This winter was ; as a result, many snowy, alpine areas have seen bouts of winter rainfall where there would ordinarily only be snow. These unusual weather patterns have contributed to an abysmal ski season, but they can also set the stage for dangerous avalanches. At temperatures close to freezing, precipitation can fall as rain but freeze when it hits the snow, forming an icy crust. Snow that accumulates on top of that crust is unstable and prone to abrupt slides, causing an avalanche that can close down a major highway in moments, endanger backcountry skiers and more.

Avalanche experts in Western Washington know how to manage the risks associated with rain-on-snow events, but many of their counterparts in colder regions like Eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana are less familiar with these dynamics. New research from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý shows that as winters in these regions warm, their snowpacks may come to resemble those of maritime areas, with more rain-on-snow events, icy crusts and complex avalanche forecasting.��

The findings in ARC Geophysical Research.

“This winter’s warmth is a harbinger,” said lead author , a UW graduate student of civil and environmental engineering. “We know that temperatures will keep rising, and our work is a red flag for cooler regions of the greater Pacific Northwest, such as Idaho and Western Montana, that aren’t used to dealing with ice crusts and their resulting avalanche problems.”

The study is part of a larger effort to understand the structure of snow as it accumulates, which has implications for weather and avalanche forecasting, wildlife dynamics and more.��

“Snow scientists are pretty good at measuring snow depth and volume,” said senior author , a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering. “We’re also pretty good at figuring out how much water you get if all that snow melts. But our models aren’t as good at representing snow structure, such as layers of different densities and crystal types that increase avalanche risks. And we really want to know how the structure of snow changes as the climate changes. That’s a tricky question that no one has tackled, particularly for rain-on-snow conditions.”

To dig into that question, the researchers studied how warming influences ice layer formation in seasonal snowpacks. First, they collected temperature and precipitation data captured by 53 monitoring stations across the Pacific Northwest for the past 25 years. They used a computer model to identify days when ice layers likely formed at each location. They then checked the model against real-world measurements at one of the locations — a station at Snoqualmie Pass — and found that the model matched the measurements with 74% accuracy.

Finally, they used the same model to simulate those same 25 winters at 2 C and 4 C warmer than they were, and looked for changes to the number of ice crusts across the region. , the Pacific Northwest is expected to warm by 2 C to 5 C by 2050 as compared to pre-2000 temperatures.

The results were split regionally by the Cascade mountains. In colder, inland parts of the Pacific Northwest — places like Eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana — higher temperatures created more rain-on-snow days and more avalanche-prone ice layers. Locations in the warmer, maritime Cascades saw the opposite effect: Higher temperatures created slush instead of ice, potentially reducing the avalanche risk associated with ice crusts.��

The predicted snowpack changes may also impact wildlife behavior. Some foraging mammals, such as reindeer, dig down into the snow in search of food and may have a hard time breaking through an icy crust. Conversely, firm ice might provide a better running surface for animals fleeing predators. Specific regional effects will require additional study.

What’s clear now is that those who work or play in avalanche terrain in broad swaths of the Pacific Northwest — and even beyond — may need to adjust to a new set of risk factors.

“I’d love to see this shared with avalanche forecasters widely, both as a call to action and as a way to help them understand what their snowpack might look like in the future,” Alden said.

, the director of geospatial science at Audubon Alaska and former doctoral student of environmental and forest sciences at the UW, is a co-author.

This research was funded by the NASA Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science program and the UW Program on Climate Change’s Graubard Fellowship.

For more information, contact Alden at cdalden@uw.edu.

As climate change nudges weather in the eastern Cascades in extreme and volatile directions, forest managers in the region have a lot to juggle. Hotter, drier summers are contributing to bigger and more frequent wildfires. Meanwhile, warmer winters may cause the Cascades to lose 50% of its annual snowpack over the next 70 years. Mountain snow supplies the Yakima River Basin with 75% of its water supply, making it a crucial reservoir for both nature and agriculture . Less winter snow also leads to drier and more fire-prone forests in the summer.

To encourage fire resilience, forest managers use tried-and-true tools like controlled burning and the selective felling of trees to thin out the forest. Both methods remove fuel and help return forests to historical conditions — but less is known about their impact on snowpack.

To address this knowledge gap, a team of researchers at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) embarked on an ambitious, multiyear study of snowpack along Cle Elum Ridge, an area of the eastern Cascades in the headwaters of the Yakima River Basin. The group experimentally thinned the forest to varying degrees in a roughly 150-acre area. Then, they measured the amount and duration of snowpack during the winter of 2023 and compared it to a previous winter before the forest treatment.��

The results were encouraging: Forest thinning efforts increased snowpack by 30% on north-facing slopes and by 16% on south-facing slopes. Thinning aided snowpack the most where it created a patchwork of gaps in the forest rather than a more even density; gaps of 4-16 meters in diameter seemed to be the “sweet spot” for snow.��

The research points toward more refined forest management practices that can optimize for both wildfire resilience and snowpack.

in Frontiers in Forest and Global Change.

“At its core, this research shows that reducing wildfire risk and protecting water resources don’t have to be competing goals,” said lead author , a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alaska who completed this work as a UW doctoral student of civil and environmental engineering. “That’s genuinely good news for a place facing both growing wildfire threats and increasing water vulnerability. So much of the climate conversation focuses on loss, which makes findings like this especially meaningful.”

Predicting snowpack in forested areas, especially those at higher altitudes, hinges on understanding how much snow reaches the ground and how much lands in the forest canopy. Snow on the ground is more likely to stick around through the season, whereas snow in the trees may either melt or sublimate back into water vapor. In either case, it wouldn’t add to the reservoir of water that melts in the spring and summer.����

“Trees intercept snow and so can reduce snowpack, but trees also shade snow and so can retain snowpack,” said senior author , a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering. “The dominant effect depends on winter temperatures, and the Cascade crest near Cle Elum is right on the border where the effect flips from trees decreasing snow to trees saving snow.”��

found that natural gaps in the forests of the eastern Cascades accumulated more snow. This, combined with other research, gave the team reason to hope for a positive connection between forest thinning and snowpack, though it wasn’t a sure thing. have found that open areas elsewhere in the Western U.S. saw reduced snowpack.

Thus, it was time for a direct — and complex — study of managed forests.

Researchers picked Cle Elum Ridge for the work, where TNC’s forest managers were planning thinning treatments to improve forest health and wildfire resiliency. The orientation of the ridge allowed them to compare north- and south-facing slopes — southern slopes in the region see more sunshine and less snow retention on average. From October 2021 to September 2022, the researchers worked with TNC’s forest managers and local contract loggers to remove trees on both slopes in a gradient, from no thinning to extensive. The team also set up time-lapse cameras at several strategic points to measure snow depth over time.

