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Summer 2024

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Fall 2002

“D” is for Doba

“I missed those butterflies.” —Coach Bill Doba

Bill Doba doesn’t think the football turf is greener elsewhere. He likes his coaching job at Washington State University and living in Pullman, where “the only traffic congestion is on football weekends.”

When his cell phone rang, Doba was fighting the late afternoon I-5 freeway traffic. He explained to Washington State Magazine that he was en route to Seattle after a recruiting visit to Everett.

“Good recruits make good coaches,” he said.

Doba was the last addition to the Cougar staff when Mike Price was hired as head football coach in 1989. Now, 14 years later, he’s the … » More …

Fall 2002

Murrell to chart new basketball course

Sherri Murrell may need a pair of steel-toed shoes.

“I’m going to be kicking down doors of all the coaches in the Northwest,” said Washington State’s new women’s basketball coach.

Even before she was introduced at WSU in late March, she had been on the phone trying to improve WSU’s recruiting success in the region. Last season, only one Cougar player was from Washington.

Murrell’s first order of business after being hired was to contact each returning Cougar player and “embrace them.” She also wanted them to know she wasn’t coming to WSU to “clean house.” With four scholarships to fill and less than two … » More …

Fall 2002

Killer compost

If you use compost in your garden, you may be setting yourself up for either a bumper crop or a bummer crop.

Gardeners, greenhouse operators, and organic farmers from Washington to California have experienced crop failures on certain plants after using compost to enrich their soil and help their plants grow.

The problem begins when common composting materials such as grass clippings and leaves collected from grounds that have been treated with an herbicide named clopyralid are sent to commercial or municipal composting facilities.

Clopyralid, made by Dow AgroSciences, is used to control dandelions, thistles, and other noxious broadleaf weeds on lawns, golf courses, and … » More …

Fall 2002

It takes a village to raise an engineer

In two months spent as a participant in the Boeing A. D. Welliver Faculty Summer Fellowship, I observed that there is more to the development of an engineer than just formulas and lectures.

In spite of the recent downturn in the economy, the demand for engineers in the workforce has remained fairly strong. Yet the enrollment in the nation’s engineering programs has been flat and retention of students low, with less than half of entering engineering students receiving engineering degrees. Prospective engineers are attracted because of their curiosity about the way things work and their problem-solving creativity, but they often drop out of engineering programs … » More …

Fall 2002

One hot link: Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections

Archives? Stuffy. Boring. Dusty. Right? Ah, then you haven’t logged on to Washington State University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) Website. This site packs in a ton of fascination.

For sheer quirkiness and creativity, for example, nothing beats the Frank S. Matsura Image Collection. A Japanese immigrant who lived in Okanogan, Washington, until his death at age 32 in 1913, Matsura broke all the rules of portrait photography in pursuit of his personal vision. In the process, he revealed the souls of his subjects, whose images speak to us after nearly a century with a sometimes unsettling immediacy. I can … » More …

Fall 2002

Right on CUE

Today students are finding new ways to work collaboratively, across academic disciplines and distance, and often in ways not convenient before at WSU.

The hub of this activity is the new $32 million Samuel H. Smith Center for Undergraduate Education.  The “CUE” was designed to support “student-centered and interactive learning,” says Gary Brown, director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, one of four units housed in the five-story, 94,000 square-foot building.  Other units include the WSU Writing Program, the General Education Program, and the Student Computing Services lab. The building contains 20 classrooms of various sizes, while the SCS lab has 45 workstations, … » More …

Fall 2002

Dancing for the Gods

On a recent spring evening, the audience at Daggy Hall was mesmerized by a rare glimpse of a complex and ancient culture. For more than two hours, Raji Soundararajan, who by day is a research associate with the Center for Materials Research, danced the magical Bharata Natyam.

Though obviously a rare treat, for many Indians in the audience Bharata Natyam was not so exotic as it was for the rest of us. Even without the excellent explanations by Mani Venkatasubramanian, associate professor in electrical engineering, they understood the stories, the rich allusion to Hindu epics danced by Ms. Soundararajan. The rest of us, including many … » More …

Fall 2002

Small and smaller

There’s a limit to how small a piece of chocolate chip cookie you can have. At some point, you’ll either have a piece of chocolate or a piece of cookie, but not a piece of chocolate chip cookie.

You run into the same problem if you’re trying to make smaller silicon processor chips, says Kerry W. Hipps, professor of chemistry and materials science. Eventually the chip gets too small to function as a processor.

The processor is the brain in your computer. It makes the decisions about what data should go where, including how to route input like keyboard strokes, and how to route output … » More …