental data to computational principles.��

“We can quickly adapt our tennis skills to the pickleball court, but it also takes years to perfect a piano concerto,” Orsborn said. “Our flexibility likely comes from our brain’s ability to learn in many ways, but we don’t understand how neurons actually implement different learning computations. I hope to build bridges between computational principles and biological implementation, which will ultimately help us build therapies to restore movements lost due to injuries like stroke.”��

Xiao’s research program designs new porous materials to address unsolved challenges in clean energy and chemical sustainability. These include developing new porous adsorbents that can use renewable electricity to drive chemical processes, as well as new porous catalysts that can convert sustainable feedstocks into useful products.��

“Porous materials are the bedrock of industrial heterogeneous catalysis and chemical separations. Many of the chemicals we use in our daily lives have, at some point, been purified or chemically transformed within nano-sized pores,” Xiao said. “Going forward, new breakthroughs in porous materials synthesis are needed to harness renewable energy sources and chemical feedstocks. With the support of this award, along with the collaborative ecosystem at the UW, we hope to realize these synthetic breakthroughs faster, better and more cheaply.”��

Zhang’s research reimagines the design of online social platforms to empower the public to take control of their online experiences. Inspired by offline public institutions and political theory, she creates novel social computing systems for collaborative governance of online communities and AI. She also develops tools for personal and collective customization on social media and approaches for encouraging pro-social public discourse.��

“Digital platforms comprise socio-technical infrastructure that are crucial to the lives of millions, yet today they are governed and designed by a select few,” Zhang said. “As a result, many people do not see themselves represented in the decisions made and possible configurations supported by the major platforms they use. But putting the onus on end users to figure it out themselves can be overwhelming. I develop toolkits and interactive techniques informed by user needs to scaffold the process of customization, enabling both flexibility and ease of use.”��

Contact Orsborn at aorsborn@uw.edu; Xiao at djxiao@uw.edu; and Zhang at axz@cs.uw.edu. ��

UPDATE (Aug. 2, 2024): A previous version of this story misstated Paul Kinahan’s name.

Fifteen faculty members at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý have been elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences. They are among 36 scientists and educators from across the state . Selection recognizes the new members’ “outstanding record of scientific and technical achievement, and their willingness to work on behalf of the academy to bring the best available science to bear on issues within the state of Washington.”

Twelve UW faculty members were selected by current WSAS members. They are:

• , associate professor of epidemiology, of health systems and population health, and of child, family and population health nursing, who “possesses the rare combination of scientific rigor and courageous commitment to local community health. Identifying original ways to examine questions, and seeking out appropriate scientific methods to study those questions, allow her to translate research to collaborative community interventions with a direct impact on the health of communities.”
• , the Shauna C. Larson endowed chair in learning sciences, for “his work in the cultural basis of scientific research and learning, bringing rigor and light to multiculturalism in science and STEM education through STEM Teaching Tools and other programs.”
• , professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, “for her sustained commitment to community-engaged, science-driven practice and policy change related to the prevention of suicide and the promotion of mental health, with a focus on providing effective, sustainable and culturally appropriate care to people with serious mental illness.”
• , the David and Nancy Auth endowed professor in bioengineering, who has “charted new paths for 30-plus years. Her quest to deeply understand protein folding/unfolding and the link to amyloid diseases has propelled her to pioneer unique computational and experimental methods leading to the discovery and characterization of a new protein structure linked to toxicity early in amyloidogenesis.”
• , professor of environmental and occupational health sciences, of global health, and of emergency medicine, who is “a global and national leader at the intersection of climate change and health whose work has advanced our understanding of climate change health effects and has informed the design of preparedness and disaster response planning in Washington state, nationally and globally.”
• , professor of bioengineering and of radiology, who is “recognized for his contributions to the science and engineering of medical imaging systems and for leadership in national programs and professional and scientific societies advancing the capabilities of medical imaging.”
• , the Donald W. and Ruth Mary Close professor of electrical and computer engineering and faculty member in the UW Clean Energy Institute, who is “recognized for his distinguished research contributions to the design and operation of economical, reliable and environmentally sustainable power systems, and the development of influential educational materials used to train the next generation of power engineers.”
• , senior vice president and director of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the Joel D. Meyers endowed chair of clinical research and of vaccine and infectious disease at Fred Hutch, and UW professor of medicine, who is “is recognized for her seminal contributions to developing validated laboratory methods for interrogating cellular and humoral immune responses to HIV, TB and COVID-19 vaccines, which has led to the analysis of more than 100 vaccine and monoclonal antibody trials for nearly three decades, including evidence of T-cell immune responses as a correlate of vaccine protection.”
• , professor of political science and the Walker family professor for the arts and sciences, who is a specialist “in environmental politics, international political economy, and the politics of nonprofit organizations. He is widely recognized as a leader in the field of environmental politics, best known for his path-breaking research on the role firms and nongovernmental organizations can play in promoting more stringent regulatory standards.”
• , the Ballmer endowed dean of social work, for investigations of “how inequality, in its many forms, affects health, illness and quality of life. He has developed unique conceptual frameworks to investigate how race, ethnicity and immigration are associated with health and social outcomes.”
• , professor of chemistry, who is elected “for distinguished scientific and community contributions to advancing the field of electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, which have transformed how researchers worldwide analyze data.”
• , professor of bioengineering and of ophthalmology, whose “pioneering work in biomedical optics, including the invention of optical microangiography and development of novel imaging technologies, has transformed clinical practice, significantly improving patient outcomes. Through his numerous publications, patents and clinical translations, his research has helped shape the field of biomedical optics.”

