UW News

A Hawaii ‘amakihi, a species of Hawaiian honeycreeper, demonstrates “nectar robbing,” where the bird accesses nectar while bypassing the flower’s pollen-bearing structures. Some Hawaiian honeycreepers’ long curved bills are the perfect implement for drawing sweet nectar from deep within a lobelioid flower. As birds reach into flowers to access the nectar stored near the base, their bills can brush against the lobelioids‘ pollen-bearing structures, making hungry honeycreepers important pollinators.

UW researchers from the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, the Institute for Protein Design and the Department of Astronomy are leading and collaborating on three research projects as part of the federally funded Genesis Mission.

Most galaxies are likely surrounded by long filaments of orbiting stars known as stellar streams. In a new study from the University of Washington, astronomers simulated stellar streams — pictured here as multicolored streaks — as they orbited virtual host galaxies to test a leading theory about how dark matter might influence the streams’ shape. The results could help researchers separate true evidence of dark matter from false positives.

Muren, a UW teaching professor of design, and Russell, a UW professor of communication, examine environmental problems from a perspective beyond the hard sciences. Frequent news headlines and rising gas prices are constant reminders of the fuel shortage linked to the war in Iran.

Women on the Waterfront Oral History Project by Alison Steichen Published on The Dispatcher July/August 2026. In 2025, I founded the Women on the Waterfront Oral History Project (W.O.W) with assistance from the University of Washington’s Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and the Labor Archives of Washington. The project honors women dockworkers and their stories across multiple generations.

Aerial view of the Totten Ice Shelf during the 61st Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition in 2019. Totten’s contributions to ice loss in East Antarctica were offset by the increased snowfall from 2021 to 2023. Between 2021 and 2023, Antarctica appeared to be growing. Heavy snowfall fueled by wetter weather caused parts of the continent to gain mass, leading some to question whether climate change is really causing the ice to melt.

This tiny chip was custom-designed in Hossein Naghavi’s lab at the University of Washington to power sensors that can see through many opaque materials using electromagnetic waves in the so-called “terahertz band.” Naghavi recently received a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a new class of cheap and efficient terahertz sensors that could be used in augmented reality headsets and many other applications.

In the paper (co-authored by Kyle Armour), researchers found that climate models could successfully replicate temperature trends in the equatorial Pacific when they expanded the window of observation by 20 years. Including more data allowed the models to better account for climate variability, which can create long-lasting fluctuations in temperature and precipitation that aren’t always indicative of a general trend.

Pictured in order, starting from the top left: Margaret Kuklinski, Dr. Dushyant Sahani, Michael Regnier, Ulrike Peters, Nikolla Qafoku, Dr. Judith Wasserheit, Dwayne Arola, Anirban Basu, Phillip Levin, Tessa Evans-Campbell, Ruth Etzioni, Alberto Aliseda Eleven faculty members at the University of Washington have been elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences. They are among 30 scientists and educators from across the state announced July 16 as new members.

2026 Jason Image Jason Recovered  Credit: M. Elend, University of Washington, V24 Each summer, an extraordinary scientific expedition heads into the Northeast Pacific to maintain one of the world’s most advanced underwater ocean observatories. We invite you to follow along as the University of Washington’s Regional Cabled Array (RCA) team returns to sea for its annual Operations and Maintenance expedition, part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Ocean Observatories Initiative.