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Fall 2007

Student of light: Recent grad transcends boundaries

“When you come to a fork in the road,” said Yogi Berra, “take it.”

Xavier Perez-Moreno has done just that.

Last spring the effusive, pony-tailed Spaniard received a Ph.D. conferred by Washington State University and The Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. WSU officials think he is the first Cougar to earn a doctoral degree jointly with a foreign institution.

Xavi (SHAH-vee), as his friends call him, clearly isn’t big on either/or choices. Besides bridging universities on two continents, his dual degree also combines different kinds of research and departments: theoretical physics here, experimental chemistry at Leuven.

But Xavi didn’t set out to break institutional … » More …

Winter 2007

Language lessons

When Saad Alshahrani came to graduate school at Washington State University, he didn’t speak a bit of English.

Addled by the long flights from Saudi Arabia, he tried to walk out of the airport in Seattle. He didn’t understand that his new home was still 300 miles to the east. The airport officials put him on a small plane to Pullman, which left him in a near-empty airport just after midnight.

“Imagine that,” he says. “I didn’t know anybody. No taxi, and no hotel.”

Fortunately, Devon Anderson, who works for the WSU Foundation, saw Alshahrani get off the plane. She understood that he was a … » More …

Winter 2007

Jazz Down the Middle

A little before 8 a.m. one Tuesday last spring, the jazz band at Pullman’s Lincoln Middle School, a bit bed-headed and bleary-eyed, was working on a tricky rhythm. Standing at the whiteboard in Room 806, the director, Joe Covill, wrote out the notes and sang the syncopated notation.

“This is how it looks,” he said, “and this is how it sounds.”

It was only a refresher lesson, one they’d heard before, not only from Covill, but from the composer himself.

Greg Yasinitsky, a music professor at Washington State University, has been the middle school’s composer-in-residence for the past four years. In two days’ time, this … » More …

Winter 2007

Secrets & Spies

The Office of Strategic Services, our country's first centralized intelligence agency, was formed during the Second World War to train men and women in the arts of sabotage and espionage and then to send them around the world to protect our nation's interests. Among the many Washington State College students and alumni who served in that conflict, five friends and classmates trained together in the OSS, then went to North Africa, Italy, England, and China to help win the war.

» More ...
Winter 2007

Time will tell

Climate change is nothing new to our planet. But this time it's different. The carbon dioxide we are putting into the air through industry, vehicle emissions, and deforestation is changing the way our soil works. That in turn affects plant, animal, and eventually human life. Through their research Washington State University scientists are challenging the conventional view that more plants and forests will solve our CO2 problems. » More ...
Summer 2009

Nadia Daud–No place like home

Nadia Daud spends nearly 80 percent of her time living abroad, traveling to some of the most troubled regions of the world. When she’s not overseas, she has an apartment in Washington, D.C. But ask her where her home is, and she’ll tell you—Pullman, Washington.

The 31-year-old refugee officer with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security grew up south of Pioneer Hill in Pullman, graduated from local schools, and then matriculated to Washington State University. It was a remarkably stable childhood for someone who now lives out of a suitcase and spends her days interviewing refugees.

“In this last year and a half I … » More …