Andrew Meltzoff elected to National Academy of Education

, professor of psychology at the UW and co-director of the , has been elected to the National Academy of Education. Members are selected based on outstanding scholarship or leadership related to education.

Members serve on expert study panels that address pressing issues in education. They also engage in the Academy鈥檚 professional development fellowship programs.

Meltzoff is a highly lauded researcher and internationally renowned expert on infant and child development. His research reaches beyond the bounds of psychology and investigates how role models and cultural stereotypes of different kinds impact child development, with implications for education.

鈥淎dults have a drive to teach others, and young children have a drive to learn,鈥� Meltzoff said. 鈥淵et education in schools often misfires. Scientific advances in psychological and brain science should help us do a better job. Our children can鈥檛 wait, and our future literally depends on how well we feed, foster and embolden our children鈥檚 natural proclivity to learn. Social justice and equity issues can and should be addressed through education.鈥�

Meltzoff鈥檚 election to the National Academy of Education adds to his long list of distinctions, including the 2020 William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science, given to honor a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology.

Dean Edwina Uehara selected for 2023 lifetime achievement award

, dean of the 天美影视传媒 , received the 2023 lifetime achievement award from the . The award recognizes her contributions to the social work profession in Washington state and across the country.

鈥淩eceiving NASW-Washington鈥檚 Lifetime Achievement Award is an incredible honor, and one that is doubly meaningful to me,鈥� Uehara said. 鈥淔irst, because it recognizes the proudest professional title I hold as a 鈥榮ocial worker,鈥� and second, because it鈥檚 an NASW-Washington state award. I am a Washingtonian though and through.鈥�

Uehara鈥檚 career reflects a lifelong commitment to antiracism, civil rights and the development of culturally grounded mental health services. During her tenure, the School of Social Work became widely recognized as an innovative leader in advancing social and economic justice and enhancing quality of life through education, research and community engagement.

Citing her transformative leadership, the nomination letter spotlights how Uehara鈥檚 social work initiatives, including the , the , the and more. The letter praised Uehara as 鈥渁 positive champion for the social work profession.鈥�

Uehara will step down as dean on June 30 after 17 years of leadership and service, becoming the longest-serving dean in the School鈥檚 history. She will rejoin the faculty to pursue her research, teaching and leadership in the field of behavioral health.

Ed Kolodziej selected as finalist for Frontiers Planet Prize

, professor of at UW, represented the United States as national champion for the inaugural . The selection from 65 U.S. applicants elevated him into consideration for the international prize at the Frontiers Forum Live in Switzerland in April 2023. The prize competition recognizes scientists whose research contributes to the sustainable future of the planet.

Kolodziej led a team of researchers at UW Tacoma, Washington State University-Puyallup, and elsewhere who discovered 6PPD-quinone, a highly toxic and previously unidentified compound that was killing coho salmon in urbanized Puget Sound streams. The discovery and the shockwave it sent through the tire industry, which uses the compound in all tire rubber, ultimately earned Kolodziej鈥檚 team the nomination.

鈥淲e believe that our work on understanding the contributions of tire rubber to environmental pollution is important,鈥� said Kolodziej. 鈥淚 look forward to the day when we have 鈥榮almon safe tires鈥� made from chemicals that are safe for both people and the environment.鈥�

Kolodziej recently travelled to Switzerland for the announcement of the prize鈥檚 international awards, which come with $1.1 million to put toward future research. Kolodziej was not selected, but said he was grateful for the global interest in his research.

鈥淚t was an honor to represent the United States for the Frontier Planet Prize,鈥� he said, 鈥渁nd I was thankful that our wonderful research team and many collaborators were recognized in this fashion.鈥�

Every fall more than half of the coho salmon that return to Puget Sound’s urban streams die before they can spawn. In some streams, all of them die. But scientists didn’t know why.

Now a team led by researchers at the 天美影视传媒 Tacoma, UW and Washington State University Puyallup have discovered the answer. When it rains, stormwater flushes bits of aging vehicle tires on roads into neighboring streams. The killer is in the mix of chemicals that leach from tire wear particles: a molecule related to a preservative that keeps tires from breaking down too quickly.

This research Dec. 3 in Science.

