Research

Black womanhood and corporate branding, Indigenous mound building and volunteering for the Peace Corps are among the subjects of recent and upcoming books by University of Washington faculty.

The University of Washington is a top research university, with many opportunities for undergraduates to participate in research. Here's how to find the best opportunity for you.

A research team led by UW Electrical & Computer Engineering and UW physics professor Mo Li has developed a method of using soundwaves to move excitons farther than previously thought possible. This allows them to be used to create transistors, switches, and transducers — leading to faster and more energy-efficient computing and optical devices.

The University of Washington has joined the Alliance for Therapies in Neuroscience (ATN), a long-term research partnership between academia and industry geared to transform the fight against brain diseases and disorders of the central nervous system. Launched in 2021 by the University of California, San Francisco, UC Berkeley, Genentech — a member of the Roche group — and Roche Holding AG, the ATN seeks to accelerate the development of new therapies for a broad range of brain and central nervous system conditions.

Released last month, “The Neuroscience of You: How Every Brain is Different and How to Understand Yours,” is Chantel’s first book, and it arrived with a splash. A small tsunami, really; the highly anticipated text has been described by reviewers as “marvelous,” “hilarious,” “highly accessible,” “charming,” and “the smartest, clearest, and funniest book I’ve ever read about the brain.”

1 in 5 adult female white-necked jacobin hummingbirds look like males. New research from the University of Washington shows that this is a rare case of "deceptive mimicry" within a species: Females with male-like plumage are trying to pass themselves off as males, and as a result receive a benefit in the form of reduced aggression from males.

A new study led by the University of Washington uses cellphone location data to estimate the number of visits to Black-owned restaurants in 20 U.S. cities during the first year of the pandemic. The study finds that despite the "Black-owned" labelling campaign launched by companies such as Yelp, the number of visits to Black-owned restaurants dropped off after an initial spike and was inconsistent around the country.

A new study projects the number of days with "dangerous" and "extremely dangerous" mixtures of heat and humidity by the end of this century. Even if global warming is limited to 2 degrees Celsius, results show that deadly heat waves will become much more common in the mid-latitudes, and many tropical regions will experience "dangerous" heat for about half the year.

In a new book, Jake Grumbach writes that states are no longer looking at each other to see what works and what doesn’t to improve the lives of their residents. Rather, he says, they’re looking to the national political parties for guidance on policy, ideology and objectives.

Rod Crawford has discovered nearly 200 species that hadn’t been described before, many of which proved to be new to science. Of the nearly 190,000 Washington specimens in the Burke’s spider collection, Crawford contributed about half.

Recent and upcoming books from University of Washington faculty include those from the Jackson School of International Studies, the Department of Psychology and the Runstad Department of Real Estate.

Statistics professor Jon Wakefield led a team estimating excess deaths due to COVID. The findings caused a stir.

Which group of mammals has the more "primitive" reproductive strategy — marsupials, with their short gestation periods, or humans and other placental mammals, which have long gestation periods? For decades, biologists viewed marsupial reproduction as "more primitive." But University of Washington scientists have discovered that a third group of mammals, the long-extinct multituberculates, had a long gestation period like placental mammals. Since multituberculates split off from the rest of the mammalian lineage before placentals and marsupials had even evolved, these findings question the view that marsupials were “less advanced” than their placental cousins.

New research by scientists at the University of Washington, the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and the University of Cologne indicates that carefully designed cocktails of broadly neutralizing antibodies could help treat HIV while minimizing the risk of the virus evolving to “escape” treatment.

"The level of support in the Philippines for Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. cannot be explained by social media disinformation or sheer coercion alone," writes Vincente Rafael, Professor in the Department of History.