Three new UW members of the academy were selected by virtue of their previous election to one of the National Academies. They are:

• , professor of atmospheric and climate science, who had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences “for contributions to research and expertise in atmospheric radiation and cloud processes, remote sensing, cloud/aerosol/radiation/climate interactions, stratospheric circulation and stratosphere-troposphere exchanges and coupling, and climate change.”
• , the Bartley Dobb professor for the study and prevention of violence in the Department of Epidemiology and a UW professor of pediatrics, who had been elected to the National Academy of Medicine “for being a national public health leader whose innovative and multidisciplinary research to integrate data across the health care system and criminal legal system has deepened our understanding of the risk and consequences of firearm-related harm and informed policies and programs to reduce its burden, especially among underserved communities and populations.”
• , division chief of general pediatrics at Seattle Children’s Hospital and a UW professor of pediatrics, who had been elected to the National Academy of Medicine “for her leadership in advancing child health equity through scholarship in community-partnered design of innovative care models in pediatric primary care. Her work has transformed our understanding of how to deliver child preventive health care during the critical early childhood period to achieve equitable health outcomes and reduce disparities.”

In addition, Dr. , president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and of the Cancer Consortium — a partnership between the UW, Seattle Children’s Hospital and Fred Hutch — was elected to the academy for being “part of a research effort that found mutations in the cell-surface protein epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), which plays an important role in helping lung cancer cells survive. Today, drugs that target EGFR can dramatically change outcomes for lung cancer patients by slowing the progression of the cancer.”

the Boeing-Egtvedt endowed professor and chair in aeronautics and astronautics, will join the board effective Sept. 30. Morgansen was elected to WSAS in 2021 “for significant advances in nonlinear methods for integrated sensing and control in engineered, bioinspired and biological flight systems,” and “for leadership in cross-disciplinary aerospace workforce development.” She is currently director of the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium, co-director of the UW Space Policy and Research Center and chair of the AIAA Aerospace Department Chairs Association. She is also a member of the WSAS education committee.

“I am excited to serve on the WSAS board and work with WSAS members to leverage and grow WSAS’s impact by identifying new opportunities for WSAS to collaborate and partner with the state in addressing the state’s needs,” said Morgansen.

The new members to the Washington State Academy of Sciences will be formally inducted in September.

These cells make another protein, called islet amyloid polypeptide or IAPP, which has been found clumped together in many Type 2 diabetes patients. The formation of IAPP clusters is comparable to how a to eventually form the signature plaques associated with that disease.

