Research

A concert may seem magical, the performance effortless. But in reality, such an undertaking requires months—or years—of intense preparation and planning. Here, three faculty share what’s involved before they ever set foot on the stage.

A year-long series, “Now Urbanism: City-making in the 21st Century and Beyond,” is exploring cities from a humanist perspective, focusing on such issues as social justice, environmental urbanism, and social networks.

Liliana Lengua, professor of psychology, is studying the impacts of economic disadvantage and parenting in the development of "effortful control," the ability to regulate one's responses to external stimuli.

Scientists have long dreamed of creating artificial enzymes, with the potential for "greener" approaches in manufacturing, pollution abatement, and other fields, but the challenges have seemed insurmountable. Now a team of UW scientists has created one of the first artificial enzymes from scratch.

In Making Minds and Madness, Professor Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen argues that many mental health conditions are as much a social construct as medical diagnosis, with doctors or therapists and their patients creating them together.

UW geography students extensively researched neighborhoods along three new RapidRide bus routes in King County, then created a website to share their information with artists creating work for those routes. 

Is anybody else out there? Are there other planets that resemble Earth? Scientists in the Virtual Planetary Laboratory are looking for clues by creating virtual planets through computer modeling. 

The growing trend of allowing police to "banish" citizens from certain neighborhoods is explored in Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America, by UW Professors Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert.

Working in teams with seniors from the Pike Market Senior Center, students in a course on qualitative research methods learned to embrace the "organized chaos" that is field research.

The new Center for Human Rights, based in the College of Arts and Sciences with Angelina Godoy as director, hopes to encourage broad collaboration on human rights issues. “It’s gratifying to see how readily colleagues across the campus have embraced the Center’s interdisciplinary vision,” says Godoy. 

When the economy floundered, Chinese migrant workers were among the largest casualties globally, in part because of a Maoist-era institution known as hukou that continues to function in China today, creating two levels of citizenship.

Over the past half century, the Brown Treesnake has decimated bird populations in Guam, leading to the extinction of nearly all native birds. Now researchers are studying the impact of bird extinctions on the island's remaining flora and fauna. 

Accurate predictions for the spread of AIDS are hard to come by in countries where health data is limited. An A&S professor's new statistical model has improved accuracy of AIDS projections and is now being adopted by many African countries. 

With support from a major Challenge Grant, the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities is planning a Digital Humanities Commons to create and evaluate the next generation of digital humanities scholarship. 

Disappointed by the depiction of Helen of Troy in a recent film, Ruby Blondell was inspired to research Helen, whom she describes as “simultaneously the supreme object of men’s desire and the instrument, or agent, of their destruction.”