“Most people think that we know what chemicals are toxic and all we have to do is control the amount of those chemicals to make sure water quality is fine. But, in fact, animals are exposed to this giant chemical soup and we don’t know what many of the chemicals in it even are,” said co-senior author , an associate professor in both the UW Tacoma Division of Sciences & Mathematics and the UW Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering.

“Here we started with a mix of 2,000 chemicals and were able to get all the way down to this one highly toxic chemical, something that kills large fish quickly and we think is probably found on every single busy road in the world.”

are born in freshwater streams. After spending the first year of their lives there, these fish make the epic journey out to sea where they live out most of their adult lives. A few 鈥� 鈥� return to their original streams to lay their eggs, or spawn, before dying. But researchers started noticing that, especially after a big rain, returning salmon were dying before they could spawn. The search for the coho-killer started with investigating the water quality of the creeks, a multi-agency effort led by NOAA-Fisheries and including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, King County, Seattle Public Utilities and the Wild Fish Conservancy.

“We had determined it couldn’t be explained by high temperatures, low dissolved oxygen or any known contaminant, such as high zinc levels,” said co-senior author , an assistant professor at WSU’s School of the Environment, based in Puyallup. “Then we found that urban stormwater runoff could recreate the symptoms and the acute mortality. That’s when Ed’s group reached out to see if they could help us understand what was going on chemically.”

First the team narrowed down what in stormwater runoff could be behind the symptoms. All creek samples contained a chemical signature associated with tire wear particles. In addition, a study led by McIntyre found that a solution made from tire wear particles was highly toxic to salmon.

But tire wear particles are a mixture of hundreds of different chemicals, so the team had a challenge ahead: How to find the culprit?

The researchers started by sectioning the tire wear particle solution according to different chemical properties, such as removing all metals from the solution. Then they tested the different solutions to see which ones were still toxic to salmon in the lab. They repeated this process until only a few chemicals remained, including one that appeared to dominate the mixture but didn’t match anything known.

Researchers used a multi-step chemical separation process to narrow down the list of possible salmon-killing culprits from thousands of chemicals to one. This animation, which shows different chemicals (dots) being separated based on a chemical commonality, is a simplified illustration of that process. Rebecca Gourley/天美影视传媒

“There were periods last year when we thought we might not be able to get this identified. We knew that the chemical that we thought was toxic had 18 carbons, 22 hydrogens, two nitrogens and two oxygens. And we kept trying to figure out what it was,” said lead author , a research scientist at the at UW Tacoma. “Then one day in December, it was just like bing! in my mind. The killer chemical might not be a chemical directly added to the tire, but something related.”

Tian searched a list of chemicals known to be in tire rubber for anything that might be similar to their unknown 鈥� give or take a few hydrogens, oxygens or nitrogens 鈥斅� and found something called 6PPD, which is used to keep tires from breaking down too quickly.

“It’s like a preservative for tires,” Tian said. “Similar to how food preservatives keep food from spoiling too quickly, 6PPD helps tires last by protecting them from ground-level ozone.”

Ozone, a gas created when pollutants emitted by cars and other chemical sources react in the sunlight, breaks the bonds holding the tire together. 6PPD helps by reacting with ozone before it can react with the tire rubber, sparing the tires.

But when 6PPD reacts with ozone, the researchers found that it was transformed into multiple chemicals, including 6PPD-quinone (pronounced “kwih-known”), the toxic chemical that is responsible for killing the salmon.

This chemical is not limited to the Puget Sound region. The team also tested roadway runoff from Los Angeles and urban creeks near San Francisco, and 6PPD-quinone was present there as well. This finding is unsurprising, the researchers said, because 6PPD appears to be used in all tires and tire wear particles are likely present in creeks near busy roads across the world.

Now that 6PPD-quinone has been identified as the “smoking gun” behind coho death in freshwater streams, the team can start to understand why this chemical is so toxic.

“How does this quinone lead to toxicity in coho? Why are other species of salmon, such as chum salmon, so much less sensitive?” McIntyre asked. “We have a lot to learn about which other species are sensitive to stormwater or 6PPD-quinone within, as well as outside, of the Puget Sound region.”

