Awards for Visual Art, Physics Research, and More

The College of Arts & Sciences is pleased to celebrate awards and honors that our faculty have received over the past few months for their research, publications, and other accomplishments.

Rhee Named Joan Mitchell Fellow
Yankowitz Selected as Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator
Rocha Beardall Receives William T. Grant Scholars Award
Barnard Receives NSF CAREER Award
More Awards & Honors

Rob Rhee, associate professor and Jack and Grace Pruzan Endowed Faculty Fellow in the UW School of Art + Art History + Design (SoA+AH+D), has been named a 2026 Joan Mitchell Fellow, one of the most coveted prizes awarded to visual artists in the US. Awarded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, fellows receive $60,000 in unrestricted funding over five years for creating artwork.  

Rhee is in cohort of 15 Joan Mitchell Fellows for 2026. The financial support they receive is interwoven with learning, peer engagement, and network-building opportunities tailored by staff based on the artists’ interests and feedback. 

Rhee, who teaches in SoA+AH+D's 3D4M: ceramics + glass + sculpture program, incorporates gourds and other natural materials in his three-dimensional works, often pairing or transforming them. 

“As someone who came to sculpture through writing, I tend to move back and forth between the two, finding inspiration in cyclical processes of return,” Rhee says. “My decade-long relationship with gourds — in the studio and recently in collaboration with the UW Farm — follows these rhythms along different scales of influence and time. My work is the activity of cultivation, grafting, building soil and other forms of agrarian bricolage, an ongoing conversation between past and future.”

The five-year Joan Mitchell Fellowship is designed to sustain artistic practices over time rather than provide one-time cash infusions. Rhee is appreciative of the fellowship’s long-term support.

“I have found a creative community at the UW in 3D4M, at the UW Farm, and as a part of the interdisciplinary Rooted Knowledge collective,” Rhee says. “I’m excited for how this award will connect the work we are doing together on campus with others doing this work around the country and abroad. The sustained support over a five-year period, both in terms of funding and the Joan Mitchell Fellowship community, is a great boost of confidence to invest in projects and ideas that take time to materialize.”

Matthew Yankowitz, associate professor of physics and of materials science and engineering at the University of Washington, is among 21 scientists selected for the 2026 cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators, a distinguished group of mid-career researchers pushing the boundaries of experimental physics.

The Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative was established by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to support creative individuals who have recently received tenure (or its equivalent) and to cultivate collaborative research environments. Investigators are encouraged to tackle interesting new research problems, pivot when necessary, and bring on students and postdoctoral researchers to accelerate their progress. Each Experimental Physics Investigator receives $1.35 million over five years.

In his UW research, Yankowitz studies what happens when sheets of atomically thin materials, such as graphene, are stacked in precise arrangements. He explains that, under the right conditions, the electrons in these materials stop behaving independently and instead act collectively, producing exotic forms of superconductivity, magnetism, and topological states within the same material.

The Yankowitz Lab builds devices in which these quantum states can be switched on and off with applied voltages, allowing a superconductor to sit directly beside a magnet or correlated insulator within a single device, with the boundary between them defined electrically. By studying what happens when these distinct quantum states meet, the lab aims to discover new forms of collective behavior and, ultimately, to develop electronics in which quantum states are programmed by voltage rather than fixed during fabrication.

As a member of the fifth cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators, Yankowitz will have opportunities to connect with other scientists from the current and past cohorts. To help investigators learn from one another, the Initiative brings cohorts together each year in an informal setting built around trading ideas and imagining new experiments, rather than the usual conference format. The Initiative also asks investigators to lead well-mentored, high-performing research groups that develop the next generation of scientific talent and supports professional development for Investigators toward that goal.

“It is a tremendous honor to be part of this program,” says Yankowitz. “The support gives us unusual freedom to take scientific risks, pursue unexpected results, and follow our curiosity wherever it leads. I am equally excited to join such an impressive community of mid-career scientists. I expect that the ideas and interactions that emerge from this group over the coming years will push our research in new directions we cannot yet anticipate.”

Theresa Rocha Beardall, associate professor of sociology, was named a William T. Grant Scholar, one of seven researchers nationwide selected for the program this year. The award supports promising early-career researchers as they expand their expertise into new disciplines, methods, or content areas. Each William T. Grant Scholar receives $425,000 over five years.

Rocha Beardall’s research bridges the areas of race, law, inequality, policing, family policing, indigeneity, and tribal sovereignty. Her scholarship is motivated by a commitment to better understand how law, legal institutions, and legal actors marginalize select racial groups, with the goal of helping to reduce and reverse these systemic inequalities.

With the Grant Scholars award, Rocha Beardall will reconstruct the histories of Native children affected by federal Indian boarding schools in Washington State by locating, digitizing, and linking records scattered across archives, with UW student researchers helping retrieve and catalog those materials. She will work under the direction of the Puyallup Tribal Historic Preservation Department, supporting tribally governed research and curriculum development while developing new expertise in Indigenous data sovereignty and supervised machine learning.

