Rick Mohler receives Architect magazine 2020 R+D award for housing access prototype ‘ADUniverse’

, UW associate professor of architecture, has won a from Architect magazine for a project designed with Seattle city planner Nick Welch to give local homeowners the information they need to plan and build on their property.

The two led a team at the in creating a prototype app called , that uses neighborhood-level demographics and GIS data to help homeowners determine the physical and financial feasibility, on a parcel by parcel basis, of building a self-contained cottage or apartment.

Mohler and Welch’s project was one of seven honored in the magazine’s , chosen from 90 submissions that, the magazine said, “are scalable, thought-provoking, and promising in achieving a more equitable and healthy built environment.”

Mohler is also a licensed architect with Mohler + Ghillino Architects and serves on the . Welch is senior planner with the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development.

“The short-term goal is simply increasing the number of available housing units, but the longer-term goal is increasing equity,” Mohler said.

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UW Libraries 2017 video exhibit ‘The Age of the Kampuchea Picture’ wins Center for Research Libraries research award

A UW Libraries video installation based on the work of New York Times journalist Elizabeth Becker has won a 2020 in research from the , an international consortium of academic and independent research libraries.

“” was an interactive video installation created in 2017 by filmmaker — who has since earned a Master’s degree in Southeast Asia Studies from the Jackson School — in collaboration with the Southeast Asia Section of UW Libraries, and , UW assistant professor of anthropology. It was among events in conjunction with a visit to campus by and French Cambodian filmmaker .

The research award is for innovation in expanding research in the social sciences or humanities. The installation was based on notes, audio and photographs from Becker’s December 1978 visit to Democratic Kampuchea just before the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime. Becker started donating her materials to UW Special Collections in 2007.

“The installation speaks to the question of what is allowed to be seen, what is hidden, and how we might seek the truth in that absence of seeing,” wrote Judith Henchy, UW Southeast Asia Section librarian, on the Southeast Asia Center website. . .

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College of Environment’s Chelsea Wood named runner-up for 2020 APEC ASPIRE prize

, assistant professor in the UW College of the Environment’s School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, has been named one of two runners-up for the national prize.

APEC, or , is a 21-country forum for governments in the Pacific Rim that promotes free trade throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The annual APEC Science Prize for Innovation, Research and Education — called ASPIRE — is awarded by the state departments of APEC-member countries. It recognizes young scientists committed to excellence in scientific research, based on scholarly publication and cooperation with scientists from other member economies.

As one of two runners-up for the prize, Wood will receive $1,200 from scholarly publishing firms Wiley and Elsevier, co-sponsors of the prize, and will be invited to a roundtable with senior government officials and to give a virtual public lecture along with the ASPIRE winner and fellow runner-up, probably in August. The United States, an APEC member, selects one grand prize winner and two runners-up each year from across the sciences.

Wood’s research studies the ecology of parasites and pathogens in a changing world. Watch .

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UW Medicine’s Dr. Gail Jarvik begins as president-elect of American Society of Human Genetics

UW Medicine’s in January began a three-year term as of the . She was elected to the position in June of 2019.

Jarvik, the Arno G. Motulsky Endowed Chair in Medicine, is a professor of medicine and genome sciences and adjunct professor of epidemiology who is also affiliated with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

The American Society of Human Genetics, or ASHG, was founded in 1948; its nearly 8,000 members include researchers, academicians, clinicians, laboratory practice professionals, genetic counselors and nurses. Jarvik has served on several of its committees and was on its board of directors from 2015 to 2018.

first learned about the complexities of modern-day Cambodia while working on a World Health Organization project along the country’s northwest border with Thailand.

There, she lived and worked with people who had been separated from their villages during the regime decades before — a time of and authoritarianism under that left up to one-quarter of the country’s population dead and a devastating legacy affecting generations. After the defeat of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, many fled starvation, uncertainty and war, some living up to a decade of their lives in refugee camps on the Thai side of the border. The majority were repatriated in Cambodia in the early 1990s, and some settled in other countries, including the United States. Trauma, poverty and language barriers have left young and old unclear, unable or unwilling to communicate about the past.

