Natural Hazards and Resilient Communities Lecture Recap: Team Rubicon’s Jake Wood

Air Force veteran Rebekah La Due, part of Team Rubicon's Operation: Good Medicine in Okanogan, Washington in October 2015.

Jake Wood was submitting applications for MBA programs when a magnitude 7.0 struck Haiti in 2010. Having just returned from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was surprised by the similarities between the news footage from Port-au-Prince and what he had seen on the ground, during times of war as a marine. Unable to plug-in with traditional disaster relief organizations, who preferred monetary donations over extra hands, Wood and three friends charted their own path to Haiti and beyond. 

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School of Forest and Environmental Sciences Student Involved in First Snow Leopard Collaring in Kyrgyzstan

School of Environmental and Forest Sciences doctoral student Shannon Kachel was recently involved in the capture and first successful satellite collaring of a snow leopard in Kyrgyzstan. The female, estimated to be between six and seven years old, was caught near the Kyrgyzstan-China border in Sarychat-Ertash Strict Nature Reserve. Snow leopards are among the most elusive and least studied of the big cats, and are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 

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Natural Hazards and Resilient Communities: Q&A with UW’s John Vidale

The UW’s John Vidale is a man of many titles—professor of Earth and Space Sciences, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, and Washington state seismologist. More recently, Vidale helped launch the university’s M9 Project, a cross-disciplinary effort whose goal is to reduce the catastrophic potential effects of a Cascadia megathrust earthquake. Earlier this year, an article in the New Yorker stirred up panic nationwide over the looming possibility of megaquake along the Cascadia Fault. 

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Natural Hazards and Resilient Communities Lecture Recap: UW's Kate Starbird

More than ever before, people—emergency responders, media, and the public—are turning to social media to communicate important information during times of crises, both natural and manmade. Whether to articulate their own whereabouts to friends and family after a disaster has occurred or to offer up help to others in need, connected crowds are wading through noise and rumors that persist online to assist in the aftermath of tragedy. 

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