“This award comes at an especially meaningful moment in my career because it lets me extend a question that has shaped my research for years in entirely new methodological directions,” says Rocha Beardall. “Across my work, I have examined how Native nations exercise political authority within institutions that may recognize Native people while still constraining tribal authority, including through the systems that determine what information is collected, how it is classified, and how it shapes decisions. What excites me most is the question of what becomes actionable when Native nations govern the production and use of knowledge concerning their own citizens, histories, and governing institutions.”

Recognizing that early-career researchers are rarely given incentives or support to take measured risks in their work, this award includes a mentoring component as well as a supportive academic community. The William T. Grant Foundation holds an annual retreat during the summer to support Scholars’ career development, where they discuss works-in-progress and receive constructive feedback on the challenges they face in conducting their projects. Scholars are also invited to attend other Foundation-sponsored workshops on topics relevant to their work.

“The Scholars program gives me the rare opportunity to become a student again and develop new methods while expanding what I can bring to research governed by the Tribe, from the questions we ask to how it is used,” says Rocha Beardall.

Arthur Barnard, UW assistant professor of physics and of materials science and engineering, received a 2026 National Science Foundation CAREER Award of more than $600,000 from the NSF Division of Materials Research. The CAREER Award is the agency’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty, recognizing those with the potential to become academic leaders in both research and education.

With the award, Barnard and his team will study how interactions between electrons give rise to unusual forms of electronic order in two-dimensional quantum materials, including superconducting states and electronic crystals. The researchers will use a new measurement technique developed in Barnard’s Classical and Quantum Nano-Systems Lab that allows them to deliberately change how electrons interact while simultaneously measuring how the material responds. Understanding how these interactions produce behaviors such as superconductivity could help researchers learn how to more precisely control the electronic properties of materials, foundational knowledge for the development of future electronic and quantum technologies.

Barnard’s lab has spent the past several years developing what he described as a “one-of-a-kind tool” to help researchers better understand how superconductivity and other phenomena emerge in atomically thin materials. “Now, with NSF CAREER funding, we are beginning to put this tool to work and looking forward to what we will discover,” he says.

The project will also provide research training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and support the development of open-source hardware and STEM modules that offer hands-on experience with van der Waals material assembly and electronic measurements.

The Burke Museum received the Western Museums Association’s 2026 Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award for Exhibition Excellence, for the Burke exhibition "Woven in Wool: Resilience in Coast Salish Weaving." The selection committee noted that Woven in Wool  truly exemplifies exhibition excellence as it is an important examination of the complexity of the Western United States. Read more about the Woven in Wool exhibition.

Jiun-Haw Chu, professor of physics, was named a 2026 Fellow of the American Physical Society (Division of Condensed Matter Physics), for "pioneering strain-based experimental techniques that have permitted discoveries affecting electronic nematicity, quantum criticality, superconductivity, and topological phase transitions.”

Nikki Crouse, professor of English, received the Dzanc Press Short Fiction Award for a collection of short fiction to be published in April 2027.

Elena Erosheva, professor of statistics and of social work, and director of the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, received the Mitchell Prize for a paper co-authored with former UW Statistics Ph.D. student Michael Pearce (assistant professor, Reed College). The paper describes how a Bayesian analysis has solved an important applied problem. The prize is jointly sponsored by the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association, the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, and the Mitchell Prize Founders’ Committee.

Scott Magelssen, Floyd U. Jones Family Endowed Chair, professor of theatre history and performance studies, and executive director of the School of Drama, received the 2026 Edited Works Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education for Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance, a collection co-edited with E. B. Hunter.

Jasmine Mahmoud, assistant professor of theatre history and performance studies in the School of Drama and a Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professor, was invited as a keynote speaker for the National Women's Studies Association conference in November.

Peter Sellars, artist partner at Meany Center for the Performing Arts, was awarded the rank of Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur by the French Minister of Culture. The Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) is the highest order of merit in France, recognizing excellence in intelligence, artistic creativity, and civic virtue.

A new film by David Shields, professor of English, was selected for presentation at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam, the world’s leading documentary film festival. Sheilds wrote, produced, and directed the film, "The Trouble with Men," which is loosely adapted from his book “Reality Hunger.”

Stefan Stoll, professor of chemistry, was one of four researchers awarded the 2026 Richard R. Ernst Prize in Magnetic Resonance, presented at the EUROMAR 2026 conference. The annual prize recognizes scientific achievements that expand the capabilities and impact of magnetic resonance. Stoll was recognized for his contributions to electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) through widely adopted computational tools and data analysis methods, particularly EasySpin, software developed and maintained by Stoll and colleagues. The software has become a standard resource in magnetic resonance laboratories, allowing researchers to simulate and analyze complex EPR spectra. 

Kārlis Vērdiņš, poet and acting instructor of Latvian in the Department of Scandinavian Studies, received the Baltic Assembly Prize in Literature, 2026, along with translator Valts Ernštreits, for their bilingual poetry collection, "Livonian Ballads." Vērdiņš's poems in this collection, written in Latvian, are based on the history, folklore, and mythology of Livonians, a tiny endangered minoritarian Finno-Ugric ethnic group in Northwest Latvia. The Baltic Assembly Prize is awarded annually in three categories — literature, arts, and science — to reflect the Baltic countries' shared interest in upholding national identity and self-esteem.