Since Grant arrived as an assistant professor in the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s Department of Anthropology, she has worked to create sites for stories of and about Cambodians to be told, through teaching, guest speakers, a multimedia installation and work with the local Cambodian community.

Grant’s newest endeavor explores a collaborative approach to narrating history. Through a $10,000 , she will turn to an collection of photos and documents from the final weeks of the Khmer Rouge, an archive that is housed in Special Collections at UW Libraries. Donated in the late 2000s by journalist and UW alumna , the provides unique insight into a difficult, and in some ways mysterious, period in Cambodian history. Grant’s Archive Actions project uses the unique documents of the Becker collection as prompts, provocations and raw materials for storytelling and artistic production by communities affected by the Khmer Rouge.

“When I learned that Elizabeth Becker’s archive was at UW Libraries, I was just blown away,” Grant said. “This is a unique and special collection because there aren’t a lot of images and texts from that period of time. It is important that Cambodians and Cambodian Americans shape the archive and representations of their histories.”

Becker was a Washington Post reporter in 1978, when she was one of only two journalists from mainstream Western media invited to visit Democratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia was known under the Khmer Rouge. In her coverage of the trip and , Becker noted the empty cities, children working the farmland and rumors of mass killings — a contrast to when she had lived in the country in previous years. She took notes and photos and managed to save enough not only for an archive, but also for use years later during the genocide trial for leaders of the very regime she covered.

Grant first looked through the archive in 2017, when she, along with UW Southeast Asia Librarian and filmmaker and UW graduate student , created an interactive installation at the UW . Using some of Becker’s photographs of people and scenes from her 1978 reporting trip, the team superimposed a map of Cambodia’s killing fields, projecting the whole piece against a floor-to-ceiling window. That work, “,” was installed in honor of a visit to the UW by Cambodian filmmaker , who had collaborated with Becker on an earlier documentary.

Henchy notes that Becker’s photographs are among the few taken by an outside observer during the Khmer Rouge regime. Becker’s tour was carefully managed by that regime, but her photos are nevertheless striking, Henchy said, demonstrating a critical issue for any such archive: “how to describe and represent the material history of violence in ways that are both objective and morally aware.”

“Thinking about what stories we inevitably weave around these images, it is disturbing how little we know of the lives of the people represented – we know nothing of their political views, their status in the brutal society in which they found themselves, and above all, we know nothing of their fates,” said Henchy.

Washington state — primarily the Seattle-Tacoma area — is home to the third-largest population of Cambodian-Americans in the United States. According to the , Cambodian-Americans are more likely to be first-generation immigrants than the United States average, and more than 80 percent speak a language other than English at home. In 2013, the U.S. Census Bureau identified 17 percent of Cambodian-American households as “linguistically isolated,” in which no one over the age 14 speaks English proficiently.

Yet the interest is there for others to learn about Cambodian language, culture and history, Grant said. At the UW, she teaches a Cambodian studies class in which she connects students with local Cambodian Buddhist temples. The UW is also one of few institutions in the U.S. that teaches the Khmer language. A growing interdisciplinary community of UW faculty at Seattle and Bothell, and organizations like the Khmer Student Association, are working together to build scholarship and pedagogy across Southeast Asia and Asian American studies, Grant said.

Art and film are just some of the storytelling methods Grant wants to employ in opening up the Becker archive. The project will kick off with workshops including the Cambodian American Community Council of Washington and the local arts organization Spean Rajana.

“My desire with Archive Actions is to explore methods of opening the collection to Cambodians and Cambodian-Americans so that they may learn from, challenge and expand public histories of this period, of the Cold War and of refugee experience in the United States,” Grant said. “What silences do they find in the collection? What beauty and horror? What courage and culpability? How might storytelling reframe what we know, and do not know?”

Eventually, Grant hopes to work with residents of the Mount Baker Village Apartments in Seattle, home to many Cambodian-Americans, on a storytelling exhibit. The initial workshops will introduce participants to the archive, discuss what would be helpful for people to see and use, and come up with ways to engage the larger community in sharing the materials and their stories.

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For more information, contact Grant at jmgrant@uw.edu.