Researchers at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý have demonstrated more similarities between IAPP clusters and those in Alzheimer’s. The team previously showed that a synthetic peptide can block the formation of small, toxic Alzheimer’s protein clusters. Now, in a in Protein Science, the researchers used a similar peptide to block the formation of IAPP clusters.

UW News asked co-senior author , a UW professor of bioengineering and faculty member in the UW , for details about protein aggregation and how these synthetic peptides work.

Alzheimer’s and Type 2 diabetes are part of a family of diseases that are characterized by having proteins that cluster together. What’s happening?

Valerie Daggett: There are over 50 of these amyloid diseases, and they start out with their respective proteins in their biologically active, good form. But then the proteins start changing structure and globbing together. These aggregates can be different sizes. They can have different underlying structures and different effects on the cells around them.

Early in the process there are smaller clusters, which are toxic, and they set off all kinds of problems. This leads to a very complicated disease because lots of other things go awry in response to these toxic clusters. Over time, these clusters combine to form non-toxic structures: longer strands and finally large deposits, such as the Alzheimer’s plaques.

Many people know that protein aggregation plays a role in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Can you describe what’s happening here?

Valerie Daggett will deliver this year’s University Faculty Lecture at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, April 1.

VD: In the case of Alzheimer’s, these small, toxic protein clusters are running around the brain attacking neurons and then over time there’s enough damage that we start to see symptoms. By the time these clusters have combined to form the non-toxic plaques, there’s already been a lot of damage. It becomes similar to trying to treat stage 4 cancer. That’s why we want to get in early.

What’s happening with Type 2 diabetes?

VD: It’s similar, except it’s happening in the pancreas instead of the brain. In healthy people, cells in the pancreas, called beta cells, secrete IAPP along with insulin. The normal, active form of IAPP helps with metabolism maintenance. But when IAPP changes shape, it starts to form these toxic clusters and then it starts attacking the beta cells. And these clusters are equal-opportunity toxins. We, and many others, have shown that you can put them on different cell types and they will kill the cells.

In this paper, you show that the IAPP clusters go through an “” phase. What does this mean and why is it significant?

VD: We’ve been looking at these amyloid systems for a long time and we started seeing this weird protein structure. It’s like every other one of the protein building blocks, called amino acids, has had this crankshaft motion on it. Half of them are rotated the wrong way.

At first we thought: “That’s got to be an artifact. Nobody discovers a new structure.” But we’ve since shown that this “alpha sheet” structure is real. And proteins in all the amyloid systems we’ve looked at — 14 now including Type 2 diabetes — form these alpha sheet structures when they’re in these small, toxic clusters. No one had seen that for IAPP before this paper.

Also in this paper, you showed that a synthetic peptide was able to bind and neutralize the toxic IAPP clusters and keep beta cells alive. What’s special about this peptide and how does it work?

VD: Previously, we designed synthetic peptides to bind to the toxic protein clusters in Alzheimer’s disease. The idea here is for these peptides to take these clusters out of commission before they can wreak havoc on the cells. The peptide we made also forms an alpha sheet structure, but it is not toxic to the cells. It binds really tightly to the clusters, and we’re currently studying what happens to the clusters after it binds.

In this paper, we showed that our synthetic peptides also work against the toxic IAPP clusters, which means this could be a potential therapeutic in the future.

Type 2 diabetes is the most prevalent amyloid disease — it affects . A lot of people associate Type 2 diabetes treatment with changing lifestyle measures, but that doesn’t work for everyone. A drug that could help minimize the damage IAPP does to the pancreas could be really helpful.

This paper had two lead authors: , who completed this research as a UW doctoral student of molecular engineering and is now at Columbia University, and , who completed this research as an acting instructor of medicine in the UW School of Medicine and is now at Indiana University. Additional co-authors on this paper are Tatum Prosswimmer, a UW doctoral student of molecular engineering; , who completed this research as a UW doctoral student of molecular engineering and is now at Ambit Inc; , who completed this research as a UW undergraduate student majoring in biochemistry and is now a student at Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences; , who completed this research as a senior research scientist in the Division of Metabolism, Endocrinology and Nutrition in the UW School of Medicine and is now at Tacoma Community College; and , professor of medicine in the UW School of Medicine.

