From Willamette to Washington

Moments before being interviewed live, on-air with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, presidential candidate and Washington Governor Jay Inslee JD’76 turns to his campaign communications director, Jamal Raad ’08, for advice about one of his talking points.

“Is there value in offering a response to the issue of polling?” asked Inslee.

“If I was focused on polls, I wouldn’t run on climate change,” Raad suggested. “We’re running because we feel deeply that the president needs to make this issue a priority.”

Gov. Inslee isn’t the first Bearcat presidential candidate Raad served. As a student, Raad led a successful ASWU presidential campaign for his college roommate, Louis Pappas ’08.

Exploratory

Pappas and Raad connected early on, both running for ASWU seats as first-year students. “We got to campus, unpacked, and both started putting up posters,” said Pappas. They won the election and formed a lifelong friendship that would take them and their senior housemates to Washington, D.C., and to the White House.

“For the first time, I met folks that really shared my core values and outlook on the world,” said Raad.

One rhetoric professor, in particular, made an impact on Raad and his housemates: Nathaniel “Nacho” Cordova. “My advisor, Nacho, would challenge you to think deeply about text and how to absorb complicated concepts,” said Raad.

By the time Raad finished his junior year, he’d worked on his own ASWU campaign and two others’ as he and his housemates considered internship opportunities. “We always talked politics,” said Matt Read ’08, a rhetoric and politics major who lived with Raad and Pappas.

The house would become the group’s think tank of sorts, and Raad’s advisor, Cordova, would stop by for dinner. “I remember how much of an impact Nacho had on me and Jamal,” said Read. “I got smarter by virtue of trying to keep up with them.”

Read had served as a legislative intern for then state representative — now Oregon Treasurer — Tobias Read ’96 (no relation). Through Read’s internship, Raad heard about Oregon’s speaker of the house, Jeff Merkley, who was trying to unseat the state’s incumbent U.S. Senator. Raad contacted the campaign office to ask about an internship but got no reply. So he contacted them again. Raad’s persistence paid off, and he became the first intern on Merkley’s campaign.

Primary

After graduation, Merkley hired Raad, who’d spent most of his senior year working in Portland on the campaign. Pappas became a field organizer in Ohio for the Obama campaign, and Read joined him as a volunteer. Another roommate, Josh Heath-Riggs ’08, would follow soon after.

When visiting his senior housemates shortly after Obama’s inauguration, Heath-Riggs decided to stay and later joined Raad as the Merkley campaign’s research director. Now he puts those skills to work for Sen. Ron Wyden as an investigator on the Senate Finance Committee, where he is responsible for vetting appointees in key financial and policymaking positions.

“We were all here because we wanted to do what we could to make things better,” said Heath-Riggs.

Pappas, Raad and Read with Pappas’ sister at Barack Obama’s inauguration

At the same time, Pappas landed a position with the Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget before transitioning to the Office of the White House Counsel as a senior legal assistant.

“I don’t think anyone meeting us as freshman would imagine one of us staffing a governor, senator or the president,” said Pappas. “Knowing that Jamal was doing it and knowing how that world works inspired me to get involved.”

Raad would serve on Sen. Merkley’s team through his 2014 reelection, eventually becoming Merkley’s press secretary and new media director.

“Jamal is family. He played critical roles on my campaigns and Senate team, taking extensive initiative to propose and implement new strategies and ideas,” said the senator. “His contributions reflect creative professional competence. But more than that, Jamal works and lives with enormous heart."

After Merkley’s 2014 reelection, Raad would head home to the Seattle, where he became the communications director for the Washington State Democratic Party — and where he met Gov. Inslee.

The general

On March 1, Inslee announced his presidential candidacy, focusing on climate change. “We’re the first generation that feels the sting of climate change, and we’re the last that can do something about it,” he said in his launch video.

Raad agrees. “Climate change is the existential crisis of our time,” he said. “Willamette is where I developed a sense of the environment and that climate change is happening in a real and significant way,” said Raad. “I felt a sense of responsibility to act.”

“Not unto ourselves alone are we born — it reflects the idea that you benefited from others and have a responsibility to do something in return,” said Raad.

