At our nation’s research universities, including the University of Washington, underrepresented minorities make up less than 6% of the faculty across non-medical science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. This severe underrepresentation among faculty has persisted for decades and comes, in part, from a lack of diversity among the doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars in these fields who elect to pursue faculty positions.

In turn, the lack of diverse science and engineering faculty discourages students of color from pursuing degrees in these fields — a negative feedback loop that has proven difficult to break.

With the help of new grants from the National Science Foundation and the Washington Research Foundation, UW is attempting to address this problem by combining efforts across an alliance of top research universities.

A key component of this effort — connecting underrepresented minority senior doctoral students with postdoctoral opportunities across the alliance — will be led by UW, under the co-direction of College of Environment Associate Dean Julia Parrish, Graduate School Dean Joy Williamson-Lott and Provost Mark Richards.

The statistics are concerning. Just 8.5% of doctoral students in these science and engineering departments identified as underrepresented minorities, significantly lower than the demographics of the U.S. But these numbers are halved at the postdoc and faculty levels — to just 3.9% of postdoctoral researchers and faculty.

“That loss is a crucial starting point,” Parrish said.

Unlike the hiring process for faculty, which usually involves advertising open positions, the hiring of postdoctoral researchers has relied more on word-of-mouth networks among academics.

“Put simply, we are looking to establish a new network at the graduate and postdoc level that doesn’t depend on who you already know or are connected to, but is instead dependent on the excellent, interesting, edgy work that they do,” said Parrish. This new system will vastly improve upon the old networks.

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Eric Meola

The United States experiences more tornadoes than any other country, with a season that peaks in spring or summer depending on the region. Tornadoes are often deadly, especially in places where buildings can’t withstand high winds.

Accurate advanced warnings can save lives. A study from the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes a new way to rate and possibly improve tornado warnings. It finds that nighttime twisters, summer tornadoes and smaller events remain the biggest challenges for the forecasting community.

“This new method lets us measure how forecast skill is improving, decreasing or staying the same in different situations,” said Alex Anderson-Frey, a UW assistant professor of atmospheric sciences. “The tornado forecasting community needs to know what we’re doing best at, and where we can focus training and research in the future.”

She is lead author of the paper published online in December in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Though the southern and central U.S. see the most tornadoes, every state can experience twisters.  Scientific understanding of tornadoes is biased toward populated places, Anderson-Frey said, where people are more likely to observe and report the events.

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COASST

As their name suggests, by-the-wind sailor jellyfish know how to catch a breeze. Using a stiff, translucent sail propped an inch above the surface of the ocean, these teacup-sized organisms skim along the water dangling a fringe of delicate purple tentacles just below the surface to capture zooplankton and larval fish as they travel.

At the mercy of the wind, these jellies can wash ashore and strand — sometimes numbering in the trillions — on beaches around the world, including up and down the U.S. West Coast. And while these mass stranding events are hard to miss, very little actually is known about how or why they happen.

Now, thanks to 20 years of observations from thousands of citizen scientists, University of Washington researchers have discovered distinct patterns in the mass strandings of by-the-wind sailors, also called Velella velella. Specifically, large strandings happened simultaneously from the northwest tip of Washington south to the Mendocino coast in California, and in years when winters were warmer than usual. The results were published March 18 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

“Citizen scientists have collected the largest and longest dataset on mass strandings of this jelly in the world,” said senior author Julia Parrish, a professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, known as COASST.

“This paper contributes to fundamental scientific knowledge of this organism in a way that traditional ‘mainstream’ marine science has been unable to do. Thousands of trained, dedicated observers are better than any satellite because they know their beach and can alert us if something is weird or unusual.”

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The documentary film is brief but its message is powerful: We humans are losing our connection to the natural world, at our great peril.

“In some sense, we think we are the most advanced culture — we take such pride in technology and advancement,” says Peter Kahn, University of Washington professor in the Department of Psychology and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

“But in some other ways, we are more distant from the natural world than any culture has been. Potentially also more distant from the human spirit.”

Kahn’s words are featured in “Forgetting Nature,” a new short documentary by British-based filmmaker Ross Harrison that will begin streaming for free on March 17.

The film, production notes say, is “an urgent call to examine the effects of technology on our experiences, and the way wild nature is being squeezed out of our lives.”

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Francesca Samsel and Greg Abram

Freshwater is accumulating in the Arctic Ocean. The Beaufort Sea, which is the largest Arctic Ocean freshwater reservoir, has increased its freshwater content by 40% over the past two decades. How and where this water will flow into the Atlantic Ocean is important for local and global ocean conditions.

A study from the University of Washington, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that this freshwater travels through the Canadian Archipelago to reach the Labrador Sea, rather than through the wider marine passageways that connect to seas in Northern Europe. The open-access study was published Feb. 23 in Nature Communications.

“The Canadian Archipelago is a major conduit between the Arctic and the North Atlantic,” said lead author Jiaxu Zhang, a UW postdoctoral researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies. “In the future, if the winds get weaker and the freshwater gets released, there is a potential for this high amount of water to have a big influence in the Labrador Sea region.”

The finding has implications for the Labrador Sea marine environment, since Arctic water tends to be fresher but also rich in nutrients. This pathway also affects larger oceanic currents, namely a conveyor-belt circulation in the Atlantic Ocean in which colder, heavier water sinks in the North Atlantic and comes back along the surface as the Gulf Stream. Fresher, lighter water entering the Labrador Sea could slow that overturning circulation.

“We know that the Arctic Ocean has one of the biggest climate change signals,” said co-author Wei Cheng at the UW-based Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Atmosphere Studies. “Right now this freshwater is still trapped in the Arctic. But once it gets out, it can have a very large impact.”

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Cisneros-Montemayor et al./Nature

The future of an equitable and sustainable global ocean, or “Blue Economy,” depends on more than natural or technological resources. A new study finds that socioeconomic and governance conditions such as national stability, corruption and human rights greatly affect different regions’ ability to achieve a Blue Economy — one that is socially equitable, environmentally sustainable and economically viable.

A paper published March 17 in Nature by the University of Washington-based Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center suggests how different parts of the world might begin to achieve these goals.

“When ocean or coastal development is planned, decision-makers focus on available data to inform their decisions. The fact is, we have a lot more data about resources than about how development will actually impact the people who bear the risk and maintain the stewardship of the area,” said co-author Yoshitaka Ota, a UW research assistant professor of marine and environmental affairs.

Ota directs the Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center, launched in 2020 by The Nippon Foundation and UW EarthLab as a 10-year program to transform ocean governance so oceans benefit everyone equitably.

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