That was ten years ago. Harkins has since worked with a wide range of leaders, students, faculty, staff, and activists across a variety of programs, campuses, and communities to help build coalitions dedicated to increasing access to higher education for those who face the greatest barriers to it. For this collaborative work, Harkins recently received the Barclay Simpson Prize for Scholarship in Public from the Simpson Center, which carries an award of $10,000.
“What so impressed the board is Gillian Harkins’ profound dual commitment to both building programs and networks to make higher education available to incarcerated adults and to writing about it,” says Kathy Woodward, director of the Simpson Center and professor of English. “She is known across the country not only for her deeply collaborative work in Washington state but also for her influential writing on prison education.”
Harkins is currently leading the Simpson Center’s 2018-2019 Prison Education Collaboration, part of a longer-term project that gathers teachers from across campuses and prisons to create a model for inside-outside collaboration. The goal is to support the work of other prison education groups, including programs founded by currently incarcerated individuals.
“I think those of us at the UW do have a lot to offer, but only if we find ways to do this work collaboratively,” says Harkins. “It’s not an intrinsic good to have resources and bring them somewhere. You have to think of and center the goals of the community you are partnering with and ask: who is benefiting?”
Excerpted from an April 1, 2019 article published by the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
An Astronaut Joins Hall of Fame
Growing up in small-town Missouri, Janet Kavandi had a fascination with the night sky. She dreamed of being an astronaut but never thought it would happen. “When I was young, space flight was a cold war competition between two world powers, and the only astronauts were male military test pilots," she explains.
By the time Kavandi (PhD, chemistry, 1990) finished college, more opportunities had opened up and in 1994, she was selected as a member of the 15th class of U.S. astronauts. Earlier this year she was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame, joining two previous honorees from the UW College of Arts and Sciences, Richard F. Gordon Jr. (BS, Chemistry, 1957) and George Pinky Nelson (MS, PhD, Astronomy, 1974, 1978).
In a 1998 story for Perspectives newsletter, Kavandi recalled her first launch, on a space shuttle headed for space station Mir. "I had been told by other astronauts not to assume you were going anywhere until the solid rocket boosters ignited, so as the countdown was proceeding, I was almost expecting a hold or an abort,” she said. “When the main engines ignited six seconds before liftoff, I was thinking, `Hey, this might just happen!' Then the solid rocket boosters went and shot us off the pad. I just started laughing and crying all at the same time. It was a very special moment.”
Kavandi would go on to fly into space two more times and log more than 13.1 million miles in 535 orbits of Earth. She then took on a leadership role at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, serving as the director of Flight Crew Operations. She currently serves as director of NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
Being inducted into the astronaut hall of fame is “a huge honor," says Kavandi. Of course, so was flying on three NASA missions. “I had the best job in the world flying into space,” she says. “Nothing compares to that.”
This article is excerpted from a February 27, 2019 Columns magazine story and an October 1998 Perspectives newsletter story.
A Whale of an Honor
Elizabeth Nesbitt, curator of invertebrate paleontology and micropaleontology at the Burke Museum, has been recognized in a big way. Smithsonian scientists have named a newly discovered species of long-extinct whale in her honor.
A fossil of the whale, dating back about 33 million years, reveals a whale species notable for both its lack of teeth and of baleen — rows of flexible hair-like plates that filter relatively tiny prey from gulps of ocean water. An article in the journal Current Biology explains that the lack of these features "represents a surprising intermediate stage between modern filter-feeding whales and their toothed ancestors."
The species has been named Maiabalaena nesbittae. Carlos Mauricio Peredo, the lead author of a study of the fossils explains that Maiabalena combines the words for “mother” and “whale,” and nesbittae honors Nesbitt “for her lifetime of contribution to the paleontology of the Pacific Northwest and her mentorship and collegiality at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.”
Nesbitt, also an associate professor of earth and space sciences, studies fossils throughout the western North America. She works primarily with marine fossils, investigating, variously, the most recent major extinction event of marine fauna, which occurred over 30 million years ago, the biotic communities around hydrocarbon seeps, the microbiota of Puget Sound, and how implications of modern microbiota called foraminfera are key indicators of the Sound’s health today.
In addition to her research, Nesbitt is committed to public outreach, and as curator of invertebrate paleontology and micropaleontology at the Burke Museum, she has put together exhibits on everything from the Pacific Northwest’s seismic history to fanciful imaginings of fossils brought to life.
Learn more about Maiabalaena nesbittae and the clues it provides.
Faculty Artwork Takes First Place
The jury has spoken. An oil painting by Philip Govedare, UW professor of painting and drawing in the School of Art + Art History + Design (SoA+AH+D), received the first-place Juror’s Choice award in the Whatcom Museum’s Bellingham National 2019 Juried Art Exhibition and Awards earlier this year.
Fifty-seven artists from across the US were chosen for the exhibition by guest juror Bruce Guenther, an art historian and independent curator who has served as curator at the Portland Art Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and Seattle Art Museum. In addition to Govedare, the exhibition featured works by SoA+AH+D alumni Sharon Birzer (MFA 1995), Emily Gherard (MFA 2004), and Cable Griffith (MFA 2002).
Govedare’s award-winning artwork, “Artifact,” is a landscape painting. The artist explains that his landscapes are derived from sites that are both visually compelling and charged with implications of use, development, and ownership. The work, he says, “comes from a perspective of anxiety about the condition of landscape and nature in our world today.”
A Third of "Husky 100" from CAS
Each spring, the UW announces its Husky 100, recognizing 100 undergraduate and graduate students who are making the most of their time at the UW. Of the students honored for 2019, 37 are from the College of Arts & Sciences, from undergraduates planning academic conferences to doctoral students promoting diversity in their field. To learn more, visit the UW’s Husky 100 webpage, which features photos and brief profiles of all 100 students. Congratulations to the honorees for this well-deserved recognition!
