Fuller has been part of the WaNPRC team as associate director of research since 2021 and has been serving as interim director since June. With more than 30 years of experience in vaccine research and nonhuman primate models for infectious diseases, she is recognized internationally for her groundbreaking work in translational vaccines and antivirals. Fuller鈥檚 innovative approach to developing DNA and RNA vaccines for swift responses to emerging infectious diseases is timely and impactful.

鈥淚n our discussions about her vision as director, I was inspired by her commitment to expanding the Center鈥檚 research capabilities and enhancing its infrastructure,鈥� Ostendorf said. 鈥淚 am confident that WaNPRC will thrive under Dr. Fuller鈥檚 leadership, and I look forward to partnering with her to advance the exceptional work at the Center and to support its long-term success.鈥�

WaNPRC plays an important role in the 91探花research enterprise with its dual mission of empowering the delivery of leading-edge scientific discoveries to improve human health and advancing standards of care, health, well-being and conservation for primates around the world.

鈥淚 am honored to be entrusted with leading the Washington National Primate Research Center,鈥� Fuller said. 鈥淎s one of only seven primate centers in the nation, WaNPRC is a leader in transformative biomedical research. WaNPRC has provided a critical bridge for basic research and clinical testing of new innovations that have and will continue to save or improve millions of human lives. I look forward to supporting the next discoveries in human and veterinary medicine and training the next generation of scientists and veterinarians in nonhuman primate research.鈥�

NASA last month to establish a regional scientific consortium based at the 91探花, in partnership with Washington State University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, that will use an interdisciplinary approach to explore how the space environment 鈥� both in low-Earth orbit and beyond 鈥� affects living things.

The , which stands for Biology in Space: Establishing Networks for DUrable & REsilient Systems, will focus on innovation, acceleration and implementation of knowledge and technology of space biology centered on human-plant-microbiome relationships. The long-term goal is to enable a durable听human presence in low Earth orbit, 90 to 600 miles altitude, and beyond.

“The establishment of the BioS-ENDURES Consortium marks an exciting new chapter in space biology research at UW, WSU and PNNL,” said principal investigator , professor and chair of aeronautics and astronautics at the UW. “We’ve long recognized that successful long-term space presence requires more than just rockets and spacecraft 鈥� it demands a deep understanding of the complex interactions between humans, plants and microorganisms in space environments.

鈥淚’m particularly excited that through this consortium, we’re bringing together experts across all three institutions to develop new ways to monitor and predict these biological interactions in space, work that will be crucial for establishing a sustainable human presence beyond Earth.”

The team includes biologists studying humans, animals and plants, who will work together with microbiologists and other experts to ensure an integrated view of the space flight biosphere by enhancing data acquisition, modeling and testing. BioS-ENDURES has three focus areas related to the effects of spaceflight stressors:

• Develop monitoring to measure underlying molecular status, or biomarkers, in humans, animals, plants and their associated microbial communities
• Create models that predict human-plant-microbe robustness and interactions among organisms in space
• Validate and apply understanding of human and plant health, including promoting beneficial human-plant-microbe interactions, to enhance health in space

At the UW, the interdisciplinary team includes and in microbiology; and in environmental and forest sciences; in Earth and space sciences; in pharmaceutics; Marissa Kranz at the 91探花Medical Cyclotron Facility; and in genome sciences; Dr. in laboratory medicine and pathology at the 91探花School of Medicine; in pharmacy; and in oceanography.

The BioS-ENDURES Consortium builds on a collaboration between the UW, WSU, PNNL and science and industry advisory boards. Consortium members will work with NASA to align work with current and projected needs. The funding is spread out over five years and will support yearly proof-of-principle demonstration projects to advance the science of the three focuses, annual symposia tracks, and physical testing.

“The 91探花 is excited to have this opportunity to contribute to the听development of new capabilities that will enable a sustainable听human presence in space,”听said Mari Ostendorf, vice provost of research at the 91探花and 91探花professor of electrical and computer engineering.听“This consortium enables new partnerships and brings together investigators who have a long history with NASA and space applications with researchers who have deep expertise in human/animal, plant and microbial biology.听This research will push the boundaries of our scientific understanding to reveal new biological mechanisms that will address both sustainability and risk mitigation needs in space.听We look forward working with WSU, PNNL and NASA, as well as with other industry and science partners to accelerate space technology.”

For more information, see or contact Morgansen at morgansn@uw.edu. 听

Ostendorf will assume leadership of the UW鈥檚 premier and growing research enterprise from , who has served for 15 years as Vice Provost for Research. Lidstrom will step down from the role Aug. 31 and return to the faculty to focus on her research in chemical engineering and microbiology.

