Twelve faculty members at the 91̽�� have been elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences. They are among 36 scientists and educators from across the state July 17 as new members. Election recognizes the new member’s “outstanding record of scientific and technical achievement and willingness to assist the Academy in providing the best available scientific information and technical understanding to inform complex policy decisions in Washington.”��

The 91̽��faculty members were selected by current WSAS members or by their election to national science academies. Eleven were voted on by current WSAS members:��

, professor, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair, and director of the Paul G. ��Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering, for “contributions in data management for data science, big data systems, cloud computing and image/video analytics and leadership in data science education.”��

professor of civil & environmental engineering and of industrial & systems engineering, for “pioneering work in human mobility analysis and infrastructure resilience, which have transformed transportation systems in terms of both demand and supply, and shaped the future directions of transportation systems research on community-based solutions and disaster resilience.”��

Lloyd and Kay Chapman Endowed Chair for Oral Health and associate dean for research in the 91̽��School of Dentistry, and professor in the Department of Health Systems & Population Health, for “leadership in understanding and addressing children’s oral health inequities through community-based socio-behavioral interventions and evidence-based policies.”��

professor of biology, for “internationally recognized leadership in the biology of sleep, including groundbreaking research on molecular and genetic aspects of the brain, human behavioral studies on learning under varied sleep schedules, and contributions that have shaped policy on school schedules and standard time.”��

, the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel professor of physics and of electrical & computer engineering, for “foundational contributions to fundamental and applied research on the optical and spin properties of quantum point defects in crystals and for service and leadership in the quantum community.” ��

, professor and chair of human centered design and engineering, for “award-winning leadership in HCI computing, whose research has advanced health and education technology, influenced policy, and shaped the HCI field of through impactful scholarship, interdisciplinary collaboration and inclusive, real-world technology design.”��

, professor and associate dean for research in the 91̽��School of Social Work, for “contributions to understanding psychosocial and physiological factors that moderate the effectiveness of their interventions and ultimately improve the health of children with abdominal pain disorders.”��

, professor of medicine in the 91̽��School of Medicine and of pharmacy, “for leadership in health economics and cancer research, including work on financial toxicity, cost- effectiveness, and healthcare policy that has influenced national discussions, improved cancer care access, and shaped policies for equitable and sustainable healthcare.” Ramsey is also Director of the Cancer Outcomes Research Program at Fred Hutch.��

, professor of bioengineering and Vice Dean of Research and Graduate Education in the 91̽��School of Medicine, for “national leadership in biomedical research, research policy, and graduate education, including pioneering novel drug delivery approaches for regenerative medicine applications in the nervous system and other tissues such as bone, cartilage, tendon and skin.”��

, Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of Earth and space sciences, for “revolutionizing our understanding of climate change in Antarctica through pioneering ice core extractions under hazardous Antarctic conditions and their subsequent analyses over two decades, and for applying that expertise to advance climate research in Washington State.”��

, professor of pharmaceutics, for “pioneering contributions to pharmaceutical and translational sciences, including groundbreaking research on drug transporters, PBPK modeling and maternal-fetal pharmacology that have helped shaped drug safety policies.”��

The Academy also welcomed new members who were selected by virtue of their election to the National Academies of Science, Engineering or Medicine. Among them is , the Arthur B. McDonald professor of physics and director of the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics. Hertzog was elected to the National Academy of Sciences last year. ��

A team led by the 91̽�� has received a from the National Science Foundation to further research into how urban societal systems can be organized to be both efficient and resilient.

The (LEAP-HI) project, based in the 91̽��College of Engineering, supports fundamental research to generate the knowledge, mechanisms and tools needed to design an adaptable society. That is one, researchers say, that can switch between different operating strategies depending on the situation. Ideally, people in these societies are informed about and can adapt to system changes without undue hardship.

The grant provides funding over four years to researchers at the UW, Arizona State University, the University of Notre Dame and The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

“This project aims to develop systematic ways to reconfigure urban spaces for a variety of uses. It designs mechanisms that provide business owners, and supporting infrastructure such as transit operators, with a set of options and decision support tools capable of accounting for future uncertainties. We explicitly model how information flows through a system so that people can adapt well to external disruptions,” said , a 91̽��professor of civil and environmental engineering and the lead LEAP-HI researcher.

This research will advance knowledge at the intersection of different disciplinary areas including urban planning, controls and optimization, human behaviors and transportation systems analysis, she said.

Equally important, the project integrates people, businesses and transit into a network, thus enabling a better understanding of how society can adapt to different disruptions.