Then, they waited for snow to fall.

By March 2023, the area was close to its peak snowpack, and the team returned with staff and equipment from the UW (RAPID). The RAPID crew flew a specialized drone that generated a detailed 3D map of the study area using a laser-mapping technology called lidar.��

By comparing the new 3D map and timelapse imagery to lidar data captured before the forest treatment, the team was finally ready to calculate two things: the change to the forest structure, and its effect on the snowpack.

Across the whole study area, the team found that thinning helped the forest recover 12.3 acre-feet (or about four million gallons) of water in the form of snow per 100 acres on north-facing slopes, and 5.1 acre-feet (or about 1.5 million gallons) per 100 acres on south-facing slopes.��

As expected, areas where the thinning opened gaps in the canopy were most effective at restoring snow storage that had been previously lost to environmental degradation and climate change. Gaps of 4-16 meters in diameter seemed to retain the most snow, though there were few gaps larger than 16 meters to evaluate.

One surprising result: The way forest managers thin forests doesn’t reliably create gaps. Forest managers map out their reductions using the density of trunks in an area, not canopies, as their primary measurement.

“Imagine a group of 100 people all holding umbrellas in the rain,” said co-author , director of the UW Climate Impacts Group. “They’re standing close enough together that their umbrellas overlap, so none of the rain hits the ground. If you remove 10 of the umbrellas randomly, you’d still have plenty of coverage overall. But, if you remove 10 umbrellas that are right next to one another, you create a gap in the umbrella ‘canopy,’ and you get a 10% increase in the amount of rain that hits the ground.”

That realization adds a nuance to the findings. It’s likely that forest thinning can benefit both wildfire and snowpack resilience at the same time, but only if managers keep canopy gaps in mind.��

“One thing we all learned was that snow people and tree people speak different languages,” Lumbrazo said. “Different experts look at totally different variables to help them decide whether or not to cut down a single tree. So an important goal is to get everyone speaking the same language. And I think this paper is one step towards better communication.”

Overall, the results suggest practical changes to forest management practices in the eastern Cascades. For example, managers might consider more tree-thinning on north-facing slopes, since snowpack gains may be greater there. With further research, these learnings may also extend to other regions in the Pacific Northwest.��

The work could also aid collaboration between forest managers and hydrologists at a time when the region needs all the water it can get.

“As we lose snowpack, everything becomes really squeezed,” said co-author , a senior aquatic ecologist at TNC who earned her doctorate in aquatic and fishery sciences at the UW. “We are currently in our third consecutive year of water restrictions in the Yakima River Basin, and are staring down one of the lowest snow years on record. However, our research shows that the treatments currently used for restoring fire resilient forests are compatible with the forest structure needed for supporting water security. And in a world where climate change is reducing water supplies and increasing wildfire severity, we are pleased to report that the same forest treatments can support both goals.”

Co-authors include , a former UW graduate student of civil and environmental engineering; , a former UW undergraduate student of atmospheric and climate science; , a data processing specialist at the UW RAPID facility; and , director of Forest Conservation and Management at The Nature Conservancy.

This research was funded by The Washington Department of Natural Resources, The Nature Conservancy and the National Science Foundation.��

For more information, contact Lundquist at jdlund@uw.edu, Dickerson-Lange at dickers@uw.edu or Howe at emily.howe@tnc.org.��

NASA last week that both the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý STRIVE team and the UW-affiliated EDGE team were selected to lead satellite missions to better understand Earth and improve capabilities to foresee environmental events and mitigate disasters.

STRIVE and EDGE were among four finalists as part of the agency’s Earth System Explorers Program, which conducts principal investigator-led space science missions as recommended by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2017 Decadal Survey for Earth Science and Applications from Space.

The total estimated cost of each mission, not including launch, will not exceed $355 million with a mission launch date of no earlier than 2030, stated NASA.

“This was fantastic news. We have been working on this concept for a few years now, and for many of us it is a dream come true. To be able to observe the atmosphere at this level of detail is a tremendous opportunity,” said , a UW professor of atmospheric and climate science, who is leading the STRIVE mission.

Stratosphere-Troposphere Response using Infrared Vertically-resolved light Explorer

, which stands for Stratosphere-Troposphere Response using Infrared Vertically-resolved light Explorer, will examine the regions of the atmosphere where weather forms and the ozone layer sits, yielding new insights into temperature and trace gases in the atmosphere that affect aviation, long-range transport of volcanic smoke and air pollution.

The STRIVE instruments, compact enough to fit into the trunk of a midsize SUV, can make more than 400,000 observations each day. Instead of looking straight down at the Earth, like other missions, the STRIVE instruments angle sideways towards Earth’s surface to capture the atmosphere in greater detail.

“With these observations, we won’t just get measurements of ozone but rather all the chemical species that affect ozone in the stratosphere,” Jaeglé said.

The ozone layer, which absorbs ultraviolet radiation, after severe depletion in the early 2000s, but still requires careful monitoring.

STRIVE represents a technological and scientific quantum leap that will help researchers understand how air pollution circulates following a wildfire or volcanic eruption, for example. Importantly, STRIVE will also aid weather forecasting efforts beyond the typical 10-day window to give people time to prepare for extreme weather events.

“If we can see something propagating from high up — such as large shifts in winds —��then we will know that several weeks later it will impact Earth’s surface. Our current weather models cannot predict this connection very well because we don’t really know what is going on at the interface of the stratosphere and troposphere,” Jaeglé added.

The national-scale team includes partners from academia, industry and federal science labs. at the University of Iowa is the deputy principal investigator of STRIVE, and at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is the project scientist. Several NASA Goddard scientists are also involved. Other UW members of STRIVE are professor , assistant professor and affiliate faculty member , all in the UW Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science.

The Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer��

, or Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer, uses lasers to observe the three dimensional structure of Earth’s surface — including forests, glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice — as it changes. , a senior principal physicist and , a senior research scientist both at the UW and , a UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, are part of the EDGE team, led by from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

EDGE will be the first global satellite imaging laser altimeter system, according to . The system captures surface detail in high resolution by firing laser pulses at the Earth and recording how long it takes for them to return, making over 150,000 measurements each second. It can also precisely track changes in surface elevation over time to capture how ice sheets and glaciers are responding to climate change over seasonal and longer-term timescales.

