Research

The College of Arts & Sciences is home to many distinguished researchers, faculty, and students. Their work and contributions have been featured in media outside of the UW and across the country. Take a look at some ArtSci features from this past Spring Quarter. From AI to nature's poets, ArtSci in the Media has something for everyone!

Speculative fiction author Anselma Prihandita (PhD, language and rhetoric, 2025), a Nebula Award winner, finds that her creative writing bolsters her scholarly work in unexpected ways. 

A new type of computer simulation predicts that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will discover millions of previously undetected objects in the solar system over the course of the coming decade. Mario Juri, professor of astronomy at the UW, is quoted.

Alejandro Rico Guevara is one of the foremost researchers on hummingbird bills. He has spent years studying how hummingbirds use their beaks to feed and fight. But his latest research looked at how human actions seem to be driving a high-speed example of evolution in hummingbird bills.Rico-Guevara, assistant professor of biology at the UW and curator of birds at the UW Burke Museum, is interviewed.

A group of astronomers from across the globe, including a team from the University of Washington and led by Queens University Belfast, have revealed new research showing that millions of new solar system objects will be detected by a brand-new facility, which is expected to come online later this year.

On June 3, scientists working on the Muon g-2 experiment (pronounced "mew-on gee-minus-two") released the third and final measurement of the muon magnetic anomaly. This result agrees with the published results from 2021 and 2023 but with a much better precision of 127 parts per billion, surpassing the original experimental design goal of 140 parts per billion.

WRF planning grant fuels effort to unify and elevate research on the brain across the university.

While at the UW, artist Kyra Wolfenbarger has been a researcher, museum intern, and arts writer. What’s shaped her most are the people she’s met along the way.

Using a powerful research telescope, astronomy and physics major Max Frissell identified a never-before-seen comet. Now he’s hooked.

Nine months ago, the Seattle school implemented one of the strictest phone bans in the citys public school district, requiring its 755 students to lock up their devices in pouches for the school day. Luca Magis-Weinberg, assistant professor of psychology at the UW, is quoted.

Many bird enthusiasts like to hang bright red feeders filled with homemade sugar water to attract hummingbirds to their gardens. Now, new research suggests this common practice may be driving rapid evolutionary change in one species in California. Alejandro Rico-Guevara, assistant professor of biology at the UW and curator of birds at the UW Burke Museum, is quoted.

A new study suggests that Anna's Hummingbirds in the western United States are not only keeping up with human influence on their habitat, they're thriving. Alejandro Rico-Guevara, assistant professor of biology at the UW and curator of birds at the UW Burke Museum, is quoted.

From campus to wherever you call home, we welcome you to learn from and connect with the College of Arts & Sciences community through public events spanning the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. We hope to see you this June.

If you're reaching for a chatbot instead of a search engine or a trusted source, think twice before acting on the information it gives you. Katy Pearce, associate professor of communication at the UW, is interviewed.

Because of its unique status in the modern world, myths and misunderstandings about Chinese characters abound. Where does this writing system, so different in form and function from alphabetic writing, come from? How does it really work? By exploring the spread and adaptation of the script across two millennia and thousands of miles, Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (University of Washington Press, 2025) by Dr. Zev Handel addresses these questions and provides insights into human cognition and culture.