In the Media

Like many medications, naloxone — the nasal spray that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose — comes in a flimsy box. The device that administers the medication is shaped like a cartoon spaceship and has to remain sealed in blister pack until use. It’s clunky to carry and can be sprayed accidentally. 

With a new device that began as a class project, Western Washington University alum Brendan Mudd wants to put the life-saving medication into more hands by making it easier to carry around and conceal.  

Mudd spent the four months since graduation finalizing its design and is now seeking Food and Drug Administration approval — a process that could take several years, he said.  

Two new Washington projects aim to establish healthier learning environments that improve student performance and morale, and foster feelings of belonging and well-being.

Two new regional developments have implemented this Living Design Framework: University of Washington’s Life Sciences Building and Western Washington University’s electrical engineering and computer science building, Kaiser Borsari Hall.

Most people think of seismic activity as the result of movement along faults or of violent volcanic eruptions. But seismic events can have other causes, including floods and even large crowds of excited fans—such as those at Taylor Swift’s recent Seattle shows, whose enthusiastic reception caused seismic activity equivalent to a 2.3 magnitude earthquake—and glaciers.

Decades ago, scientists who research seismic activity in the Washington Cascades recorded a number of small seismic events and eventually determined that they were caused by glacier movement. These events, called “glacier quakes,” allow for important insight into seismic activity, patterns of glacier movement and even climate events.

For Washington state residents, seismic activity is nothing new. 

Meagan Bryson serves as the first director of the newly minted Academic Advising and Student Achievement Center at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash. The center is part of an institutional alignment to connect student services and promote student success on campus.

Bryson spoke with Inside Higher Ed about her new role, developing partnerships across the campus community and investing in the next generation of student affairs professionals

Jared Ross Hardesty, an associate history professor at Western Washington University who’s written about slavery in Boston, said the records can help decipher details of enslaved people’s everyday lives, and tell of the prevalence of slavery in Colonial Boston. For example, Boston probate records list Pompey, an enslaved Black 14-year-old boy, in the 1759 inventory of Thomas Fleet. Fleet left Pompey to his son, Thomas Fleet Jr., a printer who taught the youth his own trade. From this record, Hardesty said, people can imagine Pompey working at the printing press, circulating materials at the brink of the American Revolution.

“Using those kinds of contextual clues, you can kind of build out a little bit of a kind of life story around an enslaved person,” he said.

The Lummi Nation welcomed hundreds of community members into the Wex’liem Community Building Monday night, Oct. 9, for salmon, song, dance and speeches to mark Indigenous Peoples Day. 

With the Blackhawk singers opening and closing the event, the celebration featured Indigenous people from across the region. 

Keynote speaker and doctor Evan Adams, from the Tla'amin Nation north of Powell River, British Columbia, came to Lummi for the event to speak about Canadian Indigenous experiences and health care. 

Youth speaker Santana Rabang of the Lummi Nation, Nooksack Tribe and First Nations Shxwhá:y Village spoke of her personal experience watching Indigenous people become more represented in mainstream culture. Several speakers from the Lummi Nation and surrounding tribes spoke at the event as well. 

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: If you walk along the beach on the Pacific Northwest coast, you might not notice some very special things. They're called clam gardens, and they've been sitting along the shore for thousands of years.

MARCO HATCH: Clam gardens are these really special intertidal spaces where for thousands of years, Indigenous people moved rocks to the low tide line to terrace the beach, just like you could terrace a hill to grow more grapes. You can terrace a beach to increase the area for clams to live.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Marco Hatch. He's an associate professor at Western Washington University in environmental science and a member of the Samish Indian Nation. He's also a clam garden expert.

Now, clam gardens are an Indigenous innovation that's essentially a rock wall along the shoreline. These structures allow the rising tides to bring sediment over the rock wall to create an ideal habitat for the clams. But then during low tide, it creates an exposed beach that's ideal for harvesting.

Hatch says clams' grown in gardens are two to four times the size of other clams. And the gardens are 150% to 300% more productive than wild beaches.

Beneath the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of New Zealand, lies a sea's worth of water, locked within the Earth's crust. Researchers believe that this sunken reservoir may play an important role in dampening the strength of earthquakes in the Western Pacific.

We tend to think of earthquakes as sudden, often violent events that take place over a matter of seconds. But energy can also be released from the Earth's crusts in slow motion, over a period of weeks or months. These are called slow slip events and they occur when tectonic plates get temporarily locked together as one attempts to slide past the other.

New Zealand sits at the boundary of two major tectonic plates: the Australian Plate and the Pacific Plate. The boundary between these plates is known as a fault, and this particular Australian-Pacific fault is known for producing these slow-motion earthquakes. But, while experts believe many slow slip earthquakes are associated with buried water under the Earth's crust, no direct geological evidence for an underground reservoir has been found at this particular site. Until now.

Full story features WWU geologist Andrew Gase.

Hundreds of Western Washington University students marched to Depot Market Square on Wednesday, Sept. 27 to celebrate the first official day of fall quarter with Western Wednesday: First Night Out.

The march kicked off from Red Square, led by the pep band, and ended with live music, free Boundary Bay Brewery & Bistro macaroni and cheese, booths from local businesses and more.

As classes start at Western Washington University, increasing retention is top of mind for the university’s administrative team. 

Western is running a $2.2 million deficit this year after a 3% budget cut across the board last spring due to enrollment declines since the pandemic. In 2019, the university had 16,142 students enrolled — in 2022, there were only 14,747. 

However, last year’s freshman class was the biggest in history. Early numbers show promising first-year enrollment this year, near the level of last year’s class of 3,223, Western Communications Director Jonathan Higgins said.  

“That’s all a very encouraging development for us here,” Higgins said. But a big challenge for the university is now making sure those freshmen come back for a second year. Last year, the university reported that only 77.1% of freshman students from fall 2021 returned in fall 2022.