Effective Jan. 1, the UW College of Architecture and Urban Planning will be renamed College of Built Environments. The Board of Regents approved the name change on Sept. 18. Dean Daniel S. Friedman says that the college is increasingly focused on sustainable practices and environmental quality, and that the new name is a way of making that offi cial. "‘College of Built Environments' better reflects our core responsibility to 21st-century challenges—urbanization, climate change and livable communities," Friedman says.
Clarita Lefthand Begay received the 2008 Bullitt Foundation Environmental Fellowship, a $100,000 cash prize for a graduate student from the Pacific Northwest who has achieved a stellar academic record in spite of a disadvantaged background. A member of the Navajo Nation and a doctoral student in the UW's School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Begay is working on more effective methods of detecting bacteria in drinking water.
The National Institutes of Health has awarded the Pacific Northwest Center for the National Children's Study at the UW a grant of approximately $40 million. Over the next five years, the UW will partner with Washington State University, Oregon Health and Science University, and local communities in Washington's Grant County and Oregon's Marion County to conduct the largest study of child health in United States history.
President Mark A. Emmert, '75, has been elected to the National Academy of Public Administration. As a member of the nonprofit coalition, he will be working with other top public management and organizational leaders to combat the nation's most critical problems.
Provost Phyllis Wise has been elected to the Institute of Medicine, the nation's most prestigious organization for academic medicine. A UW professor of physiology, biophysics, obstetrics, and gynecology, Wise currently heads a research program dealing with women's health issues and gender-based biology. Also elected was Lawrence Corey, a professor of laboratory medicine, medicine, and microbiology and the head of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's Program in Infectious Diseases.
On Oct. 1, Thomas Baillie became dean of the University of Washington School of Pharmacy. He had been with the Merck pharmaceutical company since 1994, most recently as vice president and global head of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics.
Jennifer Culkin, a nurse at Harborview Medical Center, is one of six winners of the 2008 Rona Jaffe award for emerging women writers. She received the $25,000 prize in honor of her collection of essays, A Final Arc of Sky.
Russell Ellis, a UW Police Department officer, received a Lifesaving Award at the 2008 Governor's Industrial Safety and Health Conference. On June 16, while driving, he spotted an elderly woman lying face-down on the sidewalk. After noting she was not breathing, he quickly dialed 911 and began administering CPR. She was later taken to a hospital, where she recovered.
Assistant Professor of Music Huck Hodge is the winner of the Gaudeamus Prize for composition for his recent work, Parallaxes. He will receive 4,550 euros for a new composition to be performed at the next International Gaudeamus Music Week.
Stephanie Smallwood, associate professor of history, won the 2008 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. She received $25,000 for her book, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, for the best book written in English on slavery or abolition.
A bench in the Medicinal Herb Garden was recently inscribed in recognition of Bill Talley, campus landscape architect emeritus. The bench honors his service at the UW from 1987 to 2007.—Compiled by Ioana Albu