Beth Gardner to serve as Director of the Center for Quantitative Sciences

Associate Professor Beth Gardner has agreed to serve as the director of the Center for Quantitative Sciences (CQS), effective July 1, 2021. In this role she will be responsible for the programmatic and financial health of the Center, which includes the graduate degree program Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management (QERM) and the curricular program Quantitative Science (QSCI), which offers both undergraduate and graduate courses as well as an undergraduate minor.

Crow science for kids (and adults!)

Chances are good that no matter where you live in the U.S., you’re somewhat familiar with crows. Perhaps you’ve seen them perching on a telephone pole, flying overhead, or raiding garbage. You can also likely recognize their caws. But have you ever noticed a crow letting ants crawl all over it, or sprawled out on the ground with its wings and mouth open on a hot day?

Sara Gonzalez to serve as the Quaternary Research Center Director

Professor Sara L. Gonzalez has agreed to serve as the Quaternary Research Center (QRC) Director, effective July 1. In this role she will continue building the interdisciplinary intellectual portfolio of the QRC and broadening the involvement and impact of the QRC across the university. Gonzalez is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington and Curator of Archaeology the Burke Museum of Natural History.

Researchers discover yessotoxins, produced by certain phytoplankton, to be a culprit behind summer mass shellfish mortality events in Washington

Dying clams on Hood Canal, Rocky Bay, 2019.King et al, Harmful Algae, 2021

Back in the summers of 2018 and 2019, the shellfish industry in Washington state was rocked by mass mortalities of its crops. “It was oysters, clams, cockles — all bivalve species in some bays were impacted,” said Teri King, aquaculture and marine water quality specialist at Washington Sea Grant based at the University of Washington. “They were dying, and nobody knew why.”

UW Ocean Voices program, seeking equity in ocean science, gets key approval from United Nations

Ocean Voices, a program of the University of Washington-based Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center to advance equity in ocean science, has been named among the first group of actions taken in a United Nations-sponsored, decade-long program of ocean science for sustainable development. “The human relationship with oceans under current political economies is unsustainable, unstable and inequitable,” writes Yoshitaka Ota, director of the center.