One way to protect salmon and other creatures living in the creeks is to treat stormwater before it hits the creeks. But, while tests have shown that there are effective environmentally friendly stormwater technologies for removing 6PPD-quinone, it would be almost impossible to build a treatment system for every road, the team added.

Another option is to change the composition of the tires themselves to make them “salmon-safe.”

“Tires need these preservative chemicals to make them last,” Kolodziej said. “It’s just a question of which chemicals are a good fit for that and then carefully evaluating their safety for humans, aquatic organisms, etc. We’re not sure what alternative chemical we would recommend, but we do know that chemists are really smart and have many tools in their toolboxes to figure out a safer chemical alternative.”

Additional co-authors are , a postdoctoral research associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who completed this work at the Center for Urban Waters; , and at WSU Puyallup; , , and at UW Tacoma; , , , and at the University of Toronto Scarborough; at the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project; Fan Hou, a doctoral student at China Agricultural University who completed this research at the UW; , Ximin Hu, and at the UW; , a postdoctoral research fellow at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who completed this research at the Center for Urban Waters; and at San Francisco Estuary Institute; at NOAA; and at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington State Governors Funds and the Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality in San Francisco Bay.

For more information, contact Kolodziej at koloj@uw.edu, McIntyre at jen.mcintyre@wsu.edu and Tian at tianzy@uw.edu.

Grant numbers: NSF: 1608464 and 1803240, EPA: #01J18101 and #DW-014-92437301

The waters of Puget Sound support many species, including mussels, salmon and killer whales. But researchers know that runoff from land in the urbanized areas might contain chemicals that could harm these creatures, even if it’s not always clear which chemicals are the most harmful.

Existing methods track specific chemicals of known concern. Until recently, however, there was no way to find out what other potentially harmful compounds might be present in the water.

Using a new “non-targeted” approach, researchers at the 天美影视传媒 and UW Tacoma screened samples from multiple regions of Puget Sound to look for other concerning chemicals. The team identified 64 chemicals never detected before in this waterway. Eight chemicals were at potentially hazardous concentrations that will need further investigation. The team Dec. 30 in Environmental Science & Technology.

“Historically we’ve done a decent job of categorizing legacy chemicals in Puget Sound, but we also know there are a lot more chemicals that get into the water every day,” said senior author , a research scientist at the at UW Tacoma. “If we can understand what’s there and at what concentrations it’s occurring, then we can start to figure out which chemicals will likely impact the health of fish, killer whales and other marine organisms.”

The researchers collected water from 18 regions 鈥� from Port Townsend to Olympia 鈥� of Puget Sound’s nearshore, meaning the team collected the water samples while standing on docks or the shore, not a boat.

“Our sampling sites covered areas of different land use. For instance, we have relatively clean sites such as the Hood Canal near Holly, Washington, as well as urbanized or industrial sites such as the and the ,” said lead author , a research scientist at the Center for Urban Waters. “With such a wide range, we hoped to see a link between contamination and land use.”

The researchers collected water at the 18 sites multiple times over 2018, leading to 78 water samples. Then they used a method called high-resolution mass spectrometry to help them identify what chemicals were in each sample.

“Our method allows us to detect hundreds to thousands of chemicals at once in a single sample. It determines a compound’s mass really accurately,” said co-author , an associate professor in both the UW Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the UW Tacoma Division of Sciences & Mathematics.

The researchers use the mass of each compound to figure out the chemical formula, and then use other information to identify it.

“On CSI when they have these instruments, they turn on the instrument and it tells them: ‘That’s ibuprofen.’ But in reality it’s a lot of work to get to get to a point where you are absolutely sure you know what that chemical really is,” Kolodziej said.

The team found at least 205 different chemicals across their samples. Of those compounds, researchers were able to reliably confirm the identity of 75, of which 64 were reported for the first time in Puget Sound.

The 75 confirmed chemicals included pesticides, herbicides, food additives and pharmaceuticals 鈥� antidepressants and blood pressure medications, for example 鈥� and compounds related to vehicles, such as tire rubber chemicals.

“Our goal is to really figure out which chemicals matter from a biological perspective 鈥� how a fish or a shellfish will react,” James said. “So we compared the levels of the chemicals we found to concentrations toxicologists have deemed concerning for marine life.”