The project involves two case studies that address the vibrancy of small- to mid-scale food systems in Seattle and Phoenix. These studies will focus on challenges encountered by marginalized communities that include disproportionately large shares of frontline workers in food establishments and public transit users.

“Maximizing efficiency has been the driving force for economic growth and industrial expansion in modern societies,” said , one of the lead researchers and a professor at ASU. “It is also a defining attribute of the smart and sustainable cities movement.”

However, maximizing efficiency often results in systems that are unable to adapt to external disruptions, as demonstrated in the wake of many disasters, including COVID-19, Chen said. While there have been calls for increasing redundancy, adding redundancies in systems design increases costs and resource demands.

“What is needed is an adaptable societal organization that can operate in a variety of configurations in response to a wide range of disruptions, thereby displaying both efficiency and resilience,” said , a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Notre Dame and a LEAP-HI researcher.

And, added Assistant Professor at UNC Charlotte, “our urban spaces and the regulations that are attached to them represent both constraints and opportunities in either prohibiting or enabling those diverse functionalities.”

Additional researchers on the LEAP-HI team includes and , both 91̽��associate professors of urban design and planning; and , 91̽��assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering.

For more information, contact Chen at qzchen@uw.edu.

Lower- and middle-income King County residents who live in denser neighborhoods — with stores, libraries and other destinations within easy reach — are more likely to walk or bike, according to new 91̽�� research.

But neighborhood density didn’t motivate higher-income residents to leave their cars at home, the transportation engineers found. Of the environmental factors they studied, the only one that significantly influenced how frequently that group walked or biked was how attractive they found their neighborhoods to be.

Dimensions of “attractiveness” that motivated the higher-income group included seeing other people when they walk in their neighborhoods, the attractiveness of buildings and homes and having interesting things to look at.

Those , based on a random survey of 547 King County households who live in the highest- and lowest-density neighborhoods around State Route 520 across Lake Washington, will be presented at the in Washington, D.C., next week.

The survey, which was conducted in 2013, asked more than 100 detailed questions about people’s travel habits and about the built environment near their homes. The median annual income range for the lower-income group was between $40,000 and $60,000, and for the higher-income group was above $140,000.

The factors significantly associated with an increase in how often people in the lower-income households biked or walked in a week were higher neighborhood density, easy access to destinations, a younger average household age, having access to more bicycles and owning fewer cars.

“What drives these two groups of people to walk or bike is quite different,” said senior author , a 91̽��associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. “For the higher-income people, walking and biking is a largely result of choice, and our models show that the density of their neighborhoods and most other things in their built environment, such as the accessibility of destinations, don’t really matter as much to them.”

“For the lower-income group, walking and cycling appears to be the result of constraints, in which case higher neighborhood density and easy access to destinations are positively associated with more walking or biking,” Chen said.

The number of bicycles in the household was the only factor associated with more walking and biking trips in both income groups. Each additional bicycle is related to 1.1 and 1.2 additional days that someone walked or biked in the last week for the lower-income group and the higher-income group, respectively. This lends support to Seattle’s and other cities’ bike sharing programs, researchers said.

Access to each additional vehicle in a household is negatively associated with the number of days that the lower-income group walked or biked in a week — reducing that number by 2.5 days. By contrast, the number of vehicles owned didn’t matter for the higher-income group.

The survey, which asked people about everything from transit accessibility and safety to the prevalence of trees and traffic, also uncovered differences in how people in the two income groups perceived their neighborhoods, though not all of those factors significantly influenced their travel behavior.

The researchers did find that people in the two income groups walked and biked for different purposes.

“People in the lower income groups were more likely to walk or cycle to get to their daily activities — they need to get to work, go to stores, buy some food,” said lead author Xi Zhu, who graduated with a master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering from the 91̽��last spring.

“That’s not something that influenced the higher income groups as much,” she said. “They were more likely to make these trips for exercise or recreation.”

Ultimately, the findings suggest that one-size-fits-all strategies to increase non-motorized travel aren’t likely to be as effective across different neighborhoods, Chen said.

“The bigger question is, ‘What leverages do we have to change people’s travel behaviors?’ This study suggests that certain land use strategies may only work for certain groups,” Chen said. “It also suggests that policies to promote biking and walking need to be tailored to different neighborhoods and different populations.”

The research was funded by the (PacTrans).

For more information, contact Zhu at zhux2012@uw.edu and Chen at qzchen@uw.edu.