Spring 2019
In memoriam
Alumni, faculty, and staff of Washington State University who have passed away, as listed in the Spring 2019 issue of the magazine » More ...
Alumni
Spring 2019
The Wine Club for Cougs
The Wine-By-Cougars Wine Club over the last 12 years has raised the profile of Cougs in the wine industry, engaged alumni, and helped people learn more about wine at WSU. » More ...
Spring 2019
Chaplin’s athletes
Washington State University men’s track and field coach John Chaplin ’63 led the most successful sports program in Cougar history.
The Cougars went undefeated in dual meets nine seasons en route to a 202-17 record during his 21-year tenure. WSU won four Pac-10 outdoor championships, was NCAA runner-up four times outdoors, and claimed the 1977 NCAA indoor championship. Chaplin’s athletes earned 105 All-America certificates and 61 conference titles. Below are just a few of the many athletes he mentored and coached over his years with the program.
Read more about Chaplin and his legacy in “Athlete, coach, winner.”
TUARIKI JOHN DELAMERE: Tuariki “John” Delamere … » More …
Winter 2018
Fit for every body
Inside an old yellow craftsman house, sewing machines whir, sketches adorn the walls, underwear and tank top prototypes hang from clothing racks, and a cat wanders through the living room.
Debbie Christel’s childhood home in north Tacoma has transformed into the headquarters of Kade and Vos, a start-up company helping women get the clothes they need.
“We ask women, what do you need to be comfortable?” says company cofounder Christel ’08. “Our design process doesn’t go through a weight-biased filter. We don’t take a small pattern and make it bigger. We know that doesn’t work.”
In the United States, 67 percent of women wear a … » More …
Winter 2018
Gold mettle man
Poles planted and ready, Sean Halsted ’92 waits at the starting gate for the 15-kilometer cross-country skiing race. It’s March 2018 at the PyeongChang Winter Games and he’s wearing the signature red cap and striped jersey of the U.S. Paralympic team.
Behind sunglasses, Halsted glances at the grandstand filled with thousands of cheering fans, colorful flags, and jangling cowbells. Cameras point in every direction and he catches a glimpse of himself on the jumbotron. Though the Air Force veteran has competed all over the world, the enormity of the event is overwhelming. His eyes turn back to the countdown clock where seconds creep by until … » More …
Winter 2018
On the straight, tall, and narrow
The straight, long rows of tall and thin loblolly pine grow very fast in the South’s flat lands, especially compared to the slow-growing Douglas fir on steep Pacific Northwest slopes.
It’s just one of many differences that Travis Keatley (’99 Forest Mgmt.) has witnessed as he manages more than seven million acres of timber across 11 states for Weyerhaeuser.
As vice president of southern timberlands for the timber, land, and forest products company, Keatley works out of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and travels from Florida to Virginia to Louisiana, and all states in between, as he oversees Weyerhaeuser’s … » More …
Winter 2018
Making artificial intelligence smart
It’s not a simple thing to get a car to see what we see.
“The world is very complex. That’s what makes vision for self-driving cars a challenge. There are millions of scenarios and millions of contexts,” says Carolina Parada (’04, ’06 MS Elec. Eng.) from her home in Boulder, Colorado.
A senior manager for Nvidia, a company probably best known in the video gaming community for its top-shelf graphics cards but with a strong presence in the machine learning market, Parada and her team are working on machine perception, a key piece of getting self-driving cars safely on the
… » More …
Winter 2018
A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost
Virginia F. Smith ’97 PhD Biochem.
Clemson University Press: 2018
“Art,” said the Roman philosopher Cicero, “is born of the observation and investigation of nature.”
He said this two millennia before the arrival of Robert Frost, the New England poet who smuggled personal, subtle, and often dark themes into a vast, accessible, and popular body of work rooted largely in the natural world. As Virginia Smith notes in her fastidious A Scientific Companion to Robert Frost, … » More …
Winter 2018
From the horse’s mouth
When an international archaeology team needed to understand how an ancient civilization cared for its horses, they turned to Scott Bender ’95, a veterinarian with the Navajo Nation in Arizona.
Bender will be the first to admit that his career didn’t turn out like he expected—in fact, unforeseen twists are among his favorite parts. This particular turn got him involved in a research project that has changed our understanding of a pivotal point in human history: the emergence of horse domestication for war and transportation.
It started with a surprise phone call. Archaeologist William Taylor was examining horses exhumed from ancient … » More …
Winter 2018
Briefly noted
Freedom’s Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West
Edited by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack ’02 PhD History
University of Oklahoma Press: 2018
Between 1940 and 2010, the black population of the American West grew from 710,400 to 7 million. With that explosive growth has come a burgeoning interest in the history of the African American West—an interest reflected in the range and depth of the works collected in Freedom’s Racial Frontier that link past, current, and future generations of African American West scholarship. The West is revealed as a place where black Americans have fought—and continue to fight—to make … » More …