The eight chemicals found at concerning levels were:

• Two vehicle-related contaminants that are found in tires and other sources
• The antidepressant drug Venlafaxine
• Two herbicides, including an aquatic one used for controlling weeds and algae
• Two chemicals found in plastics
• A called PFOS, which is known to be harmful to humans and animals

These concerning chemicals were localized to specific “hot spots” in Puget Sound, and most of them weren’t always present in different samples from the same site. This is in contrast to other chemicals that the team found in almost all of the samples but deemed less of a concern, such as the artificial sweetener Splenda and a drug used to treat seizures and bipolar disorder.

The next step, the researchers say, is to dive into what these data mean for marine life in the nearshore, specifically in shellfish and salmon. The team also hopes to continue to investigate the eight concerning chemicals and better understand the hot spots.

“Some way or another, a huge fraction of the things we buy and use end up in the rivers and Puget Sound,” Kolodziej said. “Everyone thinks chemicals hit the ocean and disappear because there’s so much water in the ocean that the concentrations go way down. But if you took the concentration of a chemical in wastewater effluent or storm water, it’s not like you can just divide by total water volume of Puget Sound, and that’s the concentration you’d detect in Puget Sound. The concentration in the nearshore is a lot higher because there hasn’t been enough time for mixing to occur. So exposure levels for aquatic organisms in the nearshore can be much higher than you might expect.”

Additional co-authors are , a postdoctoral research associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who completed this work as a research scientist at the Center for Urban Waters; , a lab manager at the Center for Urban Waters; , a doctoral student in the UW civil and environmental engineering department; Fan Hou, a doctoral student at China Agricultural University who completed this research as a visiting student at the UW; , an undergraduate student at UW Tacoma; and an environmental modeler at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This research was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

For more information, contact James at jamesca@uw.edu, Tian at tianzy@uw.edu and Kolodziej at koloj@uw.edu.

Grant number: 01J18101. This research has not been formally reviewed by EPA. The views expressed in this document are solely those of authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Agency. EPA does not endorse any products or commercial services mentioned in this publication.

Can we build to withstand natural disasters, reduce environmental toxins as consumption rises, meet urban transportation challenges so food, supplies and consumer products can get where they need to go?

Over the next month, College of Engineering鈥檚 annual will feature faculty focusing on these questions and developing technologies to build more resilient urban communities. The three lectures 鈥� on earthquake resiliency, sustainable transport of goods and emerging technologies for safe, clean water 鈥� are free and open to the public, but seating is limited and .

Engineering Solutions for a Seismically Resilient Seattle

The series kicks off Wednesday, Oct. 12, in Kane Hall 130 with a discussion by civil and environmental engineering associate professor on the Pacific Northwest鈥檚 readiness to withstand and recover from a major earthquake. Berman will detail seismic risks that are unique to the region; the innovation, research and planning necessary to prepare for 鈥渢he big one鈥�; and structural engineering technologies that can enable faster and stronger post-event repair.

Delivering Sustainability: Transporting Goods in Urban Spaces

On Wednesday, Nov. 2, in Kane Hall 120, , associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, will explore a question with answers that may surprise you: How does the rise of online shopping impact efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and create sustainable communities? As the popularity of online shopping and grocery delivery rises, consumers do have an opportunity to make more sustainable choices when it comes to transporting goods in urban spaces. But more delivery trucks also create competition for limited road and curb space with cars, buses, bikes and urban residents.

Understanding Our Chemical Fingerprints: Safer Water for Our Cities

The lecture series closes on Wednesday, Nov. 16, in Kane Hall 120 with civil and environmental engineering associate professor , an expert in the distinctive chemical fingerprints on water that our daily human activities leave, impacting salmon populations and other fish, animals and plants, as well as people鈥檚 health and safety. Although more than 80,000 chemicals are in circulation and thousands are introduced each year, only a handful are comprehensively evaluated for safety by the Environmental Protection Agency. Kolodziej will discuss the pathways that these chemicals take from homes, factories and offices into the waters around us, as well as emerging systems to remove toxic chemicals.

All lectures are free and start at 7:30 p.m. Advance registration, either or by calling 206-543-0540, is required. All lectures will be broadcast at a later date on .