As Inslee’s campaign communications director, Raad is happy with how the campaign’s unfolded. Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and broadcast media of all stripes have taken note. The Onion’s even written several times about Inslee, prompting a response from the candidate:

This was supposed to be off the record. https://t.co/y8ns10UOKw

— Jay Inslee (@JayInslee) May 23, 2019

Jokes aside, Raad and Inslee have serious plans for the White House. “Our mission is the wholesale mobilization of the federal government to engage with climate change,” said Raad.

“I don’t know whether Jamal’s tremendous creative ability and insightful strategic thought comes just from native talent or is a product of a world class Willamette education,” said Inslee. “I have been in public life for 30 years and rank him in the top echelon of political thinkers. And it’s fun to work with a fellow Bearcat!"

“It's a tremendous privilege to be involved,” said Raad. “The governor talks about how we can be the heroes in this effort. That inspires me to get to work every morning.”

Collaborative Research Catalyzes Career

As the head of the National Cancer Institute’s Antiviral Immunity and Resistance Section, Alex Compton ’06 leads a team of researchers who study HIV and emerging viruses.

“There’s something fascinating and terrifying about pathogens,” said Compton, who was bitten by the research bug as a first-year student in a class taught by Sharon Rose, biology professor emerita. “It’s mind-altering to see the type of devastation they cause. I realized in Professor Rose’s class that I wanted to understand how and why this happens — why does a cold virus cause mild symptoms while a hemorrhagic fever virus might kill you?”

Unsure whether he wanted to treat diseases as a doctor or to study pathogens in a lab, Compton applied for a research position through the Science Collaborative Research Program, a competitive summer experience that pays students to work directly with faculty members.

“I usually didn’t take first-year students in SCRP,” said Barbara Stebbins-Boaz, biology professor emerita. “But Alex was a sophisticated writer and very thoughtful, so I thought I’d take a chance.”

It paid off for both.

Stebbins-Boaz and a group of Willamette student researchers published a paper about an herbicide’s effect on frog egg cells, ultimately earning Compton his first academic publication.

“That first lab experience was eye-opening,” said Compton. “It was more than a foundation for my current research, I enjoyed the process — the type of thinking I learned in the lab.”

It led him to apply at the National Institutes of Health after graduating. “My previous research experience was important and seen as a positive,” said Compton, who landed a position studying viruses with NIH.

Compton took more than lab methods from his time at Willamette. Though not required as a biology major, he took the entire organic chemistry series and served as a teaching assistant to Todd Silverstein, chemistry professor emeritus.

In Peter Wogan’s “Controversies and Issues in Cultural Anthropology” course, Compton remembers being particularly challenged by a writing assignment. “The topic I picked was probably not the wisest: ‘Why does body odor smell the way it does to us?’” Compton said. “The ‘C-’ may have been the worst grade I've ever gotten on a paper.”

“I’ve not read a lot of essays on body odor,” said Wogan, professor of anthropology. “The point of the assignment was to push students to come up with original insights from a human-centered perspective, so he took a biological question and ran with it; I love that he brought together hard science and qualitative research to answer his question.”

Compton continued with his postgraduate work in molecular biology and virology at the University of Washington in Seattle and with a fellowship at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. His doctoral research and current focus is on HIV — how it spreads at the cellular level and the evolution of the virus.

“While I remember moments in different disciplines that had a lasting effect on me, listening to Professor Craig explain natural selection was a definitive moment,” said Compton, who’d covered the subject in high school and earned an ‘A’ in the class. “I realized that I never understood it, and I learned how much it comes down to how the material is communicated.”

Communication is a focus of Willamette’s biology program and a lesson Compton has taken directly to his job at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland.

In addition to the copious reading and writing one would expect, visual communication is a growing part of Compton’s work. “We spend a huge amount of time on graphic design and visualization of data to present our research in the easiest to understand way,” said Compton.

His team’s work is replete with the types of graphs and charts he created in his first lab experience with Stebbins-Boaz, who took a chance on the quiet first-year student.

“Alex takes on the complexities of the immune system and viruses,” said Stebbins-Boaz, who’s thrilled for the success of her former student and intrigued by his work. “Pulling those fields together is the pinnacle of intellectual and research achievement.”

Eclipse Event: Shining in the Dark

It was a head-to-head battle that pitted sun vs. moon.