“What’s really exciting about EDGE is the level of detail it will measure. Older laser altimetry measurements sample a coarse grid of points on the ground, but with the EDGE data we will be able to see individual trees around Seattle, and small cracks in glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. Often, it’s the fine-scale processes that drive how the large-scale system changes,” Smith said.

Although the effort will focus on polar regions, forests and coastlines, EDGE is an “everything mission,” Shean said.

“These precise surface elevation change measurements are essential for so many pressing scientific and engineering applications,” he added. “The EDGE data will have implications for sea level rise, natural hazards monitoring, water resource and forest management, and wildfire response. This is also a major milestone for UW, as it formalizes UW leadership and involvement on not one, but two NASA Earth Observation missions. I’m excited to bring students onto the EDGE team and train the next generation of UW researchers who will do amazing things with EDGE data in the coming decades.”

For more information on STRIVE, contact Jaeglé at jaegle@uw.edu.

The ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý was awarded $2.5 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to fund 16 postdoctoral fellows in a number of fields across the College of Arts & Sciences, the College of Engineering and the College of the Environment.

The UW is one of 30 U.S. research universities to receive the funding. The grants support work in a range of natural science disciplines supported by the foundation, including disciplines of astronomy, biology, chemistry, Earth and planetary sciences, ecology materials science, physics and quantum information. Post doctoral fellows will receive between $90,000 and $200,000 for work lasting nine to 24 months.��

Gordon and Betty Moore established the Moore Foundation in 2000 to create positive outcomes for future generations. In pursuit of that vision, the Foundation advances scientific discovery and environmental conservation. It is one of the nation’s leading philanthropies with an endowment of approximately $12 billion and annual grantmaking exceeding $500 million.

In awarding the funds, officials with the Moore Foundation noted the “critical role postdoctoral fellows play in advancing scientific discovery and the importance of maintaining the talent pipeline for science.”

The UW is well known for training future researchers and scientific leaders across disciplines. Many of the post-doctoral fellows in this cohort say they plan to pursue faculty positions, to inspire another generation of scientists.

“The work these postdoctoral researchers are doing will increase our understanding of the planet and the universe, helping to create a better future for all,” said Cecilia Giachelli, associate vice provost for research and a professor of bioengineering. “We are deeply grateful to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for their generous support.”

UW News asked the cohort of Moore Foundation postdoctoral fellows to share their research goals. Here’s what they told us:

Arachaporn Anutaliya, Applied Physics Laboratory:

“I’m excited to receive this fellowship because it allows me to study large-scale equatorial waves that move heat through the ocean and shape global climate patterns. Understanding how these waves redistribute heat is essential for improving our understanding of climate variability and global warming. This fellowship supports my goal of building a career in ocean and climate science that connects fundamental research to broader climate understanding.”

Arpit Arora, Department of Astronomy:��

“I am thrilled to receive this fellowship, as it lets me collaborate with the UW experts leading the Rubin Observatory to study dark matter — the invisible substance making up 85% of all matter in the universe. I use computer simulations to model ‘stellar streams,’ which are long trails of stars being torn apart by our galaxy’s gravity. By comparing these simulations with new telescope data, I can use the motion of these stars to map out the hidden influence of dark matter and finally understand how it shapes our universe.”

George Brencher, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering:

“My research uses satellite data and machine learning to improve measurements of snow and ice that are needed for managing water resources and natural hazards. Rapid advances in Earth observation and machine learning are transforming the field, allowing us to push the limits of what we can observe on Earth from space. This fellowship will allow me to develop new approaches that translate these advances into meaningful, real-world impact.”

Leo Brody, Department of Chemical Engineering:��

“Receiving this fellowship gives me the flexibility to explore a new class of materials that could dramatically lower the cost of turning waste plastics and biomass into useful fuels and chemicals. I am especially excited about replacing rare, expensive catalysts with materials made from Earth-abundant elements like iron, aluminum and carbon. This support will help me prioritize making energy and chemical production cleaner, cheaper and more sustainable.”

Jamie Cochran, Department of Biology:

“I will study the physiology of the freshwater crustacean Hyalella azteca, which is used to understand the impact of aquatic stressors — such as metals or pesticides — on freshwater environments. Just like humans require a specific ratio of salt to water for survival, these shrimp-like crustaceans must regulate their internal balance of ions to water. My project involves trying to determine the mechanisms behind this balance, which could also help us understand other sensitive freshwater creatures. I am grateful to this fellowship for the opportunity to investigate this ecologically significant species.”

Debarati Das, Department of Chemistry:

“As a biochemist, I am keen on pursuing a career in industry or the government sector addressing questions at the interface of chemistry and biology. I find microorganisms particularly fascinating because they are able to live in diverse habitats, from the deep sea to the human body. With the support of the Moore Foundation, I will be able to develop new skills to study how microbes use unique chemistry to adapt to different environmental conditions. This work will help us to understand the critical roles of microorganisms in every ecosystem on our planet.”

Mateo Lopez Espejo, Department of Psychology:

“When we hear a sound, we turn our heads to focus our vision and hearing on the source. This is a process called active sensing. I am excited to investigate the mechanisms behind this process using the fruit fly as a model so that I can take advantage of its genetic tools and fully mapped brain connectivity. The support of this fellowship will be fundamental to help me establish this research plan during my postdoc, and to cement my future career.”

Cassandra Henderson, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering:��

“I am pleased to accept the Moore Foundation fellowship to support my essential research in preparing Washington communities for climate change. With this assistance, I will be able to continue work on the , which enables long term flood planning that addresses sea level rise.”

Sophia Jannetty, Department of Biology:��

“I use computer simulations to explore how the behavior of individual cells affects the health of our tissues and organs. I am honored to receive the Moore Foundation fellowship, which will allow me to apply this approach to better understand how aging cells and inflammation interact to influence disease. I hope my work can inform more thoughtful strategies for promoting healthy aging.”

Atsushi Matsuda, Department of Biology:

“Electron microscopy reveals extraordinary details inside living cells, but turning these images into accurate three-dimensional reconstructions remains a major challenge. My research aims to overcome this by combining physics-informed machine learning with computer vision to create tools that are broadly usable by biological researchers. I am excited to receive this fellowship because it gives me the freedom to pursue this highly interdisciplinary work at the intersection of biology, computational mechanics and artificial intelligence.”

Hikari Murayama, Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science:��

“Quantifying greenhouse gas emissions was a core pillar of my doctoral work, and this fellowship provides an opportunity to build off of that. We’ll be focusing on historical data: Tracking past methane emissions from oil and gas facilities can give us insight into how emission patterns fluctuate over time. I’m excited to continue developing as an interdisciplinary scholar while also forming my identity as a researcher as I pursue faculty positions.”