Over the past 16 years, the University鈥檚 research portfolio has grown from $996 million to an astounding $1.63 billion in 2020. Since 2010, the 91探花has received more externally sponsored research funding than any other U.S. public university. Recent global rankings that emphasize research place the 91探花in the range of sixth听to 16th听in the world.

鈥淏ecause the Office of Research partners with leaders and units across the university, Dr. Ostendorf鈥檚 demonstrated vision and collaborative leadership will be critical to advancing our interdisciplinary research efforts, as well as our ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives,鈥� Richards said.

Collaborative research has grown, with 27% of 91探花research funding involving partnerships with other entities.听The Office of Research has evolved and grown as well, with additional units and programs and a host of initiatives focused on serving the research community.

鈥淚 look forward to supporting the Provost’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, recognizing that diverse perspectives foster innovation, and to helping build partnerships that strengthen the 91探花ecosystem for interdisciplinary research,鈥� Ostendorf said.

In addition to holding an endowed professorship of system design methodologies in the College of Engineering鈥檚 electrical and computer engineering department, Ostendorf is an adjunct professor of computer science and engineering, and of linguistics. She also has served as associate dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Engineering and as associate chair for research in electrical engineering.

A prominent researcher in the areas of speech and language technology, Ostendorf鈥檚 current research focuses on conversational artificial intelligence, exploring dynamic and context-aware models for understanding and generating speech and text, particularly in multi-party contexts. This work contributes to a variety of applications, from education to clinical and scientific information extraction, and has been used in automatic analysis of human-to-human call center conversations, automatic extraction of information from clinical notes, and natural language processing to support development of more accurate STEM assessments.

Ostendorf earned her doctoral, master鈥檚 and bachelor鈥檚 degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, joining the 91探花in 1999 after several years as an electrical and computer engineering faculty member at Boston University. Elected to the National Academy of Engineering earlier this year, she is also a fellow of the听IEEE, the听International Speech and Communication Association听and the听Association for Computational Linguistics, and is a member of the听Washington State Academy of Sciences, a corresponding fellow of the听Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a former Australian-American Fulbright Scholar.

Green Rat Clingfish, described by 91探花biologist Adam Summers, noted among ‘most remarkable’ new marine species of 2019听

The Green Rat Clingfish is having a moment of fame, thanks to , 91探花professor of biology and fishery sciences, and his co-authors.

That’s because the has included the fish, first described by the researchers in a 2018 in the journal ZooKeys, as one of the “10 most remarkable new marine species from 2019.” The group the list on March 19, to coincide with Taxonomist Appreciation Day. Taxonomy is the science of naming, defining and classifying groups of organisms by shared characteristics.

The Green Rat Clingfish, or Barryichthys algicola, is a small, slender, green fish with a paler green stripe on the side of its tiny head, an orange iris and green fins. Among the smallest species of clingfish, it lives on algae along the southern Australian coast. Summers and co-authors of Texas A&M University and of the Western Australia Museum, in Perth, described the fish based on 22 specimens found in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania. They also created a new genus 听鈥� above species, below family in the taxonomic naming 鈥� Barryichthys.

Summers said of the discovery: “It is tiny and bright green, and it has a belly sucker. What could be better in a fish?”

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Mari Ostendorf named a corresponding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

The Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s National Academy, has chosen听, 91探花professor of electrical and computer engineering, as one its new corresponding fellows for 2020.

Ostendorf was named one of eight corresponding fellows,听听March 3. Fellows are leading thinkers and experts whose work has had a significant impact on the nation of Scotland. The corresponding fellow designation is for those who have attained high international standing in fields in the society’s domain, but who are not residents of the United Kingdom.

The society named听, who join the 1600 existing fellows from diverse fields such as physical and life sciences, arts, humanities, social sciences, education, business, industry and public life.

Ostendorf, who came to the 91探花in 1999, is a professor of systems design methodologies in electrical and computer engineering and an adjunct professor of linguistics and of computer science and engineering. She is also the UW听associate vice provost for research.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh was established in 1783 under the mission “Knowledge made useful.” Of 91探花faculty,听John Scott, chair of the Department of Pharmacology, is also a corresponding听听with the society.

Read more on the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering听.

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Thaisa Way receives 2020 Outstanding Educator Award from Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture

The Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture has given , 91探花professor of landscape architecture, its Outstanding Educator Award for 2020.

The award, one of 11 award the council gives annually to faculty members, honors “truly outstanding, innovative and noteworthy work as an educator whose career is recognized as having made a significant contribution to the landscape architecture discipline.” Among the requirements for nomination is that the faculty member’s work must have been recognized at the national or international level in two or more of these areas: research, public service, outreach or service to education.