On August 21, 2017, darkness fell over the Willamette University campus in Salem and the crowd of over 2,500 erupted in cheers and applause. As one of the few college campuses along the “path of totality,” Willamette University had the unprecedented opportunity to host an out-of-this-world viewing and learning experience. In the end, the campus community came together to put on an exciting and memorable event.

Now Willamette’s eclipse event has received a Silver Anvil award by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). Each year the Silver Anvils recognize excellence in communications and marketing planning, strategies and tactics. Of nearly 120 entries in the events category, Willamette’s eclipse event was a top five finalist along with programs by the Smithsonian National Zoo, Duke Energy, Universal Pictures and the World Pancreatic Cancer Coalition. At the awards program on June 7 in New York City, Willamette's event was named the recipient of the Silver Anvil.

Billed as the “Phenomenon on the Lawn” (Willamette’s North Lawn served as the main viewing location), Willamette’s eclipse event included community events and one of the largest gatherings of solar scientists in the world. The weekend activities included a pub talk with a Willamette physics professor, keynote lecture by astronomer and author Ray Jayawardhana and campus-wide eclipse viewing event open to the public. The American Astronomical Society partnered with Willamette Academy, the university’s college access program for underrepresented high school students, to present twelve tables of science demonstrations throughout the viewing.

Media outlets including CNN, The Weather Channel, National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, Oregon Public Broadcasting and The New York Times covered the event, including a 360 video shot, in part, on campus.

CNN Español highlighted Willamette Academy, and many outlets interviewed Willamette President Steve Thorsett, who's also an astrophysicist.

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Video

CNN

CNN Español at Willamette Academy

Coevolution and Darwin's 'abominable mystery'

A Joshua tree wields serrated blades to repel invaders. But the yucca moth is undeterred. Seduced by a succulent flower, the moth flits by hedgerows of sword-like leaves. She shrouds herself in white petals, and the ancient ritual begins.

The dusty grey insect follows ancestral instructions imprinted in her genetic code. Stakes are high: Her children’s lives are on the line.

Complex relationships among flowering plants and pollinators shape nearly every aspect of modern terrestrial life. Flowering plants are our food, shelter, clothing and medicine, yet fundamental questions remain about their sudden diversification 100 million years ago.

Charles Darwin recognized that his theory of gradual evolution was threatened by this fossilized bloom, describing it as an “abominable mystery.”

New research into the Joshua tree genome suggests that evolutionary pressures among pollinators and plants may be part of the answer to Darwin's mystery.

Coevolutionary Clues

Coevolution occurs when one species’ evolution affects the evolution of another species, which, in turn, affects the evolution of the original species.

By eating slower gazelles, cheetahs reduce the overall number of “slow” genes in gazelles’ gene pool. Fast gazelles put pressure on cheetahs to speed up, which, in turn, puts pressure on gazelles once again. The cheetah’s explosive sprint and gazelle’s nimble leap were shaped by a coevolutionary arms race over millennia.

Unlike the evolutionary footrace between cheetahs and gazelles, yucca moths and Joshua trees have a special type of coevolutionary relationship known as an obligate mutualism. Each partner depends on the other for survival. Only yucca moths pollinate Joshua trees; in turn, Joshua trees serve as nurseries for moth larvae, which feed on the plant’s seeds. But there is a twist — two of them, actually. There are two species of Joshua tree and two corresponding species of yucca moth. The pairs live in different Southwest neighborhoods, but their territories overlap in a 60-mile stretch of desert in Tikaboo Valley, Nevada.

A few hours drive from Las Vegas, the remote desert ecosystem serves as an outdoor laboratory for Chris Smith, an evolutionary biologist and professor at Willamette University. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Smith has collaborated for nearly a decade with other researchers, undergraduate science students and citizen-scientist volunteers to gather and analyze field measurements, to decode the Joshua tree’s genome, and to look for genetic signatures of coevolution between Joshua tree and yucca moth.

“Darwin described this as ‘the most wonderful case of fertilization ever published,’” said Smith. “I think it’s our best shot at solving his ‘abominable mystery.’”

Darwin’s “Abominable Mystery”

Biologists have circumstantial evidence that pollinators may be part of the answer. “Not only do flowering plants, or angiosperms, and pollinating insects proliferate in the fossil record at the same moment in deep time,” says Smith, “Four of every five plants are angiosperms; most have specialist pollinators.”