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý Office of Research, the UW Department of Bioengineering, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the American Diabetes Association and a UW Mary Gates Research Scholarship.

For more information, contact Daggett at daggett@uw.edu.

Allbritton was selected “for innovation and commercialization of single-cell, analytical, and gut-on-chip technologies for drug screening and for engineering education.”

Drawing from the fields of engineering, chemistry, physics and materials science, Allbritton’s research develops technologies and platforms for biomedical research and clinical care, including the study and analysis of single cells for the treatment of a variety of diseases such as cancer, macular degeneration and HIV. She is an international expert on multiplexed single-cell assays, microfabricated platforms for high-content cytometry combined with cell sorting, and microengineered stem-cell-based systems for recapitulating human organ-level function.

Her work has resulted in over 250 full-length journal publications and patents and led to 15 commercial products. In addition, five companies have been formed based on her research discoveries: Protein Simple (acquired by Bio-Techne in 2014), Intellego, Cell Microsystems, Altis Biosystems and Piccolo Biosystems. She has been nationally recognized for her research and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors and the Washington State Academy of Sciences.

As the Frank & Julie Jungers Dean of the College of Engineering, Allbritton is committed to engineering excellence for the public good by fostering high-impact, interdisciplinary research and technology translation and building an inclusive community of faculty, staff and students. She has received numerous awards for her leadership, including the BMES Robert A. Pritzker Award and the Edward Kidder Graham Award for Leadership and Service.

Allbritton is among 114 new members across the U.S. who are honored for contributions to “engineering research, practice or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and for contributions to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

, principal senior technical fellow at Boeing, has also been elected to the academy. Seebergh is a UW affiliate professor of chemical engineering.

When researchers want to study how COVID makes us sick, or what diseases such as Alzheimer’s do to the body, one approach is to look at what’s happening inside individual cells.

Researchers sometimes grow the cells in a 3D scaffold called a “hydrogel.” This network of proteins or molecules mimics the environment the cells would live in inside the body.

New research led by the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý demonstrates a new class of hydrogels that can form not just outside cells, but also inside of them. The team created these hydrogels from protein building blocks designed using a computer to form a specific structure. These hydrogels exhibited similar mechanical properties both inside and outside of cells, providing researchers with a new tool to group proteins together inside of cells.

The team Jan. 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“In the past 10 years, there’s been a shift in the world of cell biology,” said co-senior author , a UW associate professor of chemical engineering and of bioengineering. “Classically, folks have attributed much of the cell’s interior organization to membrane-bound organelles, such as mitochondria or the nucleus. But now scientists are realizing that the cell actually has other ways to locally concentrate certain molecules or proteins without using membranes, for example, by protein-protein interactions. This concentrating allows the cell to turn on or off specific functions that can be helpful or ultimately lead to disease.”

DeForest continued: “What I think is pretty exciting here is that we have good mechanical control of our hydrogels — even when they are made inside human cells. This means we can tune them to essentially function as a synthetic version of whatever sequestering phenomenon we want to study, such as how protein aggregation can lead to Alzheimer’s.”

One key element of this research was that the protein building blocks were designed from scratch — they don’t exist anywhere in nature — using computers.

“You can imagine a protein as a string of subunits called amino acids. That string folds up to form a three-dimensional structure. There are 20 different amino acids, and a typical protein is made up of 100 to 200 of them. That makes the system very complex, because how do you know how it’s going to fold?” said co-lead author , who completed this research as a UW postdoctoral researcher at the and is now a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. “That’s where the computer comes into play — it does calculations to estimate the most likely three-dimensional shape. And similarly, you can tell it what shape you want and it tells you what sequence you need to build the protein.”

To make a variety of hydrogels with different properties, the team used computational design to control how floppy or rigid the protein building blocks were and how the building blocks organized and connected to create the hydrogel. The researchers also used two different methods to link the building blocks together: One linked them irreversibly and the other allowed the proteins to disconnect and reconnect.