Dongmin Shi, Department of Materials Science & Engineering:��

“I am honored to receive support from the Moore Foundation fellowship, which will enable me to pursue innovative, foundational ideas with long-term impact in biomedical engineering. My research focuses on developing wearable biosensors that help monitor and better understand human health. In the future, I aim to become a faculty member who helps translate fundamental scientific discoveries into technologies that improve health care.”

Marta Ulaski, School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences:

“Healthy rivers are the backbone of thriving salmon and trout populations but we don’t yet know if the places we protect are the ones most at risk from a warming climate. I’m looking forward to combining climate, policy and habitat information in a new way to better understand how river protections support salmon and trout. Ultimately I hope this work will help close the gap between research and conservation practice and provide evidence to guide future policy.”

Corinne Vietorisz, School of Environmental & Forest Sciences:��

“I am very excited to receive the Moore Fellowship, which will allow me to join the Willing Lab at the UW to study how fire-adapted microbes can aid in forest recovery following wildfire. I am continuously amazed by the enormous impacts microorganisms have on our world. My long-term goal is to study how soil microbes — including fungi and bacteria — can improve ecosystem restoration and land management outcomes.”

Samuel Wong, Department of Physics:��

“I am interested in proposing novel ways to test theories beyond the current understanding of fundamental physics, such as searching for new particles and forces. Specifically, my work involves finding ways to use precision measurement techniques to search for these tiny signals of new physics. The UW is a leading center for precision measurement, and the support from the Moore Foundation postdoctoral fellowship will allow me to do this work alongside , UW assistant professor of physics.”

Weiwang Zeng, Department of Chemistry:��

“I am excited to receive this fellowship because it gives me the freedom to take big scientific risks at a crucial stage in my career. I use ultrafast bursts of light in a special range of the electromagnetic spectrum to reveal and control new behaviors in atomically thin quantum materials. With this support, I can build toward an independent research program.”

UPDATE (Sept. 23, 2025): This story has been updated to correct Don MacKenzie’s title.

Public electric vehicle charging stations in America have . They’re notorious for breaking down, charging at a snail’s pace, refusing customer payment and leaving drivers stranded without juice. Advocates for electric vehicles, or EVs, worry that reliability concerns are hampering adoption at a critical moment in the campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but data on the topic is limited.

To address this problem, researchers at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý designed a survey to tease out exactly how much a car owner’s perception of public charging reliability influences their willingness to buy their first EV. The team created a series of hypothetical scenarios to study the factors that might nudge a skeptical shopper towards an EV over a gasoline-powered car, including vehicle and gas prices, driving range and public charging access.

The results were dramatic. Participants with a negative view of public charging were much less likely to choose an EV than those with a moderate view. It took some serious hypothetical improvements to offset those negative perceptions: The EV needed to be discounted 30%, have 366 extra miles of range or there needed to be 30,000 additional public charging stations.

“No one knew how much charger reliability was coloring the decisions of prospective EV buyers,” said senior author , a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering. “I was not at all surprised by the direction of the response. What surprised me was the size. These were monster results. This is a warning for the whole industry.”

The June 28 in Transport Policy.

The results come at a tenuous time for EV adoption in America. The market continues to grow, but political factors like are complicating sales outlooks. The federal government is also to phase out gas car sales, which could threaten similar efforts in Washington and several other states.

The state of public charging isn’t inspiring confidence in buyers, either. have shown with public networks. There are , and home charging is an option for some drivers, but the threat of slow and flaky public chargers remains a powerful deterrent for anyone venturing outside their “home range.”

“We know there’s a lot of range anxiety out there,” said lead author , a UW doctoral student of civil and environmental engineering. “EV owners often tolerate charging problems, while newcomers are less aware of the hurdles. If trust erodes, adoption could slow.”

The team found it tricky to measure the link between station reliability and buyer behavior because there weren’t obvious real-world groups to compare. Tesla’s stations get consistently higher marks than other networks, but Tesla cars and their owners are too different in other ways to make for a useful comparison. Simply asking people for their thoughts about charging may produce answers that are colored by their overall feelings about EVs.

Instead, the researchers turned to hypothetical scenarios. They recruited roughly 1,500 participants who had never owned an EV and surveyed them in three groups, asking the first to picture a world where public charging is a mess, the second to imagine a charging utopia and the third to simply give their preexisting opinions about charging.

Each group then went “shopping.” Each round of the survey, participants chose between an EV and a comparable gas-powered car. The researchers tweaked variables such as vehicle cost, gas prices and range, and trends emerged over several rounds.

Participants with a negative view of public charging demanded strikingly large concessions before choosing an EV. In some cases, the adjustment needed was nonsensically large.

“People wanted a 366-mile increase in range before they bought an EV,” MacKenzie said. “Lots of EVs don’t even have a 366-mile range today. That’s obviously not a practical demand. But it illustrates the strength of this effect.”

There were other surprises in the data, too.

“The results were basically the same for people who have access to home charging and people who don’t,” Singh said. “So even if they wouldn’t actually have to rely on the charging network, respondents were still concerned about reliability.”

As the auto industry works to bring EVs into the mainstream, these findings are both a warning and an invitation for further study. Little is known, Singh said, about what specific improvements would have the greatest impact on public charging perception. Asking the right questions could help stakeholders throughout the industry figure out where to invest.

“What are the specific factors that would convince skeptics?” she said. “Does a station need to be online 90% of the time to improve a user’s perception? Or 95%? Or 99%? Or would improving the point of sale system help more? Where do you put your dollars to have the greatest effect on public perception?”

What’s clear, MacKenzie said, is that reliability must be prioritized as charging networks expand.

“This is the Achilles’ heel right now for EVs,” he said. “If we push the broader market towards EVs, or if it grows on its own before we can fix this problem, it’s really bad news for continued growth. I think it could engender a real backlash. It only takes one bad experience to lose a customer. That’s a big danger for EV adoption.”

This research was funded by the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation.

, an affiliate assistant professor at UW Tacoma, is a co-author on this paper.

For more information, contact Singh at rs49742@uw.edu.

. As more strains of bacteria and other microbes evolve defenses against available drugs, more patients run the risk of contracting infections that defy treatment.

Now, ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý researchers offer new insights into measures currently used to control the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria and other infectious agents in health care facilities.

in Environmental Science & Technology, the team studied the efficacy of nine common disinfectants used in health care facilities or households — such as ethanol, hydrogen peroxide, benzalkonium chloride and UV light — against three well-known strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The researchers first evaluated how successfully each disinfectant killed (or more accurately “inactivated”) the bacteria.

Then the team went a step further. It also assessed the damage the disinfectants did to the root cause of the resistance: the bacterial genome itself. And while all the cleaners did a great job of stopping the spread of bacteria, the picture was very different when the team zeroed in on DNA.

“What we’re learning is that it’s not just the bacteria that we need to deal with in hospitals and elsewhere. It’s also the behavior of their DNA in these environments,” said lead author , who completed this research as a UW doctoral student in the civil and environmental engineering department and is now an assistant professor at Tongji University.

Within bacterial cells, the source of antibiotic resistance is specific genes — individual portions of DNA — that instruct a cell to protect itself against certain antibiotics. Modern disinfectants do an impressive job of stopping bacterial cells in their tracks, but a bacterium’s genes may survive even the death of the cell. And, thanks to a trick called “,” genes from one bacterium — even if that bacterium has been killed — can sometimes find their way into a new living bacterium, thus passing on antibiotic resistance.

In short, stopping the bacteria themselves isn’t always enough to prevent the creep of resistance.

“Increasingly, environmental engineers are thinking about and treating resistance genes as an emerging contaminant,” said He. “In public health settings such as hospitals, we might disinfect and sterilize an operating room to remove any bacterial contamination, but what if resistance genes survive? They could potentially reach other bacteria and contribute to more dangerous antibiotic resistant hospital-acquired infections.

“Our previous work has demonstrated resistance genes can stay active in horizontal transfer after water and wastewater disinfections, which led us to wonder whether similar things could occur in health care and personal-care disinfection practices.”

The experiment pitted the nine disinfectants against three kinds of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the microbe responsible for life-threatening staph infections. Researchers placed samples of the bacteria in different environments, mostly as dried drops on stainless steel and nonstick surfaces that are common in hospitals and at home. They then applied the disinfectants and measured the effects on both the bacterial cells and the genes in question.

As expected, the disinfectants did a great job of stopping the bacteria. However, most had a negligible impact on the resistance-conferring genes. The DNA survived largely intact, and it was free to find its way into new bacteria.

There were some positive and negative standouts, though frequently not the cleaners the team expected.

“Chlorine, under the conditions we tested, seemed to be less effective against DNA than we originally anticipated, whereas another common cleaner called phenol, which we didn’t think would be effective, actually ended up working relatively well in some cases,” said senior author , a UW associate professor in the civil and environmental engineering department.

The winner in many of the experiments was UV light, which did significant damage to the offending genes — though ultimately less damage than the team anticipated.

“UV irradiation seems to be one of the more effective approaches to both inactivating bacteria and degrading their DNA,” Dodd said. “We know that UV light directly damages DNA, so we weren’t necessarily surprised to see it perform well here. But it was a welcome result nonetheless.”

The researchers were quick to point out that existing disinfection regimens in hospitals are still effective and critical for preventing the spread of disease.

This work can help researchers home in on the tools that offer the best one-two punch against problematic bacteria and their genes. Moving forward, the team wants to learn more about how best to optimize these cleaners’ effects, especially when new factors like ambient temperature, humidity and density of bacterial cells are taken into account. But, the results from this paper could already help hospitals refine their disinfection protocols.

“If you know you have a patient in a hospital or other health care facility who’s infected with an antibiotic-resistant pathogen, I think we do have enough evidence at this stage to suggest trying certain disinfectants over others when cleaning surfaces or instruments that the patient may have been in contact with,” said Dodd. “For example, UV light could be a good choice, whereas benzalkonium chloride might not be.”

Additional co-authors on this paper are , a former UW graduate researcher who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology; , a former UW research assistant who is now an associate professor at Gonzaga University; , a former UW graduate researcher who is now a medical resident at the UW School of Medicine; , a former UW guest researcher who is now a research professor at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology; , a UW professor in the environmental and occupational health sciences department; , UW professor emeritus in the environmental and occupational health sciences department; and , a professor at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Allen & Inger Osberg Endowed Professorship.

For more information, contact Michael Dodd at doddm@uw.edu and Huan He at huanhe@tongji.edu.cn

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. ��

UPDATE April 8,2025: An earlier version of this story included outdated rankings that were erroneously posted by U.S. News and have since been removed from the U.S. News ranking site. This story has been updated to reflect most recent rankings.

Many of the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s graduate and professional degree programs were widely recognized as among the best in the nation, according to .

The UW Information School tied for No. 1 alongside the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for library and information studies. And, more than 80 UW schools and departments placed prominently in the 2026 rankings.

While the UW celebrates the success and impact of the programs recognized by U.S. News — and notes that many applicants use these rankings to help them select schools and discover potential areas of study — the University also recognizes shortcomings inherent in the ranking systems.

The UW School of Law and the UW School of Medicine withdrew from the U.S. News rankings in 2022 and 2023, respectively, citing concerns that some of the methodology in the rankings for those specific disciplines incentivize actions and policies that run counter to the schools’ public service missions.

UW leaders continue to work with U.S. News and other ranking organizations to improve their methodologies, to the extent that the organizations are open to it. Schools, colleges and departments continually reevaluate the benefits and potential shortfalls of participating in specific rankings.

“As these rankings demonstrate, the UW’s outstanding graduate and professional degree programs are leading the way in training highly skilled people to fill critical workforce needs and advance discovery and innovation in a wide range of fields,” said UW President Ana Mari Cauce. “It has never been more important to recognize how much graduate and professional education benefit our nation and people everywhere, and the UW is proud to see these exceptional programs be celebrated.”

Excluding the School of Law and the School of Medicine, 32 UW programs placed in the top 10, and more than 80 are in the top 35.

In new rankings released this year, the UW placed in the top 10 nationwide in library and information studies, public affairs, nursing, speech and language pathology, education, public health, computer science, psychology and civil engineering, according to U.S. News.

The UW’s Evans School of Public Policy & Governance has maintained its top-10 ranking for more than a decade and placed seventh in the nation. The Evans School’s environmental policy program was ranked second and nonprofit management and social policy each were ranked at No. 8.

This year’s rankings highlighted UW’s leadership in nursing and public health: The UW School of Nursing held the No. 1 overall ranking for a public school offering a doctor of nursing practice program, and nursing schools at UW Bothell and UW Tacoma are among the top 10 public institutions that offer a master’s degree. The School of Public Health has maintained its top-10 ranking for more than a decade, coming in this year tied for No. 10. The school also had three programs in the top 10: biostatistics, environmental health sciences and epidemiology. And overall, the U.S. News rankings noted UW’s strength in health sciences: The School of Social Work was ranked No. 7 and the School of Pharmacy tied for 12th — or third among public institutions on the West Coast — on last year’s list, while dentistry programs are not ranked.

The UW’s programs in speech and language pathology tied for No. 5, topping schools on the West Coast.�� Three programs from the College of Education placed in the top 10. And the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering this year tied for seventh place overall, and four programs ranked in the top 10, including artificial intelligence, programming language, systems and theory.

In some cases, such as the College of Arts & Science and the Foster School of Business, U.S. News ranks several professional disciplines housed within academic units. The rankings below are based on preliminary data and may be updated. relies on both expert opinions and statistical indicators.

TOP 10:

Library and Information Studies (overall): Two-way tie for 1st

Public Affairs (environmental policy): 2nd

Library and information studies (digital librarianship): Two-way for 2nd (ranked in 2022)

Library and Information Studies (information systems): 2nd (ranked in 2022)

Nurse practitioner (doctor of nursing practice): 3rd

Physics (nuclear): Two-way tie for 3rd (ranked in 2024)

Library and Information Studies (library services for children and youth): Two-way for 5th (ranked in 2022)

Nursing (midwifery): 5th

Nurse practitioner (pediatric acute care): Two-way tie for 5th (ranked in 2022)

Speech-language pathology: Six-way tie for 5th

Education (elementary education): 6th

Education (secondary education): 6th

Public Health (biostatistics): 6th

Computer science (overall): Four-way tie for 7th

Computer science (programming language): 7th

Public Health (environmental health sciences): 7th

School of Social Work (overall): 7th (ranked in 2025)

Statistics: Tie for 7th (ranked in 2022)

Computer science (artificial intelligence): 8th

Computer science (systems): 8th

Education (curriculum/instruction): 8th

Evans School of Public Policy & Governance (overall): Two-way tie for 7th

Psychology (clinical): Six-way tie for 8th

Public Affairs (nonprofit management): 8th

Public Affairs (social policy): 8th

Public Health (epidemiology): Two-way tie for 8th

Computer science (theory): Three-way tie for 9th

Earth sciences: Five-way tie for 9th (ranked in 2024)

Geophysics: Three-way tie for 9th (ranked in 2024)

Engineering (civil): Three-way tie for 10th

Public Affairs (public finance and budgeting): 10th

School of Public Health (overall): Two-way tie for 10th

TOP 25:

Biological sciences: Three-way tie for 23rd (ranked in 2022)

Business (part-time MBA): Two-way tie for 17th

Business (information systems): Two-way tie for 12th

Business (international MBA): Three-way tie for 20th

Business (supply chain management): Three-way tie for 21st (ranked in 2025)

Business (full-time MBA): Two-way tie for 22nd

Business (entrepreneurship): Three-way tie for 23rd

Business (executive MBA): Three-way tie for 25th

Chemistry (analytical): Four-way tie for 16th (ranked in 2024)

Chemistry: Three-way tie for 24th (ranked in 2024)

Chemistry (inorganic): Three-way tie for 22nd (ranked in 2024)

College of Education (overall): Two-way tie for 22nd

Education (administration): Two-way tie for 12th

Education (policy): Three-way tie for 16th

Education (psychology): 19th

Education (special education): Two-way tie for 11th

College of Engineering (overall): Three-way tie for 20th

Engineering (aerospace/aeronautical/astronautical): Three-way tie for 15th

Engineering (biomedical/bioengineering): Four-way tie for 12th

Engineering (chemical): Two-way tie for 25th

Engineering (computer): Two-way tie for 13th

Engineering (electrical): Four-way tie for 18th

Engineering (environmental/environmental health): Four-way tie for 18th (ranked in 2025)

Engineering (materials engineering): Three-way tie for 24th

Library and Information Studies (school library media): Two-way tie for 11th (ranked in 2022)

Mathematics (applied math): 21st (ranked in 2024)

Nursing master’s (overall): Three-way tie for 12th

Nurse practitioner (family): Three-way tie for 11th (ranked in 2025)

College of Pharmacy (overall): Three-way tie for 12th (ranked in 2025)

Physics (overall): 20th (ranked in 2024)

Public Health (healthcare management): Three-way tie for 16th

Public Health (health policy and management): 13th

Public Health (social behavior): Two-way tie for 12th

Public Affairs (global policy and administration): 14th

Public Affairs (public management and leadership): Three-way tie for 11th

Public Affairs (public policy analysis): 13th

Sociology (overall): Two-way tie for 22nd

Sociology (population): Two-way tie for 15th (ranked in 2022)

TOP 35:

Business (accounting): Three-way tie for 27th

Business (management): Three-way tie for 29th

Business (finance): Three-way tie for 31st

Business (marketing): Two-way tie for 32nd

Engineering (industrial/manufacturing/systems): Three-way tie for 30th

Engineering (mechanical): Three-way tie for 30th

English: Two-way tie for 34th

History: Three-way tie for 31st

Mathematics: Three-way tie for 27th (ranked in 2024)

Political science: Five-way tie for 33rd

Psychology: Nine-way way tie for 30th

Officials across multiple states in the Southeast . Devastating hurricanes , and researchers are focused on how to help communities become more resilient.

One way to prepare is to have a full picture of what happens before, during and after a major hurricane. This information provides key details, such as wind speed and wave height during a landfall event, that can inform infrastructure design so it’s better able to withstand these types of storms.

Days before Hurricane Helene descended, ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý researchers in the traveled to Cedar Key, Florida, and Horseshoe Beach, Florida, two small coastal communities near where the hurricane was predicted to make landfall. UW researchers collaborated with people at the University of Florida, the and the to collect pre-storm data and place sensors to measure storm surge levels and wave height during the landfall event. Team members are headed back to Florida next week to collect post-storm data.

UW News asked , the RAPID Facility’s operations manager, about the trip and why this research is important.

What data did you collect before the storm arrived?

Michael Grilliot: For this project, we collaborated with , an associate professor in the Engineering School for Sustainable Infrastructure and Environment at the University of Florida. To get before-storm data, we did lidar scans of beach fronts and nearby buildings and infrastructure systems. We also used a drone to collect aerial photos of Cedar Key. These images can be stitched together into a 3D model.

To collect data during the event, a team led by , associate professor in the Engineering School for Sustainable Infrastructure and Environment at the University of Florida, .

UW RAPID staff also helped deploy 17 wave gauges and four pore pressure sensors to detect storm surge depth, timing and wave information during the storm. , a UW undergraduate student studying electrical and computer engineering who has worked for the RAPID Facility for several years, built 13 of the wave gauges that we deployed. Our wave gauges are almost as robust as commercially available models, but we built them for one-tenth of the cost. If we lose one in the storm, it’s not as much of a financial loss.

What do the wave gauges look like?

MG: They are 13 inches long in PVC pipe with a pressure sensor exposed on one end. Unfortunately they look kind of like a pipe bomb, so we put RAPID stickers all over them to try to make them more unassuming, especially when we fly with them. They say “RESEARCH” on them very clearly.

How do they work?

MG: Pressure increases with water depth, so as the storm surges we see a sharp increase in the recorded pressure. We do have to calibrate the instruments for ambient atmospheric pressure, which changes quite a bit during a hurricane, so there is some post-processing that we have to do before reporting actual water depths.

We attach the gauge to anything we think has a good chance of surviving the storm. This could be a light pole, dock pilings or street signs. We work a lot with private landowners to find locations with limited access to reduce the chance that someone might steal them. Once they are placed, we measure the sensor with a high-precision GPS to know the exact elevation of the pressure sensor.

After the storm and post-processing, we can report water levels as a depth above mean sea level, or, if the sensors are installed over land, simple flooding depth. It’s far easier for people to understand that they would be standing in 9 feet of water if they were standing where the wave gauge was installed instead of reporting something like “13 feet above mean sea level,” which sounds more abstract to people.

What data did you get from the wave gauges during the storm?

MG: Our partners at the University of Florida retrieved the wave gauges on Sunday and downloaded the data on Monday.

Peak surge occurs in a matter of hours once the water starts to rise. It almost looks like a heartbeat on an electrocardiogram. The water is much slower to recede, taking all night or all day to reach pre-storm levels. Superimposed on all of this are the smaller ups and downs of the waves. At first glance the data looks quite noisy, but we are able to filter out noise and capture what’s important.

The wave data shows the conditions during the peak surge, which will help modelers understand the energy and forces these waves exerted on buildings on the shore. It also shows us the flood level, which helps us know which level or floor of a building would be experiencing these waves.

Wave and storm surge levels during hurricanes are often predicted based on models, so this dataset can also help researchers validate and better calibrate their predictive models.

There are often a few wave gauges in place that catch storm surges. But this was unique in the fact that we were able to respond on such short notice to place so many sensors in conjunction with the pre-storm lidar and drone imagery. Also, some of the locations would have had no sensors and data available without our wave gauge deployment. That, combined with the wind data from the University of Florida’s tower makes a robust pre-storm and during-storm dataset that has not been captured before.

When you return to the area next week, what will you measure?

MG: We will be looking for a lot of coastal changes. We’ll be flying drone lidar as well as doing ground-based lidar, and collecting more imagery to capture changes to the beach, mangroves and structures. Understanding the changes in beach morphology is equally as important as understanding the damage to the structures. If we can learn what happens to the sediment and seabed, we can better predict what will happen above.

We are also taking the Z-boat this time. This remote-controlled boat will allow us to create a topographic map of underwater depth.

How will this research help communities prepare for future hurricanes?

MG: Ultimately, the hope is that we can build structures that can withstand the forces that we are measuring — both through the damage we see and in the data we captured during the storm. We hope that this will help people better predict storm surges and wave heights, and that people will be able to know how at risk they are, trust that information and act accordingly to save lives and property.

This research is part of a larger effort led by the Nearshore Extreme Events Reconnaissance (NEER) Association in collaboration with the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association, which are both funded by the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Grilliot at grilliot@uw.edu and Nina Stark, who is also the associate director of the UF Center for Coastal Solutions and the NEER team lead, at nina.stark@essie.ufl.edu.

When ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý President Ana Mari Cauce launched the Population Health Initiative in 2016, she spoke in soaring, ambitious terms. “We have an unprecedented opportunity to help people live longer, healthier, more productive lives – here and around the world,” she said. UW researchers have leapt at that opportunity, forging connections across the university, working side by side with community partners and breaking down traditional barriers to improving public health. ��

In just eight years, the Initiative has funded 227 innovative, interdisciplinary projects. Many are focused right here in Western Washington, where projects have helped in South Seattle, identified soil contaminants in community gardens in the Duwamish Valley, and improved how community leaders along the Okanogan River . Other projects have reached across the globe, targeting health disparities in Somalia, Peru, Brazil and more.����

“In this relatively short period of time, we’ve demonstrated the power that accrues when faculty and staff across the various areas of our campuses are working together and also exposing students to the cutting-edge work of tackling grand challenges,” Cauce said in her most recent .��

And they’re just getting started. Many PHI-funded projects are still in their earliest stages, leveraging initial funding to show proof-of-concept for their ideas and setting the stage for future work. Fourteen projects so far have received much larger grants to empower researchers and community partners to expand successful projects and scale up for greater impact.��

With the Initiative now a third of the way into its 25-year vision, UW News checked in with three projects that recently received funding to scale their efforts.��

Spotting potential memory health issues in rural Washington

Diagnosing memory health issues in the best of circumstances is extraordinarily difficult. Patients typically make multiple visits to their doctor and take a many of which can produce flawed results — people who take the same test more than once, for example, will often score higher, potentially masking memory loss. ��

It’s even harder in rural America, which has a Patients seeking memory care might have to make a long, expensive trip to a major city, which leads many people to wait until a problem becomes apparent. By then, it’s often too late — modern treatments can slow the progress of memory loss, but there’s no way to regain what’s been lost.��

“So, how do you catch it early?” said , a UW associate professor of psychology. “We give people an app to have them check for themselves.”����

Stocco and , director of the UW Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, together with Hedderik van Rijn of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, led the development of an online program that can measure a person’s memory and predict their risk of memory disorders. Like a flash-card app that helps students cram for a test, the program shows pictures and asks the user to recall what they saw a few minutes earlier. The app records how quickly and accurately the user responds to each question and makes the next one a little easier or more difficult.����

Researchers have long understood that a person’s ability to recall a specific memory tends to fade over time. This is called the “.” In�� Stocco and van Rijn found that they could measure individual differences in the slopes of such curves.�� The app works by comparing a person’s responses to an internal model of forgetting and adjusting the slope of the model until it matches the responses. The resulting slope can be used to estimate the likelihood that their memory is fading faster than normal.����

By taking the test regularly, a person can track their memory’s decline over time. But preliminary tests, Stocco said, have shown that even a single use can spot a potential problem.��

“Just by looking at a single lesson, based on the result, there’s almost a perfect correspondence between the speed of forgetting and your probability of being diagnosed by a doctor,” Stocco said. “It can be as accurate as the best clinical tests but, instead of taking two or three hours, this can be done in eight minutes, and you don’t need a doctor.”��

A Tier 3 grant from the Population Health Initiative and a collaboration with the will allow the researchers to share the app with up to 500 people in rural and counties. Participants can take the test on their own time, and the results will be shared with researchers. If a potential problem emerges, the researchers plan to invite participants to Seattle for an in-person evaluation.����

“It’s a solution that seems to solve these problems of early access and diagnostic bottlenecks,” Stocco said. “If this works, there’s no problem giving it to everybody in the state. We’re really interested in expanding and adding people from underrepresented populations and underrepresented areas, and the grant will allow us to do that.”��

Nancy Spurgeon of the Central Washington Area Health Education Center is also a collaborator on the project to test the prototype app, which is not yet available to the public.��

Revamping the Point-In-Time Count to better understand King County’s unhoused population��

For years, volunteers fanned across King County on a cold night each January, flashlights and clipboards in hand, searching for people sleeping outside. They’d also gather the shelter head counts for that night. Officially called the , this effort attempted to tally the number of people who lacked stable housing. This endeavor was replicated in cities across the country, and the results were combined to create a national count that influences how the federal government allocates funding.��

There’s just one problem – the count is Volunteers can’t possibly find everybody. It captures only a single moment in time, and collects only limited data on people’s circumstances or personal needs. A person sleeping in their car might need different services than a person who sleeps in a tent, and the count didn’t fully capture that distinction.��

So, a team of UW researchers designed a better way to count. Their method, detailed in a published Sept. 4 in in the American Journal of Epidemiology, taps into people’s social networks to generate a more representative sample, which the researchers then ran through a series of calculations to estimate the total unhoused population.������

Called “respondent-driven sampling,” the method stations volunteers in common “hubs,” like libraries or community centers, and offers cash gift cards for in-person interviews and peer referrals. Volunteers collect detailed information on people’s circumstances and needs, giving each person three tickets to share with their unhoused peers. When those peers come in for an interview and show the ticket, the person who referred them receives another small reward. The new person gets a gift card and another three tickets.��

“This method gives people a more active voice in being counted. It’s a more humane way to count people, and it’s also voluntary,” said , a UW associate professor of sociology and co-lead on the project. “The regular PIT (Point-In-Time) count just counted people. Now we can collect all sorts of information from people on their circumstances and their needs. Should policymakers want to, they could leverage that data to change service offerings.”��

The researchers received a Tier 2 grant to develop the system. They launched it in partnership with King County in 2022 and 2024, and were recently awarded a Tier 3 grant to test out the feasibility of running it quarterly.����

“Running the count quarterly allows us to estimate how many people move in and out of homelessness and whether there are seasonal changes, which are rarely measured,” Almquist said. “Also, people’s needs change depending on the time of year, and this method will help us better understand those rhythms.”����

Other cities and counties have expressed interest, the researchers said. The team has also begun to expand the effort, aiming to improve data across the broad spectrum of housing and homelessness services.����

“A very important byproduct of this work across schools and departments at UW is that we can create an ecosystem of people and projects,” said , a UW professor emeritus of health systems and population health and co-lead on the project. “We’ve spun off projects on sleep assessments, relationships with organizations that collect data on homelessness, and we’re mapping the sweeps of encampments in relationship to where people choose to be located. We have a whole network of homelessness-related research now.��

“These PHI grants gave us the fuel to ignite these projects.”��

Other collaborators are of the UW Department of Health Systems and Population Health and of the VA Health Services Research and Development; of the UW Departments of Sociology and Statistics; of the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology and the eScience Institute; and Owen Kajfasz, Janelle Rothfolk and Cathea Carey of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.��

Engaging community to mitigate flood risk in the Duwamish Valley��

More than a century ago, Seattle leaders set out to control and redirect the Duwamish River. They dredged the riverbed and dug out its twists and turns. Wetlands were filled in, the valley was paved over and a system of hydrology was severed. What had been a wild, winding river valley with regular flooding became an angular straightaway built for industry. But when UW postdoctoral scholar looks out at the Duwamish, she sees the river fighting back.����

“The water was always there,” Jeranko said, “and now it’s fighting to come back up.”����

The river returned with devastating effect in December 2022, when a king tide and heavy rainfall , submerging homes and shuttering local businesses. The underserved neighborhood faces a significant risk of future floods.��

To mitigate that risk, the City of Seattle has updated the neighborhood’s stormwater drainage system and launched a new flood-warning system. But the , a nonprofit focused on river pollution and environmental health, saw an opportunity for something greater. The DRCC asked a team of UW researchers to help develop flood adaptation plans that are community-based, culturally responsive and that enrich the local environment.����

“In the community, people don’t think there’s been enough engagement. There’s all this talk about flood mitigation, but all they see are sandbags,” Jeranko said. “So DRCC was like, ‘Look, we really need the people who live in the flood zone to understand the solutions.’ Because we have this long-lasting relationship with them, they see us as someone who’s able to provide a list of solutions, not favor one over the others, and do it in an informative way.”��

Boosted by a Tier 3 grant from the PHI, Jeranko and a team representing five UW departments, the Burke Museum and the DRCC are engaging with the community. This fall, the team will present the neighborhood with an expansive list of flood mitigation options and encourage city leaders to consider people’s preferences. Early work shows the community would favor nature-based solutions, Jeranko said. Floodable parks, for example, would provide ecological, recreational and public health benefits to the entire community, while storing flood water during storms.����

“It has been wonderful to collaborate with the UW team on this to make sure we are centering community voices in every single step of the planning for climate resilience,” said Paulina López, executive director of the DRCC. “Community leadership and representation is indispensable to bring climate justice to the Duwamish Valley.”��

Jeranko hopes their community-based model will be replicated by communities across the country facing similar risks from climate change and sea level rise.��

“Even though UW and a lot of other universities really support and invest in community-engaged work, a lot of times it’s fundamentally hard to make that research happen,” Jeranko said. “But the Population Health Initiative grant was about supporting all those things.”��

Other collaborators on the project are , and of the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences; of the Department of Landscape Architecture; of the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, of the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences; of the Quaternary Research Center and the Burke Museum; and López and Robin Schwartz of the DRCC.��

For more information on any of the projects mentioned, or to learn more about the UW Population Health Initiative, visit the Initiative’s website or contact Alden Woods at acwoods@uw.edu.����