Way, an urban landscape historian, was to receive the award in person at the council’s 2020 conference, planned for March in Louisville, Kentucky, but the event was canceled due to the coronavirus.

She has written or edited several books, including “” in 2015, published by 91探花 Press, which came out in paperback last year.

91探花Notebook is a section of the 91探花News site dedicated to telling stories of the good work done by faculty and staff at the 91探花. Read all posts here.

In all, 91探花professors make up one-third of the 24 new members, who will be formally inducted in September during an annual meeting at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

Elected by current members of the Washington State Academy of Sciences:

• , professor of environmental and occupational health sciences
• , associate dean for faculty affairs and professor in the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance
• , professor of chemistry
• , professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate vice provost of research
• , professor and chair of mechanical engineering
• , professor of physics at the 91探花Institute for Nuclear Theory
• , professor of pharmacology and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences

Additionally, , professor of atmospheric sciences and of applied mathematics, was elected to the state academy by virtue of his election into the National Academy of Sciences.

The 91探花team developed , a conversational agent designed to provide engaging and informative conversation and to transform how people interact with everyday devices in their homes. The team from the 91探花Department of Electrical Engineering and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering took home the $500,000 first prize, which will be shared among the students.

Their challenge was to produce a socialbot 鈥� an AI agent capable of coherent conversation 鈥� that could converse about popular topics and current events for a goal of 20 minutes. Teams built their socialbots using the Alexa Skills Kit and received continuous, real-world feedback from millions of Amazon customers who interacted with teams anonymously through Alexa.

Amazon from three worldwide finalists on Tuesday at the conference in Las Vegas.

“Our philosophy in developing Sounding Board was to bring a variety of relevant content into a natural conversation,鈥� said team leader and electrical engineering doctoral student . 听鈥淯ltimately, we hope Sounding Board can become a conversational gateway to online information that users enjoy talking with.鈥�

The Sounding Board socialbot earned an average score of 3.17 on a 5-point scale from a panel of independent judges and achieved an average conversation duration of 10:22.

The runner up team from Czech Technical University in Prague, which attained an average score of 2.72 and had an average conversation duration of 3:55, received a $100,000 prize. The third-place team听from in Edinburgh, Scotland, received a $50,000 prize for an average score of 2.36 and an average conversation duration of 4:01.

The 91探花Sounding Board team combines expertise in natural language processing, speech technology and human-AI collaboration from additional team members EE doctoral student and Allen School doctoral students Elizabeth Clark, , and . EE professor is the lead faculty advisor for the team, working in collaboration with professors and of the Allen School鈥檚 Natural Language Processing research group.

鈥淭he students started from scratch, with no experience building a dialog system or working with Alexa skills, but together they brought a breadth of perspectives on language processing and a passion for understanding both the technical and human factors challenges of conversational AI,鈥� Ostendorf said.

The Sounding Board design is both user- and content-driven. The system aims to understand user comments in multiple dimensions, from directives to sentiment and personality, in order to best serve user interests. At the same time, the system relies on having interesting and timely things to talk about. It actively harvests online content and leverages a knowledge graph to provide connections between related topics that can be used to steer the conversation.

鈥淪ounding Board is unique in its ability to understand what type of person the user is, and is able to adjust parts of the conversation based on who it thinks the user is,鈥� said the Allen School鈥檚 Sap.

The 91探花team relied on the collaborative environment at the university, both for getting feedback on technical ideas and for user testing. Faculty and students from across the UW-NLP community 鈥� in computer science, electrical engineering and linguistics 鈥� provided input on the many different versions of Sounding Board as it evolved.听 In addition, a key resource in system development was access to real Alexa users nationwide. “It is impossible to anticipate all the types of reactions and questions people will have, even the different ways that a simple yes-or-no question can be answered. Learning from actual user data is critical,鈥� Ostendorf said.

More than 100 teams from universities in 22 countries applied to be part of the inaugural competition. The finalists were selected from among 12 semifinalists whose socialbots were evaluated based on customer ratings of their interactions during hundreds of thousands of conversations last summer.

The three finalists continued to improve their socialbots by leveraging customer interactions through Nov. 7, and Amazon selected the winner based on assessments of a panel of judges listening to conversations with three interactors.

Amazon will publish technical papers from all participating teams in the Alexa Prize Proceedings as a way of sharing their work with the broader research community.

鈥淲e envision that conversational AI will be integral at the interface between humans and machines, and the Alexa Prize makes an important step toward that vision,鈥� said Choi. 鈥淚t has been an exciting journey to build Sounding Board, and we look forward to working on crucial research challenges that we have identified along the way.鈥