“Irreversibly crosslinked systems are going to be intrinsically more stable, making them better for long-term cell culture and functional tissue engineering,” said DeForest, who is also a faculty member with the UW and the UW . “But the reversibly crosslinked systems are more fluid, which may be better for driving specific protein-protein interactions within living cells.”

To determine if the hydrogels in cells had similar characteristics compared to their extracellular counterparts, the researchers examined whether building blocks within the hydrogels could move around. A stiffer hydrogel would be more likely to trap the proteins in one position compared to a more fluid gel. The mechanical properties of each type of hydrogel remained even when inside a cell.

The team plans to further explore this system, including being able to better control how hydrogels form and localize within cells.

The most crucial part of this project, the researchers said, was the collaboration between protein designers and chemical and biological engineers.

“Our cross-disciplinary collaboration with Cole’s group has been very exciting, and has opened up routes to new classes of biomaterials with a wide range of applications,” said co-senior author , the director of the Institute for Protein Design and a professor of biochemistry in the UW School of Medicine.

, a UW doctoral student in bioengineering, is co-lead author on this paper. Additional co-authors are , a UW research scientist in the Institute for Protein Design; , an assistant professor at Pohang University of Science and Technology who completed this research as a UW postdoc at the Institute for Protein Design; , a UW doctoral student in bioengineering; , a UW doctoral student in molecular and cellular biology; , a UW doctoral student in biological physics, structure and design; , a UW research scientist at the Institute for Protein Design; , a group leader at the Hubrecht Institute who completed this research as a postdoc at the Institute for Protein Design; , an acting instructor at the Institute for Protein Design; Alee Sharma, an undergraduate student at Northeastern University; and , an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Engineering. Mout and Sahtoe were part of the . This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Audacious Project, the Open Philanthropy Project, the Wu Tsai Translational Investigator Fund, the Center for the Science of Synthesis Across Scales and the National Institutes of Health.

For more information, contact DeForest at profcole@uw.edu, Mout at rubul.mout@childrens.harvard.edu and Baker at dabaker@uw.edu.

A team of biomedical researchers, including two bioengineers at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, has developed a new method for hiring engineering professors. Currently, the researchers argue, engineering departments “lack the education and skills needed to effectively hire faculty candidates from historically excluded groups.”

To help diversify faculty hiring, the team August 14 in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

“While Black, Latinx and Indigenous individuals , individuals from these same demographics comprise only about ,” said co-author , UW associate professor of bioengineering and of laboratory medicine and pathology. “This disconnect means that our profession is underperforming. Addressing this massive issue would create a stronger profession that is better equipped to tackle our society’s and world’s biggest challenges. Most of the strategies in the paper can be broadly applied not just in biomedical engineering, but also across science, technology, engineering and math fields.”

The team’s roadmap details six major steps that could help increase diversity in faculty hiring. These steps are rooted in evidenced-based best practices as well as experiences in the researchers’ own institutions. The primary goal is to actively recruit, hire and retain a more diverse group of faculty and improve the rate at which doctoral students from historically excluded groups go on to become faculty members.

“You can’t just say ‘it’s not our fault, we don’t get the applicants’ — that’s passing the buck,” said lead author , a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. “If you want to change the diversity of your hiring program, you have to change how you’re getting applicants and how you evaluate them.”

Throughout the paper, the researchers emphasize the importance of developing consistent rubrics with fleshed out criteria to evaluate candidates. The researchers cite studies showing that a lack of strict criteria leads to less diverse hiring and “sliding bias.”

“Most departments think they are looking only at ‘the science’ experiences, with no look at ‘lived’ experiences. However, the data shows that even when looking at the science experiences alone we make evaluations with substantive racial and gender bias,” Stevens said. “We also don’t account for how historical and current lived inequities can lead to different scientific and professional experiences.”

Unbiased practices like evaluation rubrics can level the playing field for candidates who come from historically excluded groups. In the paper, the team includes a template rubric that anyone can use for hiring processes.

