Four 天美影视传媒 researchers have been named AAAS Fellows, according to . They are among 449 newly elected fellows from around the world, who are recognized for their 鈥渟cientifically and socially distinguished achievements鈥� in science and engineering. New Fellows will receive an official certificate and a gold and blue rosette pin 鈥� representing science and engineering, respectively 鈥� to commemorate their election.

A tradition dating back to 1874, election as an AAAS Fellow is a lifetime honor. AAAS Fellows play a crucial role in shaping public policy, advancing scientific research and influencing national and global perspectives on critical issues. Becoming a AAAS Fellow is among the most distinct honors within the scientific community, and those elevated to the rank have made distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. All fellows are expected to meet the commonly held standards of professional ethics and scientific integrity.

This year鈥檚 UW AAAS fellows are:

, professor of biochemistry at the UW School of Medicine and the director of the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design, was recognized for his groundbreaking work in computational protein design. Baker鈥檚 early work was in predicting how chains of chemicals fold into molecular structures that determine protein functions. He went on to design new proteins from scratch to carry out tasks in medicine, technology and sustainability. His team is developing vaccines, targeted drug delivery for cancer, enzymes to break down environmental pollutants and innovative biomaterials, among other endeavors. Baker received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his scientific achievements to benefit humankind. He has also been awarded the Overton Prize in computational biology, Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences.

, professor and chair of neurobiology and biophysics at the UW School of Medicine, was honored for her distinguished contributions to cognitive and systems neuroscience. Buffalo, who is the Wayne E. Crill Endowed Professor, is particularly noted for her pioneering research on the neural basis of remembering and learning, and for advancing translational research into broader insights on human brain function. She studies the relationship between eye movements and activity in the hippocampus and other nearby brain regions involved in forming memories, navigating and recalling the emotional context of past events. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, which presented her with the Troland Award for innovative, multidisciplinary studies. She also helps train postdoctoral scholars at the UW Medicine Institute for Translational Immunology.

, professor and chair of genome sciences at the UW School of Medicine, was noted for her distinguished contributions to the fields of genetics and genomics. She is known for advancing knowledge of the mechanisms underlying molecular evolution and genetic variation in yeasts and in humans. Her lab develops new tools to study mutations and their consequences, genome structure, gene interactions, and the evolution of gene expression. She has a longstanding interest in how copy number variations 鈥� how many times a particular segment of DNA repeats 鈥� affect adaptation, and how these variations arise. Dunham applies her genomics methods to diverse topics, including the biology of aging and the emergence of multi-drug antibiotic resistance. Dunham is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar.

, UW professor of chemistry, was honored for distinguished contributions to the theoretical understanding of nanoscale light-matter interactions, particularly for the design and interpretation of advanced spectroscopies that use electrons and light to probe material excitations. Masiello is an applied physicist whose research focuses on creating simple-yet-rich theoretical models that bring insight and understanding to observations spanning from quantum materials to nanophotonics. Masiello was hired as an assistant professor at the UW in 2010. He is a faculty member in both the Molecular & Engineering Sciences Institute and the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems, and is also an adjunct professor of applied mathematics and of materials science and engineering. Masiello’s honors include receiving an NSF CAREER Award and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, called PECASE, awarded by President Obama at the White House.

• , professor of neurobiology and biophysics, and adjunct professor of applied mathematics
• , Arthur B. McDonald Professor of Physics and director at the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics

Fairhall and Hertzog are among 120 new members and 30 international members elected 鈥渋n recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research,鈥� . Chartered in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences provides policy advice and input to governmental, nonprofit and private organizations.

develops theoretical approaches to understand how nervous systems process information. She collaborates with experimental labs across the UW, examining information processing in systems that range from single neurons 鈥� nerve cells that receive and conduct signals 鈥� to neural networks. She鈥檚 studied how mosquitoes use heat and chemical cues to forage, and how neural inputs drive muscle activation and biomechanics in hydra 鈥� tiny, tentacled invertebrates that live in water.

Fairhall grew up in Australia. She completed her master鈥檚 and Ph.D. in physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. She was a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton University before joining the UW School of Medicine faculty in 2004. Among Fairhall鈥檚 honors and awards are a Sloan Fellowship, a Burroughs Wellcome 鈥淐areers at the Scientific Interface鈥� Fellowship and a McKnight Scholar Award. She was named an Allen Institute Distinguished Investigator. In 2022, she was Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair at the 脡cole Normale Sup茅rieure in Paris.

Hertzog leads the UW , a research group that has designed and constructed detectors for high-precision experiments with muons 鈥� similar to electrons, but about 200 times more massive 鈥� conducted at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. The UW team also has led efforts to analyze the massive amounts of data produced in that experiment, known as the聽.

The overarching goal is to test the 鈥� a theory to describe how the universe works at its most fundamental level.聽Studying the behavior of muons may help determine whether muons are interacting solely with known particles and forces, or if unknown particles or forces exist.

Hertzog completed his Ph.D. in physics at The College of William & Mary. Following time at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Illinois, he joined the UW as a professor in 2010. He鈥檚 served on numerous scientific advisory committees and panels and is coauthor of more than 200 papers and technical reports. He has mentored or co-mentored more than 20 Ph.D. students and 15 postdoctoral researchers.

With this year鈥檚 additions, the National Academy of Sciences now has 2,662 active members and 556 international members.

Four faculty members at the 天美影视传媒 have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The new members from the UW are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twenty scientists and engineers at the 天美影视传媒 are among the 38 new members elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences for 2021, according to a July 15 . New members were chosen for 鈥渢heir 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.鈥�

Current academy members selected 29 of the new members. An additional nine were elected by virtue of joining one of the National Academies.

New UW members who were elected by current academy members are:

• , professor and Port of Tacoma Chair in Environmental Science at UW Tacoma, director of the and science director of the , 鈥渇or foundational work on the environmental fate, behavior and toxicity of PCBs.鈥�
• , professor of psychology, 鈥渇or contributions in research on racial and gender inequality that has influenced practices in education, government, and business鈥� and 鈥渇or shifting the explanation for inequality away from individual deficiencies and examining how societal stereotypes and structures cause inequalities.鈥�
• , professor of chemistry and member faculty at the , 鈥渇or leadership in the innovative synthesis and chemical modification of nanoscale materials for application in light emission and catalysis.鈥�
• , professor of global health and of environmental and occupational health sciences, and founding director of the , 鈥渇or work on the health impacts of climate change, on climate impact forecasting, on adaptation to climate change and on climate policy to protect health.鈥�
• , professor of environmental and forest sciences and dean emeritus of the College of the Environment, 鈥渇or foundational studies of regional paleoenvironmental history and sustained excellence in academic leadership to catalyze and sustain transformative research and educational initiatives.鈥� Graumlich is also president-elect of the American Geophysical Union.
• Dr. , the Joseph W. Eschbach Endowed Chair in Kidney Research and co-director of the , 鈥渇or pioneering contributions and outstanding achievements in the development of the novel wearable artificial kidney, as well as numerous investigator-initiated clinical trials and multi-center collaborative studies.鈥�
• , professor of environmental chemistry and chair of the Physical Sciences Division at UW Bothell, 鈥渇or leadership in monitoring and understanding the global transport of atmospheric pollutants from energy production, wildfire, and other sources, as well as science communication and service that has informed citizens and enhanced public policy.鈥�
• , professor and chair of psychology, 鈥渇or contributions demonstrating how psychological science can inform long-standing issues about racial and gender discrimination鈥� and 鈥渇or research that has deep and penetrating implications for the law and societal efforts to remedy social inequities with evidence-based programs and actions.鈥�
• , the Leon C. Johnson Professor of Chemistry, member faculty at the and chair of the Department of Chemistry, 鈥渇or developing new spectroscopy tools for measuring energy flow in molecules and materials with high spatial and temporal resolution.鈥�
• , professor of astronomy, 鈥渇or founding the and leading the decades-long development of the interdisciplinary modeling framework and community needed to establish the science of exoplanet astrobiology鈥� and 鈥渇or training the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists who will search for life beyond Earth.鈥�
• , professor and chair of aeronautics and astronautics, 鈥渇or leadership and significant advances in nonlinear methods for integrated sensing and control in engineered, bioinspired and biological flight systems鈥� and 鈥渇or leadership in cross-disciplinary aerospace workforce development.鈥�
• , associate professor of chemistry and member faculty with the Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute, 鈥渇or exceptional contributions to the development of synthetic polymers and nanomaterials for self-assembly and advanced manufacturing with application in sustainability, medicine and microelectronics.鈥�
• Dr. , Associate Dean of Medical Technology Innovation in the College of Engineering and the School of Medicine, the Graham and Brenda Siddall Endowed Chair in Cornea Research, and medical director of the UW Eye Institute, 鈥渇or developing and providing first class clinical treatment of severe corneal blindness to hundreds of people, for establishing the world premier artificial cornea program in Washington, and for leading collaborative research to translate innovative engineering technologies into creative clinical solution.鈥�
• Dr. , professor of medicine and director of the , 鈥渇or global recognition as an authority on drug and vaccine development for viral and parasitic diseases through work as an infectious disease physician and immunologist.鈥�
• Dr. , professor of pediatrics and of anesthesiology and pain medicine, and director of the , 鈥渇or outstanding leadership in pediatric anesthesiology and in the care of children with traumatic brain injury鈥� and 鈥渇or internationally recognized expertise in traumatic brain injury and direction of the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center for the last decade as an exceptional mentor and visionary leader.鈥�

UW members who will join the Washington State Academy of Sciences by virtue of their election to one of the National Academies are:

• , professor of biostatistics, 鈥渇or the development of novel statistical models for longitudinal data to better diagnose disease, track its trajectory, and predict its outcomes鈥� and 鈥渇or revolutionizing how dynamic predictors are judged by their discrimination and calibration and has significantly advanced methods for randomized controlled trials.鈥� Heagerty was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.
• , the Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering, 鈥渇or foundational contributions to the mathematics of computer systems and of the internet, as well as to the design and probabilistic analysis of algorithms, especially on-line algorithms, and algorithmic mechanism design and game theory.鈥� Karlin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.
• , professor emeritus of applied mathematics and data science fellow at the , 鈥渇or inventing key algorithms for hyperbolic conservation laws and transforming them into powerful numerical technologies鈥� and 鈥渇or creating the Clawpack package, which underpins a wide range of application codes in everyday use, such as for hazard assessment due to tsunamis and other geophysical phenomena.鈥� LeVeque was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.
• , the Benjamin D. Hall Endowed Chair in Basic Life Sciences and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 鈥渇or advancing our physical understanding of cell motility and growth in animals and bacteria鈥� and 鈥渇or discovering how the pathogen Listeria uses actin polymerization to move inside human cells, how crawling animal cells coordinate actomyosin dynamics and the mechanical basis of size control and daughter cell separation in bacteria.鈥� Theriot was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.
• , professor and chair of biological structure, 鈥渇or elucidating cellular transformations through which neurons pattern their dendrites, and the interplay of activity-dependent and -independent mechanisms leading to assembly of stereotyped circuits鈥� and 鈥渇or revelations regarding the fundamental principles of neuronal development through the application of an elegant combination of in vivo imaging, physiology, ultrastructure and genetics to the vertebrate retina.鈥� Wong was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

New members to the Washington State Academy of Sciences are scheduled to be inducted at a meeting in September.

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

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

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

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

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

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

, who holds the Benjamin D. Hall Endowed Chair in Basic Life Sciences and is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, came to the UW in 2018 after 21 years as a faculty member at Stanford University. She earned a doctoral degree in cell biology from the University of California, San Francisco, and was a fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research before heading to Stanford. Theriot鈥檚 research centers on the dynamic world within cells. Her work explores how cells self-organize to perform tasks 鈥� like change shape, move, respond to stimuli, and shuttle items through their interiors. Theriot has investigated these questions in a variety of biological settings, such as how white blood cells crawl through our bodies and engulf invading microbes, how fish skin heals wounds, and how the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes rearranges the proteins of the human cell鈥檚 鈥渟keleton.鈥� She employs many types of experimental approaches, from mathematical modeling to video-based analyses of cellular movements. Theriot has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

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

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

Note: This video was created in January 2020

Almost 18,000 Americans every year. Many of these people are unable to use their hands and arms and can’t do everyday tasks such as eating, grooming or drinking water without help.

Using physical therapy combined with a noninvasive method of stimulating nerve cells in the spinal cord, 天美影视传媒 researchers helped six Seattle area participants regain some hand and arm mobility. That increased mobility lasted at least three to six months after treatment had ended. The research team Jan. 5 in the journal IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

“We use our hands for everything 鈥� eating, brushing our teeth, buttoning a shirt. Spinal cord injury patients rate regaining hand function as the absolute first priority for treatment. It is five to six times more important than anything else that they ask for help on,” said lead author , a UW senior postdoctoral researcher in electrical and computer engineering who completed this research as a doctoral student of rehabilitation medicine in the UW School of Medicine.

“At the beginning of our study,” Inanici said, “I didn’t expect such an immediate response starting from the very first stimulation session. As a rehabilitation physician, my experience was that there was always a limit to how much people would recover. But now it looks like that’s changing. It’s so rewarding to see these results.”

After a spinal cord injury, many patients do physical therapy to help them attempt to regain mobility. Recently, have shown that implanting a stimulator to deliver electric current to a damaged spinal cord could help paralyzed patients walk again.

The UW team, composed of researchers from the , combined stimulation with standard physical therapy exercises, but the stimulation doesn’t require surgery. Instead, it involves small patches that stick to a participant’s skin like a Band-Aid. These patches are placed around the injured area on the back of the neck where they deliver electrical pulses.

The researchers recruited six people with chronic spinal cord injuries. All participants had been injured for at least a year and a half. Some participants couldn’t wiggle their fingers or thumbs while others had some mobility at the beginning of the study.

To explore the viability of using the skin-surface stimulation method, the researchers designed a five-month training program. For the first month, the researchers monitored participants’ baseline limb movements each week. Then for the second month, the team put participants through intensive physical therapy training, three times a week for two hours at a time. For the third month, participants continued physical therapy training but with stimulation added.

“We turned on the device, but they continued doing the exact same exercises they did the previous month, progressing to slightly more difficult versions if they improved,” Inanici said.

For the last two months of the study, participants were divided into two categories: Participants with less severe injuries received another month of training alone and then a month of training plus stimulation. Patients with more severe injuries received the opposite 鈥� training and stimulation first, followed by only training second.

While some participants regained some hand function during training alone, all six saw improvements when stimulation was combined with training.

“Both people who had no hand movement at the beginning of the study started moving their hands again during stimulation, and were able to produce a measurable force between their fingers and thumb,” said senior author , a UW associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, rehabilitation medicine and physiology and biophysics. “That’s a dramatic change, to go from being completely paralyzed below the wrists down to moving your hands at will.”

In addition, some participants noticed other improvements, including a more normal heart rate and better regulation of body temperature and bladder function.

The team followed up with participants for up to six months after training and found that these improvements remained, despite no more stimulation.

“We think these stimulators bring the nerves that make your muscles contract very close to being active. They don’t actually cause the muscle to move, but they get it ready to move. It’s primed, like the sprinter at the start of a race,” said Moritz, who is also the co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology. “Then when someone with a spinal cord injury wants to move, the few connections that might have been spared around the injury are enough to cause those muscles to contract.”

The research is moving toward helping people in the clinic. The results of this study have already informed the design of that will be co-led by Moritz. One of the lead sites will be at the UW.

“We’re seeing a common theme across universities 鈥� stimulating the spinal cord electrically is making people better,” said Moritz, who also holds the CJ and Elizabeth Hwang professorship in electrical and computer engineering. “But it does take motivation. The stimulator helps you do the exercises, and the exercises help you get stronger, but the improvements are incremental. Over time, however, they add up into something that’s really astounding.”

, a research scientist at the UW; , a UW doctoral student in rehabilitation medicine; and , an associate professor of neurological surgery in the UW School of Medicine, are co-authors on this paper. This research was funded by the Center for Neurotechnology, the Washington State Spinal Cord Injury Consortium and the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation.

For more information, contact Inanici at finanici@uw.edu and Moritz at ctmoritz@uw.edu.

Grant number: EEC-1028725

The four new AAAS fellows among the UW faculty are:

, professor emeritus in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, is honored for contributions to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Domingos is particularly known for his introduction of Markov logic networks, which presented a simple yet efficient approach to unifying first-order logic and probabilistic reasoning to support inference learning. He also helped pioneer the field of adversarial learning, producing the first algorithm to automate the process of adversarial classification to enable data mining systems to adapt rapidly against evolving adversarial attacks. Domingos subsequently contributed the first unsupervised approach to semantic parsing, which enables machines to extract knowledge from text and speech, a process that underpins machine learning and natural language processing. In 2015, he published 鈥�,鈥� a book that examines how machine learning increasingly influences every aspect of people鈥檚 lives. Domingos joined the UW faculty in 1999 and remains active in research after attaining emeritus status earlier this year.

, professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, is a pioneer in brain-machine interfaces. His earlier work was on the brain鈥檚 direction of arm and leg movements. Fetz later showed that the brain could volitionally control certain nerve cells, called cortical neurons, in various patterns. This became the foundation for research on the unexpected ability of neural activity to drive external devices. Fetz also conducted studies of interneurons in the spine, and demonstrated that they had many properties of cells in the cortex, including their preparation to carry out instructed movements. Fetz also developed dynamic network models to simulate neural interactions that target tracking and short-term memory. In an historical achievement, his lab designed and tested an implantable neurochip that can record activity of cortical cells and convert this in real-time to stimulate the cortex, spinal cord or muscles. The brain can learn to incorporate this artificial feedback loop into behaviors. The neurochip holds future promise for clinical applications, such as moving paralyzed muscles.

is a professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, as well as a professor in the Public Health Sciences Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Raftery studies the small molecules at work during metabolism in cells, animals and people. He has developed analytical and statistical methods to profile metabolites in complex biological samples. Metabolites are the end products of many biochemical functions in living systems. Raftery鈥檚 research is working to discover sensitive biomarkers indicating the presence of disease and its progression. He has applied his advances in metabolomics to detect very early stages of cancer, as well as in his research on diabetes and heart disease. He is a scientist at the UW Mitochondrial and Metabolism Center, which, among its goals, is investigating the roles of cell metabolism dysfunction in common diseases and is also seeking related diagnostic and therapeutic tools. Raftery also directs the interdisciplinary Northwest Metabolomics Research Center, which fosters collaborations among scientists from several institutions. The lab uses some of the latest technologies and capabilities to improve the metabolic understanding of a variety of serious disorders.

, a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, was honored for his contributions to artificial intelligence spanning automated planning, software agents, crowdsourcing and internet information extraction, as well as his efforts to commercialize AI technologies. Weld leads the UW鈥檚 , where he focuses on advancing explainable AI to allow people to better understand and control AI-powered tools, assistants and systems and combine human and machine intelligence to accomplish more together than alone. Weld has co-founded multiple startup companies, including Netbot, Inc., which produced the first online comparison shopping engine that was subsequently acquired by Excite, and AdRelevance, an early provider of tools for monitoring online advertising data acquired by Nielsen Netratings. A member of the UW faculty since 1988, Weld is a venture partner and member of the Technology Advisory Board of Madrona Venture Group and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, where he also leads the focused on the development of AI-powered tools to help scientists extract useful knowledge from scholarly literature.

In addition, , a professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, was selected 鈥渇or distinguished contributions to the field of HIV prevention research, particularly for design and analysis of clinical trials of pre-exposure prophylaxis and treatment as prevention.鈥� Donnell is also a UW affiliate of global health and of health services.

Open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields 鈥� chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics 鈥� the fellowships honor those early-career scholars whose achievements mark them as the next generation of scientific leaders.

The 126 were awarded in close coordination with the scientific community. Candidates are nominated by their fellow scientists, and winning fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars based on each candidate鈥檚 research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in his or her field. Each fellow will receive $60,000 to apply toward research endeavors.

This year鈥檚 fellows come from 60 institutions across the United States and Canada, spanning fields from evolutionary biology to data science. The new Sloan Fellows at the UW reflect this diversity, probing complex questions in machine learning, stellar astrophysics and neuroscience.

In the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Farhadi focuses on computer vision, machine learning, the intersection of natural language and vision, analysis of the role of semantics in visual understanding, and visual reasoning. His work seeks to enable computers to perform visual tasks that human brains perform seamlessly 鈥� from intuiting why an 鈥渁bnormal鈥� image looks strange to predicting how objects will move if acted upon and understanding actions and behaviors in a scene.

As the聽聽for the computer vision group at the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Farhadi also leads聽. The project focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and computer vision and involves extracting knowledge from images, diagrams and videos; designing visual reasoning and planning algorithms; and parsing visual data.

In the Department of Astronomy, Levesque studies the behavior, composition and life cycles of 鈥渕assive鈥� stars. Some of her targets are stellar behemoths in our own neighborhood, like Betelgeuse, while others straddle the edge of the visible universe.

Massive stars 鈥� which are at least eight times more massive than our own sun 鈥� harbor about our universe. Thanks to the light they put out and the gases they ionize, massive stars account for the vast majority of light astronomers observe in other young, star-forming galaxies. Levesque鈥檚 data can help astronomers understand how these stars form, evolve and interact with the galaxies where they are born. She also studies how massive stars die, usually as explosive supernovae. Since some supernovae also belch out bursts of gamma rays, which are powerful enough to be observed during the deaths of some of the first stars, her data from these events can help scientists envision the infancy of the universe.

Levesque makes her observations on telescopes in Chile, Hawaii and the American Southwest, including the Apache Point Observatory 3.5-meter telescope in New Mexico in which UW is a founding partner. She also helps improve the methods astronomers use to analyze data gathered on these shared platforms. Astronomy has no shortage of cosmological questions, and Levesque wants to ensure that our telescopic divining rods give us clear answers.

Tuthill, a UW Medicine scientist, explores how the nervous system detects and decodes mechanical signals to guide movement and behavior.聽 From the rat whose whiskers let it slip through building eaves, to an insect landing on a leaf, animals use mechanosensory clues to navigate.

the tiny nervous system of the fruit fly, Drosophila. The lab records neural activity from the fruit fly brain with electrophysiology and 2-photon imaging, while manipulating neural circuit function with advanced genetic tools. By combining these techniques with fine-scale analysis of fly behavior, the lab seeks to understand how activity in neural circuits senses and coordinates body movements.

The Tuthill Lab hopes to identify fundamental sensory and motor function principles that could illuminate underlying mechanisms of human movement disorders and pathological sensory conditions, such as chronic pain. Despite the apparent differences between flies and humans, the basic building blocks of the nervous system are the same.

While he was a doctoral student at Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Janelia, Tuthill studied how the fly brain detects visual motion. Later, as a Harvard Medical School postdoctoral fellow, he pioneered studies of touch processing in the fly. He joined the UW medical school faculty in 2016.

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For more information, contact James Urton at the UW Office of News & Information at 206-543-2580 or jurton@uw.edu.

Microscopy also has its limit. Light’s inherent wavelike behavior limits any microscope’s resolving power. The most minute details of our existence 鈥� from twisted strands of DNA to bulbous cellular organelles 鈥� are difficult or impossible for even the best and most expensive microscopes to visualize directly.

But scientists from the 天美影视传媒 recently reported a relatively simple method that would allow ordinary laboratory microscopes to illuminate many of these cellular structures quickly and efficiently. They did not modify microscopes to boost resolution. Instead, they used an approach to swell the tiny, complex structures within cells, bringing them within range of a microscope’s existing resolving range.

“This is a radically new way of doing microscopy,” said UW chemistry professor , who is senior author on a detailing their approach in . “The focus had largely been on hardware 鈥� improving the resolution of microscopes. Here, we expand the cell’s interior to bring it into view.”

Appropriately, this technique is known as expansion microscopy.

“This is a simple and robust approach that is surprisingly effective,” added Vaughan.

His was inspired by the developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The MIT researchers stained cells with a complex, DNA-based fluorescent probe that would make cellular contents visible. They then treated cells with an expandable polymer that linked to the custom probes and would “inflate” the specimens to as much as four times their original size. But, this approach was laborious, and required specialized, expensive reagents.

“When I saw their approach, I thought it was amazing,” said Vaughan. “But we were wondering if there was a way to do this using simpler staining strategies and conventional probes. That would make expansion microscopy accessible to thousands of labs.”

Instead of complex fluorescent probes, Vaughan’s team turned to conventional fluorescent dyes bound to antibodies, which are easier to use, and developed a simple chemical treatment that would allow the antibodies to become linked to the polymer. They then treated their stained samples 鈥� slices of mammalian brain tissue and cultured cells 鈥� with the expandable polymer as well as enzymes that could create small “snips” in proteins to help them expand.

They used this basic approach to come up with two staining protocols for expansion microscopy 鈥� one that worked better for individual cells and another for slices of tissue. Under the microscope, their images showed substantially brighter stains while maintaining excellent resolution. As an added bonus, their approach also enables expansion microscopy with fluorescent proteins, another popular fluorescent probe used by biologists. Critically, the UW team was able to obtain these high-resolution images on conventional, widely used laboratory microscopes.

“We think this will make expansion microscopy a widely used technique for researchers who want to visualize what they’re studying with a relatively simple, low-cost approach that also has excellent performance,” said Vaughan.

Vaughan said he hopes that other research groups will modify his team’s basic approach for other organisms or cell types, especially structures like cell walls that would resist expansion. Given the details illuminated by expansion microscopy, a hidden world awaits.

Two scientists from the UW Department of Chemistry, doctoral student and postdoctoral researcher , were co-first authors on the paper. Other authors were postdoctoral researcher Haruhisa Okawa and professor 鈥� both in UW Medicine’s biological structure department 鈥� and UW undergraduates Hyeon-Jin Kim and Grant Tremel. The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund and the 天美影视传媒.

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For more information, contact Vaughan at 206-543-4644 or jcv2@uw.edu.

Grant numbers: DGE-1256082, EY10699, EY17101.

“This award is a recognition of what is happening here at the UW in theoretical neuroscience research,” said , a UW associate professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. “It is an invitation to join the community of other Swartz-supported institutes that are advancing this field, as well as an opportunity to bring together different researchers and fields here at the UW.”

As the 12th to receive support from the Swartz Foundation, UW will join the ranks of Harvard, Yale and Columbia universities, as well as Caltech and the Salk Institute. The grant will support postdoctoral fellows to pursue research with faculty across the disciplines spanning computational and theoretical neuroscience, as well as collaborate with researchers at other Swartz-funded institutions.

“We want to bring in brilliant young thinkers at the interface of biology, physics and mathematics and to let those fellows identify opportunities to bring together research underway in multiple laboratories,” said UW associate聽professor of applied mathematics .

The UW’s national standing in this area sparked the interest of the Swartz Foundation, founded in 1994 by physicist and engineer , last year when Fairhall, along with the , hosted a meeting of Swartz fellows at the UW. With the new and the UW-based , the Swartz Foundation noted the UW’s strong institutional investment in this domain and invited Fairhall and Shea-Brown to draft a proposal outlining how the UW could contribute to the foundation’s mission.

“The Swartz Foundation funds the most innovative mathematical and theoretical approaches to understanding brain function 鈥� trying to find the underlying algorithms and principles involved,” said Fairhall. “The UW has such excellent faculty, both in neuroscience and the theory of neuroscience, that fellows here will have lots of options for interactions.”

Fairhall and Shea-Brown intend for researchers supported by the Swartz Foundation to have the freedom to explore a variety of projects and unique collaborations to address outstanding questions in computational neuroscience. For example, scientists are trying to understand the mathematical and statistical processes through which neural circuits create and evaluate new behaviors. Computational neuroscientists are also trying to learn how neurons in the brain 鈥� structurally and mathematically 鈥� encode, store and access information.

Fairhall and Shea-Brown hope this support from the Swartz Foundation will kindle further growth in this area over time, foster new collaborations and train the next generation of computational neuroscientists. The federal has specifically noted a need for theoretical and computational models to understand brain function. UW efforts in this area are strengthened by collaborative interactions with the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Google and Microsoft on large-scale brain models and brain-inspired computation, Fairhall said.

“Among the people who are leaders in this field today, many have passed through these Swartz-funded centers,” said Fairhall. “We would love to do that same thing and provide a launching base for new people to come in and succeed.”

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For more information, contact Fairhall at 206-616-4148 or fairhall@uw.edu and Shea-Brown at 206-685-6635 or etsb@uw.edu.