Darwin’s contemporary, French paleobotanist Gaston de Saporta, also thought pollinators were a part of the solution. He wrote to Darwin in 1877 describing a mechanism — a biological feedback loop — that could explain the rapid rise of flowering plants:

“Insects and plants have therefore been simultaneously cause and effect through their connection with each other, plants not being able to diversify without insects and the latter not being able to provide many pollen and nectar feeders so long as the plant kingdom remained poor in arrangements and was composed almost exclusively of [non-flowering] plants.” 

Unsatisfied with his own supposition — that some isolated, lost continent served as an evolutionary incubator for flowering plants — Darwin recognized the power of Saporta’s idea and immediately wrote back:

“Your idea that [flowering] plants were not developed in force until sucking insects had been evolved seems to me a splendid one. I am surprised that the idea never occurred to me, but this is always the case when one first hears a new and simple explanation of some mysterious phenomenon.”

While speculation goes back to Darwin’s time about insects’ role in arranging Earth’s flowering bouquet, major challenges have stymied efforts to demonstrate that pollinators drive speciation — a notion that’s inconsistent with the prevailing theory.

“Evolutionary theory predicts a stable relationship, or stasis, between Joshua tree and yucca moth. Their interactions shouldn’t spark evolutionary change,” says Smith. “But that’s not what our research suggests is going on.”

Evolutionary Arms Race

Because changes occur over many generations, observing evolution is particularly challenging for long-lived organisms like the Joshua Tree that might not reproduce or reach maturity for decades. Likewise, systems with multiple pollinators can confound scientists trying to determine the effect any one pollinator species has on a particular plant species.

“Many plant-pollinator interactions are among generalists, where both parties have other choices,” says Anne Royer, an evolutionary ecologist and postdoctoral researcher responsible for genomic analyses. Royer relies on Joshua trees’ exclusive pollinator relationship and hybrid zone to winnow the potential field of genetic influences and to identify snippets of Joshua tree DNA associated with a particular trait.

Researchers hypothesized that physical differences between Joshua tree flowers were related to a key feature of the yucca moth: the length of the moth’s ovipositor. Moths unfurl this needle-like organ to inject their larvae into the flower’s style – a small tube connecting the plant’s flower and ovules, or unfertilized seeds. One species of Joshua tree produces flowers with a short style. It’s pollinated by a moth with a short ovipositor. The other tree species has a longer style and is pollinated by a moth with a long ovipositor.

Smith believes that a cold war between pollinator and plant is pushing the two Joshua tree species further apart. He suspects that some Joshua trees evolved longer styles to make it harder for moth larvae to reach and eat as many seeds. Some moths evolved longer ovipositors in response.

The partners avoided mutually assured destruction for millennia through natural selection. Then a million years ago, the genetic seas parted. One species became two.

DivergenceSmith and Royer are looking in the flower’s DNA for clues to Darwin’s mystery. “If the flower is involved in speciation, we should find signs of genetic and structural variations,” says Smith.

The team relied on big data tools to track down genetic variations associated with the floral style. To see if those genes were under positive selection pressure from a particular pollinator, Smith and Royer looked for Joshua tree gene variants associated with one moth’s territory and not the other’s. They also looked for gene variants that are rare among hybrids, which suggests selection against those traits.

While these powerful tools can uncover relationships in enormous data sets, they don’t show whether a particular genetic variant actually causes the flower to develop a longer style, for example, only that plants with this genetic variant tend to have longer styles.

“When we compare across these three tests, we find a startling overlap,” says Smith. “Genetic variants that are associated with style length also appear to be under selection pressure. In fact, these genes show some of the strongest signs in the Joshua tree genome of being under selection pressure.”

Not only do the Joshua tree and yucca moth offer a clear physical target for coevolutionary influence — length of the style — the exclusive plant-pollinator relationship allow scientists to have more confidence in attributing genetic variation to the pollinator’s influence.

“There appears to be strong disruptive selection pressure on the Joshua tree flower,” says Smith, who is quick to add that his team’s research hasn’t fully resolved Darwin’s “abominable mystery.” “Our study suggests that natural selection driven by pollinators plays an important role in fostering diversity among angiosperms such as the Joshua tree and—perhaps—all flowering plants.”

Special Event Coverage

I enjoyed working with The Oregonian's higher ed reporter and university president to help share news about the solar eclipse and related events on campus:  

Eclipse fever strikes Oregon universities, schools seize 'unique educational opportunity'

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Governor's Proclamation

For the university's 175th birthday, I worked with our governor to declare February 1, 2017, as "Willamette Day" in Oregon. 

Looking Under the Hood

Physicist David Altman is moved by myosin. We all are.

Myosin is a motor protein. Responsible for every conscious and unconscious flex of our muscles, it beats our hearts.

Altman wants to understand how the molecular motor works — how the roiling action inside of a cell affects myosin's function. In 2012, Altman spent his junior sabbatical at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, performing an experiment that tested competing theories about muscle fibers’ unusual mechanical properties. The results of his experiment were published April 16 in PLoS ONE.

Muscles and Motors

Muscles have an odd and poorly understand behavior. Normally, an active muscle is stiff, because its proteins interact and form connections. But when an active muscle is used in a cyclic fashion — think of your heart beating or leg muscles when you’re running — the muscle temporarily becomes softer. When the cyclic motion stops, the muscle stiffens again.

This temporary softening, called thixotropy, may be connected to our posture. Stiff muscles provide support when you sit in class, but become less stiff and more limber when you run. The mechanism of thixotropy in muscles is not well understood, though Altman suspected that myosin was the key.

At the heart of muscle fibers are two types of interlocking filaments: myosin filaments — which contain hundreds of myosin motors that tie themselves together — and actin filaments. In active muscle, myosins bind to actin. Myosins make muscles contract by pulling themselves, stroke by stroke, along the actin filament.

Loosening Up

Altman wanted to test whether the interaction between actin and myosin was responsible for muscle’s thixotropy. According to this model, muscles’ cyclic motion breaks the actin-myosin attachments and makes the muscle fiber softer. Once motion stops, it takes a little while for myosin to re-bind to actin and make the fiber stiff again.

Altman’s experiment involved disrupting actin-myosin interactions and vibrating the muscle fiber at different frequencies to measure its stiffness. Using two chemicals that prevent myosin binding to actin, Altman then tested the muscle. The loosening effect vanished.

“To people who study muscle, it was a debate as to what was responsible for thixotropy,” says Altman. ”The experiment indicates that muscles’ stiffness depends on myosin’s grip.”

Next Steps

The experiment revealed another, unknown process at work. When the cyclic motion was slow enough, Altman was surprised to find that the muscle fiber no longer softened; it became stiffer, or rheopectic. Altman suspects thixotropy depends on forces from molecules jostling within the crowded cellular environment, but no one knows how or why muscles would stiffen when subjected to low frequency vibration.

Through Willamette’s Senior Research Seminar course and through the Science Collaborative Research Program, students work with Altman to learn more about myosins’ cellular function. “In my lab, we study myosins inside cells as opposed to just purified myosins, because we want to understand physiologically relevant conditions and how they affect the motor,” says Altman.

Over the summer, he’ll move his myosin-trapping laser lab to the basement of Collins Science Center. In the fall, Altman will continue working with physics majors on their theses, while looking for more collaborative research opportunities to explore the enigmatic muscular motor protein.

Creepy Eaton and Facebook

Used for a Halloween Facebook post, this image picked up hundreds of likes and dozens of shares. I took it using my iPhone during a morning walk to my office.

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Zena Forest Photograph

I took this unstaged photograph during a day of service at the university's research forest. The image is prominently featured online and in print publications. 

Wiley newsletter contribution #2

Always happy to assist my fellow communicators at not-for-profit organizations! Subscribe or read the Nonprofit Communications Report.

Wiley newsletter contribution

For the Nonprofit Communications Report, I wrote a short piece about how to share earned media highlights. 

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Unmasking a Researcher

Kaeli Swift ’09 wears a mask as she uncovers the corpse. She knows she’s being watched.

Eerie and emotionless, the mask does its job. Swift’s hazel eyes meet obsidian stares, and her experiment begins.

Swift studies crow funerals, raucous avian flash mobs that form when a dead crow is spotted.

Crows are smart. They remember faces of threatening people and warn others to be on the lookout. To avoid being recognized and affecting the birds’ behavior, Swift and her colleagues wear masks when unwrapping the stuffed crow used in their research.

While staying undetected by the birds, Swift’s work is earning visibility of a different sort. She was recently featured on the PBS program “IN Close.”

Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered that crows might hold funerals, and sophisticated brain scans might tell why. IN Close airs Thursdays at 7pm on KCTS 9. ___________________________ Connect with IN Close: Visit the IN Close webpage: http://KCTS9.org/in-close Like IN Close on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KCTS9INClose Follow IN Close on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KCTS9INClose Subscribe to IN Close on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/KCTS9InClose This current affairs series was made possible by viewers like you.

The Nest

Swift netted her mentors at Willamette before earning a National Science Foundation fellowship to pursue crow research at the University of Washington.

When she landed as a freshman, Swift knew she wanted to study birds. It didn’t take long to track down her undergraduate advisor, Dave Craig.

“One thing I knew that I was especially good at—for all of the other things that I felt doubt about—was networking,” Swift says. “I like birds,” she told Craig. ”I’ve been told you like birds. I want you to be my advisor.”

As a biologist who studies bird behavior, Craig says he couldn’t pass up a student named “Swift,” a nimble species of bird that targets insects mid-flight.

Swift first became a masked crow menace through collaborative work with Craig. They investigated crows’ ability to recognize individual human faces. She found another mentor in Emma Coddington, a neuroethologist who studies the effects of stress on behavior and the brain.

“She was like a laser beam,” says Coddington, smiling as she remembered meeting Swift before the start of a tough physiology class. “She stood out because she was genuinely curious and kept asking questions that indicated she was constantly integrating, thinking about how this fits in her life.”

A key part of Swift’s undergraduate life was her work with Saturday Explorations and Willamette Academy. She describes teaching through the university’s youth programs as among her most meaningful personal and most valuable professional experiences. “It’s important that students see there are all kinds of people that do science,” she says.

The Leap

Graduation came and went. Though an important chapter in her story, it’s hard to picture Swift as a recent graduate unsure if she was cut out for academia.

As someone who also struggled to imagine herself as a scientist and professor, Coddington understood such self-doubt but had no question about Swift’s ability. Coddington hired her to help set up a new physiology lab in Olin Science Center, and Swift’s mentors encouraged her to apply for an NSF fellowship. Grad school was a way to explore how her passions for teaching, fieldwork and research could fit together in her life.

Swift credits Craig and Coddington for giving her the space and the encouragement she needed, when she needed it.

“They were there to support me when I said, ‘I don’t know if I’m the kind of person who could do this,’” Swift says. They told her, “You are. Do this.”

She did.

The Ascent

Her experience with animal behavior and physiology proved invaluable to her research into crow funerals. But Swift took off for graduate school with something more: She earned the respect and admiration of her professors, especially her mentors.

“Their role as advisors wasn’t this discrete four-year period when I was an undergrad,” she says. “They’re still the people I call when I’m most ‘done’ and when I have awesome triumphs. Having the support of people who understand what it’s like to be in this profession—and what it’s like to be in this profession as woman—is really important.

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Photo, left to right: Coddington, Ramona Flatz (biology research assistant), Swift and Craig

“I knew that I picked Willamette because I could get more one-on-one attention, but I never expected to have faculty that I would invite to my wedding—and who would show up! But they did.”

Swift’s relationship with her mentors is evolving. She’s more colleague than advisee now, visiting campus in December to teach Craig’s "Behavioral Ecology" class and again in January for a biology colloquium.

As her career takes flight, crows and the NSF won’t be the only ones watching Swift. Like the birds she studies, her friends and colleagues at Willamette will be on the lookout.

“She’s amazing, and it’s been a privilege to watch her,” says Coddington. “I’m excited to see who she continues to grow into.”

Media response to student arrest

Life changing college

This guide led directly to enrollment gains for my employer, and I was responsible for all aspects of the media relations effort.

Read the chapter, which is fantastic!

If you are looking for good advice about colleges, this book is one of the best.

Letter from the governor

To support enrollment efforts, I worked with the Office of the Governor to secure a personalized welcome for admitted students.

In particular, students from smaller cities and towns indicated that this was an impactful communication that reinforced the university's distinctive location across the street from the Oregon State Capitol. 

Media response to sexual assault concerns

When a fraternity's private Facebook posts were published anonymously, members of the campus community expressed serious concerns about messages' misogynistic content. 

After the local paper published a story—including photos of students' signs—journalists flocked to campus. The Portland NBC affiliate was one of many outlets that covered the issue:

The incident sparked discussions about sexual assault, campus climate and Title IX. 

In addition to developing a robust understanding of these issues through associated research and discourse, I was moved by stories from people involved and wanted to help address the need for men to become more engaged. I sought out formal training from the Association of Title IX Administrators, and I serve as an investigator and hearing panel member for related conduct cases. 

National Coverage of Pub Talk Series

In partnership with Oregon's science museum staff, we launched Science Pub and earned prominent coverage in USA Today. Plus, fun!

My passion: Understanding science

I shared the following column, which ran on March 11, 2013, as part of the "My Passion" series in our local newspaper. 

Growing up in Las Vegas with parents that insisted I venture out into summer’s sandy oven, I spent a lot of time catching scorpions, vinegaroons and all kinds of reptiles. I marveled at the way each creature seemed perfectly suited for its place — and its prey. 

I’ve seen blood squirt from the eyes of a horned lizard, and I’ve dropped a desert iguana when distracted by the whip of its separated, writhing tail. One of my best friends can attest to the wallop a small sidewinder packs.  

Despite all the time I spent exploring and experiencing the desert, it wasn’t until a college trip with friends to Zion National Park, far from the electric skies of Las Vegas, that I looked up and saw the Milky Way - the band of stars that form the “backbone of night.” I felt the bewildering immensity of nature for the first time.

I still wonder what our ancestors thought as they gathered around a fire pit and looked to the sky. Some of their answers became myths that shaped and were shaped by society, but what of the countless millions who weren’t satisfied by such explanations? Among the everyday struggle for survival, there must have been people like me — people for whom the echoing question, “What are stars?” would never be silenced.

Human nature is to seek understanding. Our minds are powerful, complex but imperfect pattern detectors. When we look at clouds, we see shapes. We impose meaning on randomness. We confuse correlation and causality. We infer intent by default, and because we are biased to reinforce our own beliefs, it takes effort to overcome an incorrect idea that has taken root. 

These biases served us well through millennia. We survived. 

Through science, we’ve opened a window to the heavens, and we’ve looked back in time to discover much about how we came to be. 

I was stunned to learn that nearly half of Americans don’t know how long it takes our planet to revolve around the sun. I cringe when politicians deny evolution. My heart breaks when children die from easily preventable or treatable conditions because parents decide against vaccines or choose prayer over medicine.

Though science has certainly demonstrated its value to our health, economy and quality of life, it is more than advanced technology or medical treatments. The scientific method is humanity’s best tool to discover truth.

I started the local Science Pub series in conjunction with OMSI, and I collaborate with scientists to help share their work with the public. I’m passionate about the public understanding of science not just because I love the mysteries of quantum mechanics, neuroscience and cosmology, but because scientific literacy affects our ability to evaluate important issues facing our society.

With our growing population, its commensurate impact, our advancing technological sophistication and proliferation of ideas and claims, we need decision makers who understand the value and methods of science. We need a scientifically literate electorate that is able to face with open eyes our economic, environmental and geopolitical challenges.

I’m passionate about the public understanding of science not only because it answers the question, “What are stars?” but because I believe that the truth is the best foundation upon which to build our future.

Value infographic

Cited by a prominent financial aid consultant as one of the best communications in higher ed, I created this piece (with the help of an in-house designer and writer) to help shift the college cost conversation to a university value conversation.

Designed originally to strengthen the university’s website, the infographic was heavily used in print enrollment marketing campaigns and in admission fairs to quantify key competitive advantages and to counter prospective students’ perceptions about the value of a liberal arts education.

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The Scene concept

The university magazine theme and cover concept was based on Willamette's less known places, activities and talents. A friend and chemistry professor created a scale model of Waller Hall, one of the university's iconic buildings. 

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