“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for folks who read this paper to put the recommendations into practice,” said co-author , UW assistant professor in bioengineering. “It is set up as an online form and it’s paired with an online spreadsheet system that is designed to automatically reduce inter-review variability. For example, if one reviewer gives candidates the highest score in all categories but another reviewer uses the entire scoring range, the tool makes it easy for evaluators to automatically take that into account.”

In addition to finding a diverse pool of candidates and using rubrics to evaluate them, the researchers recommend:

• Preparing the department: Getting buy-in at all levels, including staff, faculty and leadership, is key. People aren’t going to want to continue to work in environments where they don’t feel welcome.
• Planning the search: A job search can take several months, but departments should spend significant time planning for the search in advance. During that time, focal points should include making sure everyone is aligned in what to look for in a candidate, building a strong search committee, training its members to complete the task, assessing roadblocks from past searches and revising materials to embrace new hiring strategies.
• Interviewing inclusively: To level the playing field, the researchers recommend being transparent about the interview process. They also advocate for including students in the process, collecting independent feedback after interviews and mitigating the impact of potentially toxic faculty members.
• Recruiting proactively: Once a top candidate has been identified, that person should get the opportunity to meet students and members of the broader university community. Showcasing the department and its vision as well as making the environment equitable in advance can increase the chance that the prospective faculty member will accept the offer.

“One of the biggest departures from the status quo addressed in this paper is an emphasis on aggressive transparency,” Boyle said. “For many aspiring academics, the hiring process for tenure-track positions feels shrouded in secrecy. Oftentimes, this results in a mismatch between how interviewees prepare and what interviewers expect. Transparency is also important in how the department presents itself. Departments in full-on recruitment mode will naturally want to put their best foot forward, but that runs the risk of hiring a candidate into a situation that they may ultimately find challenging or even toxic.”

The project is one of many from a group called BME UNITE, a national network of more than 450 bioengineering and biomedical engineering faculty. BME UNITE formed in 2020 as a way to address racism in the profession and in broader society. This group has several subcommittees working to address issues of bias and lack of representation in academia. For example, Stevens is the lead and co-corresponding author on a paper published in Cell calling for an end to that disadvantages Black scientists.

All of the co-authors on this paper are part of BME UNITE. Additional co-authors are Brian A. Aguado and Karen L. Christman at University of California, San Diego; Belinda Akpa at University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Gabriella Coloyan Fleming at University of Texas at Austin; Erika Moore, Ana Maria Porras and Gregory A. Hudalla at University of Florida; Deva D. Chan at Purdue University; Naomi Chesler at University of California, Irvine; Tejal A. Desai at Brown University; Brendan A.C. Harley at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Megan L. Killian at University of Michigan; Katharina Maisel at University of Maryland; Kristen C. Maitland at Texas A&M University; Shelly R. Peyton at University of Massachusetts Amherst; Beth L. Pruitt at University of California, Santa Barbara; Sarah E. Stabenfeldt at Arizona State University; and Audrey K. Bowden at Vanderbilt University.

For more information, contact Stevens at ksteve@uw.edu and Boyle at pmjboyle@uw.edu.

Adapted from a .

A ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý Video production, “,” won a 2023 Northwest Emmy Award this month in the Children/Youth/Teens category. “Brainworks” is a series that educates children about neuroscience.

The episode was executive produced by��, research associate��professor��of bioengineering and executive director of the UW��,��and Cara Podenski, managing executive producer for��UW Video. Podenski also wrote and directed. Dave Ris served as an editor.

“Vision and the Brain,” hosted by Chudler, guides viewers through the visual system and shows how eyes, vision and the brain are related. It also covers eye care and anatomy, color vision, vision tests and more. The episode features Dr.��, assistant professor of ophthalmology at the UW and��, professor of computer science and engineering at the UW and co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology.

The episode was funded by the Dana Foundation, the Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology (DO-IT) program and UW Video.

“Brainworks” won a Northwest Emmy Award in 2017 in the Science and Health – Program/Special category. The awards honor excellence in broadcast journalism in Washington state, Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Oregon.

Watch the award-winning video below: