At the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” Harris Hydraulics Lab, an odd scene plays out. Over and over again, researchers from the UW and the (PNNL) pass a small rubber model of a marine animal through a large tank filled with flowing water and fitted with a spinning turbine. On some runs, the model bonks against the turbine blades; on others, it receives a glancing blow or sails past undisturbed. When bonks or knicks occur, a small collision sensor on one of the turbine’s blades detects the impacts and plots the interactions in a computer program.

The researchers are repeatedly simulating something that they hope will rarely happen in the wild: a collision between marine wildlife like a seabird, seal, fish or whale — or submerged debris like logs — and an underwater turbine.Ìę

“We want to make sure we’re minimizing the chances of a collision in the first place,” said Aidan Hunt, a senior research engineer in mechanical engineering at the UW and member of the (PMEC). “But if a collision were to occur, we want to be able to detect it, and potentially avoid it, in real time. The available evidence suggests that collisions are rare, but we’re taking a ‘trust-but-verify’ approach.”

Marine energy — power harvested from tides, waves and currents — has enormous potential as a clean, renewable resource. But more information is needed about how large, commercial installations of underwater turbines or power-generating buoys could affect marine wildlife, whether through increased noise in the environment, habitat change or direct interactions with equipment.Ìę

The marine collision experiments are part of the , a collection of projects led by PNNL to study the environmental impact of marine energy.Ìę

The work at Harris Hydraulics follows a by PNNL and the UW Applied Physics Lab using a four-foot-tall prototype turbine installed at the entrance to Sequim Bay. In that study, researchers trained an underwater camera on the turbine for 109 days and then catalogued every instance of an animal approaching or interacting with the turbine. The camera captured more than 1,000 instances of fish, birds and seals approaching the turbine blades. There were only four collisions, and all were small fish.Ìę

“This study was a first step, but a promising one,” said co-author , a research scientist at the UW Applied Physics Lab. “We »ćŸ±»ćČÔ’t see any endangered species in our study, and the risk of collision for seals and sea birds seemed to be quite low. We’re excited to get back out there with the camera and learn even more.”

The Sequim Bay experiment generated hours of valuable data, but that degree of intense monitoring may not be practical in large commercial installations in the future. Cheaper impact sensors, like the ones logging bath toy impacts at Harris Hydraulics, could be a solution, researchers say.ÌęÌę

The project is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hydropower & Hydrokinetics Office, through the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Triton Initiative and the TEAMER program.

For more information, contact Hunt at ahunt94@uw.edu or Emma Cotter at emma.cotter@pnnl.gov.

UPDATE (Feb. 17, 2026): This story has been updated to note Meza’s work with the NSF I-Corps program and CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund.

Biology is full of architecture. Materials like wood, crab shells and bone all contain microscopic structures such as layers, lattices, cells and interwoven fibers. Those structures give natural materials an ideal combination of lightness and toughness, and they’ve inspired engineers to build artificial materials with similar properties. But how those tiny architectures lead to such tough materials is something of a mystery.

In 2019, , assistant professor of mechanical engineering, set up the at the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” to tease out the mechanical secrets of structures that are as small as 100 nanometers, which is about the size of a virus. He arrived with an ambitious plan to build a new generation of nanomaterials, but soon discovered that the field was missing a fundamental understanding of toughness at tiny scales.

“We had to go back to basics,” Meza said.Ìę

In the years since, Meza and his team have flipped the script on nanomaterial toughness. They’re applying what they’ve learned to new kinds of bespoke materials, though along the way they’re still surprised by tiny structures behaving in ways they theoretically shouldn’t.

Meza spoke with UW News about his strange and surprising journey into the nano realm.

What questions did you establish your lab to tackle?

Lucas Meza: Very broadly, we’re trying to design better materials, but not by introducing new material chemistries. Instead, we use architecture. This is something humans have done throughout history — think of woven textiles and fabrics, or straw-reinforced mud bricks. These are “architected materials,” where the structure of materials allows us to control useful properties like strength, toughness and flexibility.Ìę

The thing that I was particularly interested in was introducing architecture at the nanoscale. What if, instead of building a wall with bricks, we could use nanoplatelets? Or instead of making fabrics with yarn, we could use nanofibers? How would those properties change?

Engineers have found that nanomaterials are stronger, more flaw resistant and more deformable. The challenge is: How do you actually do something with them? We need to build them into large-scale materials in a way that preserves their unique nanoscale properties.Ìę

What material properties are you most interested in?

LM: We’re using architecture to tinker with a few interrelated properties. The first is a material’s strength, which is how much stress it can take before it permanently deforms. The second is ductility, which is how much a material can stretch before it breaks. Those two features sort of combine to determine a material’s toughness, which is the total amount of energy you have to put into a material to break it.

To give a couple of opposing examples: A ceramic plate is strong, meaning it can take a lot of stress, but it has very low ductility, meaning it barely deforms before breaking. So overall, it’s not a very tough material. Conversely, a rubber band is not strong at all — you can bend and stretch it with very little stress. But, it’s extremely ductile — it can stretch to many times its original dimensions without snapping. So as a result, rubber is very tough.

Credit: ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” (left) and Envato (right).

Toughness is a particularly interesting property to study because there’s no limit on how tough a material can be. There are very hard limits on how strong and how stiff a material can be, and you can use architecture to optimize them, but you can’t exceed the properties of the base material. On the other hand, you can use architecture to improve the overall toughness of a material.Ìę

Nature has already created a lot of really interesting micro- and nano-structures. Every natural material has to be porous to transport nutrients, and on top of that we see things like lattices in some bone and in sea sponges; shells all have layered architectures; wood and bone are fiber composites; and all of this happens at the micro- and nanoscale.Ìę

There had to be a reason that nature was making these architectural motifs at the micro and nanoscale, and I had a strong hunch that it had to do with toughness.Ìę

What has your lab learned about toughness at the small scale?

LM: Initially, we learned a surprising amount about what we »ćŸ±»ćČÔ’t know. My thought in getting into this work was that people know enough about fracture mechanics — how things break and why — so we can just dive into making really complicated architectures and studying their toughness, like l made by my former doctoral student, . We realized the scientific community has some big gaps in their understanding of fracture toughness. So instead, we had to go simple — basically we pulled and pushed and broke a lot of small things to understand what gives a material ductility and toughness.

We learned that all material behavior centers around something called a “plastic zone size.” Basically, when you pull on a part that has a crack, a little ball of energy builds up right at the tip of that crack. That energy ball grows as you add more stress, and at a certain point it shoots through the sample and causes a break. The size of the ball at its breaking point is the material’s plastic zone size, and it’s different for every material.Ìę

We realized that what makes a material ductile or not . If a material is smaller than its plastic zone size, that ball of energy can’t grow big enough to cause the crack to grow, so instead it spreads outward and the material bends.Ìę

The four material samples in this video are all the same size, but structural differences at the nanoscale produce different levels of ductility. In each example, the cyan color represents the sample’s plastic zone size. In less ductile samples, the cyan-colored area remains small and the material snaps, whereas in more ductile samples, the cyan area spreads out and the material stretches. Credit: Dwivedi et. al/Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids

This is the key for how to use architecture to cheat and get more ductility out of a material. If you take a brittle material and make a nanoscale lattice or foam out of it, . The new tougher “architected material” can also have a larger plastic zone size, sometimes as much as 100 times larger, meaning it is likely to be ductile as well. This is why things like fabrics and meshes can be really hard to tear.Ìę

How are you applying what you’re learning to real-world materials?

LM: We’re building lots of our material architectures painstakingly at the small scale using resources like the and the UW . That “bottom-up” approach — building things one nanofeature at a time — gives us lots of control over the building blocks we’re playing with, but it’s a real challenge to scale.

The “top-down” approach, where you let physics and kinetics just self-assemble things for you, is much easier. One example is “solid state foaming”, a technique my colleague has been working on for decades. Basically, you take a thermoplastic material — something that melts when you heat it up — throw it in a chamber with high pressure carbon dioxide so it saturates the sample, then heat it up so that dissolved gas forms tiny bubbles in the material. With this process we have less control over the precise architecture — it’s a random foam — but by controlling the amount of dissolved gas we can easily control the size of the bubbles. Those materials turned out to be super tough! My doctoral student has , where we show they could even be tougher than the material they were made from. This goes against everything we knew about normal foam fracture processes.Ìę

A plastic nanofoam material created by Kush Dwivedi, a doctoral student in Meza’s lab, seen at 2,500x, 12,000x and 35,000x magnifications. Credit: Dwivedi et. al/Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

I’m currently pursuing an earlier-stage commercialization effort to use tiny foams as a filtration material for biomedical applications. We can make nanoporous filter materials — think of the reverse osmosis system that might be under your sink — but we can do it without using any of the harsh chemical processes that are currently used. We’ve been able to explore this avenue thanks to our participation in the program, which then enabled us to get a award.

I also recently got an NSF CAREER grant to study fracture in architected materials, and we’re exploring ways to make tougher sustainable and biodegradable materials. Think of the last time you used a biodegradable fork that broke off in your food. Materials like wood are actually great alternatives for this, but we’re trying to figure out how to do it without cutting down a tree or harvesting bamboo.Ìę

For more information contact Meza at lmeza@uw.edu.

Come curious. Leave inspired.

While February might be just 28 days, the UW offers an exciting lineup of more than 40 in-person and online events. From thought-provoking art and music to conversations on culture, history, and science, the UW community invites you to explore, learn, and connect across disciplines throughout the University. In addition, take a look ahead at what’s happening in March.

In addition,Ìę.

ArtSci On Your Own Time

Recorded Lectures: Ìę(History)
Incarceration is a hotly debated topic in the United States, a country that has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world. Looking at the practice from a historical perspective, what can incarceration teach us about who we were and who we are now? What might histories of incarceration, and the histories of those who have been incarcerated, tell us about power dynamics, belonging, exclusion, struggle, and hope across societies in the past and present? The 2026 History Lecture Series explores the practice of incarceration, tracing its change over time from antiquity to our modern world. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online.

Podcast: (School of Drama)
A lively and opinionated cultural history of the Broadway Musical that tells the extraordinary story of how Immigrants, Jews, Queers, African-Americans and other outcasts invented the Broadway Musical, and how they changed America in the process.In Season One, host David Armstrong traces the evolution of American Musical Theater from its birth at the dawn of the 20th Century, through its mid-century “Golden Age”, and right up to its current 21st Century renaissance; and also explore how musicals have reflected and shaped our world — especially in regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, and equality. Free.

Exhibition: (Henry Art Gallery)
Primarily featuring works from the Henry collection created in the twenty-first century, Figure/Ground reflects a period in which hard-won civil rights and claims to self-determination have been eroded across the US, disproportionately affecting Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized communities. Free.

Book Club: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (UW Alumni)
Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of more than forty novels, collections, novellas and comic books. He is a professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, and an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana. Free.

Recorded Lectures:
Featuring selected lectures from 1996 to today, UW Graduate School’s Office of Public Lectures YouTube features an incredible lineup of artists, scientists, researchers, and more!

Week of February 2

January 29–February 8 | (School of Drama)
In this new translation of Chekhov’s ”serious comedy of human contradictions”, a group of artists and dreamers meet in the countryside and wrestle with the costs of ambition, unspoken longings, and the harsh realities of artistic pursuits. Set against a backdrop of love, passionate aspirations, and the search for meaning,ÌęThe SeagullÌęcaptures the fierce hopes and quiet heartbreaks of an artistic career.Ìę Directed by MFA Student SebastiĂĄn Bravo Montenegro.

Online – February 2 | Ìę(Jackson School of International Studies)
Presented by Radhika Govindrajan, Director, South Asia Center and Associate Professor, Anthropology, ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ”; Sunila Kale
Professor, South Asia and International Studies ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ”; and Milan Vaishnav, Senior Fellow and Director, South Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trump in the World 2.0 is an online series of talks and discussions featuring guest speakers and faculty exploring global perspectives on a second Trump administration. Free.

February 3 | (Asian Languages & Literature)
This is a unique opportunity to learn from UW Professor Zev Handel and get a peek into a linguistic history that has shaped the world. Like the book, this talk will be accessible to everyone—regardless of whether you have any knowledge of Chinese characters or East Asian languages. Free.

February 3 | (Jackson School of International Studies)
A Welcome & Research Presentation with 2025-26 UW Fulbright Canada Special Foundation Fellow, Clinton Westman. Free.

February 4 |
(History)
This lecture explores the evidence for ancient incarceration in vignettes: reading letters that prisoners wrote on papyrus, investigating spaces where they were held, and analyzing depictions of captives in monuments, law courts, and homes. Roman evidence does not model a just society, but it does offer a mirror where we can see modern practices of incarceration in a new light, asking which aspects of contemporary prisons are unique to modernity, and which reflect longer histories. The 2026 History Lecture Series presents “Power & Punishment – Histories of Incarceration,” exploring the practice of incarceration, tracing its change over time from antiquity to our modern world. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 4 | (School of Art + Art History + Design)
Death is a fundamental first step toward rebirth—but this transition can feel daunting without a compassionate guide. In The Book of Zero, our 2026 Jacob Lawrence Legacy Resident indira allegra presents a multimedia, meditative experience shaped by their research into doula work, death care, and the cyclical nature of bodies and environments. Free.

February 4 | (School of Music)
A free lunchtime performance featuring UW School of Music students in the North Allen Library lobby. Presented in partnership with UW Libraries. Free.

Online option – February 5 | 2026 University Faculty Lecture – A breath of fresh air: The science and policy saving lives from America’s deadliest cancer
Lung cancer kills nearly 125,000 Americans each year — more than breast, colon, and prostate cancers combined. UW Department of Surgery Professor and Chair Dr. Douglas Wood is out to change that and will discuss the many ways he and his colleagues are raising lung cancer awareness, increasing access to early detection, and ultimately, working to change lung cancer victims to lung cancer survivors. Free.

February 5 | Ìę(Asian Languages & Literature)
During the dark centuries between the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 CE and the golden age of reunified China under the Tang and Song dynasties (618–1279), the shi poetic form embraced new themes and structure. Using biography, social history, and literary analysis, Ping Wang demonstrates how the shi form came to dominate classical Chinese poetry, making possible the works of the great poets of later dynasties and influencing literary development in Korea and Japan. Free.

February 6 | (Jackson School of International Studies)
Since the early 2000s, literary scholarship has read Hebrew and Arabic literatures together to find moments of transgression or trespass, challenging logics of partition. In Static Forms: Writing the Present in the Modern Middle East, Shir Alon develops an alternative model for reading Arabic and Hebrew literatures, as two literary systems sharing a remarkably similar narrative of modernization and developing parallel literary forms to address it. In this talk, Alon will discuss the potential of a paradigm grounded in formal and affective analysis for new understandings of transnational modernism, Middle Eastern literatures, and comparative literary studies at large. She will also explore the limits of this approach, when parallel readings of Hebrew and Arabic literatures obfuscate rather than clarify the conditions of the present. Free.

February 6 | Ìę(Music and American Indian Studies)
UW Ethnomusicology, Department of American Indian Studies, and the UW Symphony collaborate with Lushootseed Research’s Healing Heart Project in presenting this special community event. Following a free screening of the documentary film The Healing Heart of Lushootseed, the UW Symphony (David Alexander Rahbee, director) and soprano Adia S. Bowen (tsi sʔuyuʔaÉ«) perform Bruce Ruddell’s 50-minute symphony Healing Heart of the First People of This Land. This powerful work was commissioned by Upper Skagit elder Vi Hilbert (taqÊ·ĆĄÉ™blu) shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a vehicle for, in Hilbert’s words, “bringing healing to a sick world.” Premiered by The Seattle Symphony in 2006, the piece draws inspiration from two sacred Coast Salish songs Hilbert had entrusted to the composer and features a number of percussion instruments native to this region. The performance features soloist and Indigenous soprano Adia S. Bowen (tsi sʔuyuʔaÉ«), a UW alumna who graduated in June 2025 with degrees in Voice Performance and American Indian Studies. Free.

February 6 | (Psychology)
Whether you’re married, dating, or flying solo, Dr. Nicole McNichols has some sex advice for you. And you may want to pay attention because McNichols is not only the professor of ÁńÁ«ÊÓƔ’s most sought-after class in its history, she’s one of social media’s most popular educators on the topic of sex. Pulling from her book, You Could Be Having Better Sex, McNichols shares the latest data that shows good sex is one of the most powerful and effective sources of joy.

Week of February 9

Online – February 9 | Ìę(Jackson School of International Studies)
Presented by ReƟat Kasaba, Professor, International Studies, ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” and GönĂŒl Tol, Director, Turkish Program, Middle East Institute. Trump in the World 2.0 is an online series of talks and discussions featuring guest speakers and faculty exploring global perspectives on a second Trump administration. Free.

February 10 | Ìę(Simpson Center for the Humanities)
The production and promotion of so-called “AI” technology involves dehumanization on many fronts: the computational metaphor valorizes one kind of cognitive activity as “intelligence,” devaluing many other aspects of human experience while taking an isolating, individualistic view of agency, ignoring the importance of communities and webs of relationships. Meanwhile, the purpose of humans is framed as being labelers of data or interchangeable machine components. Data collected about people is understood as “ground truth” even while it lies about those people, especially marginalized people. In this talk, Bender will explore these processes of dehumanization and the vital role that the humanities have in resisting these trends by painting a deeper and richer picture of what it is to be human. Free.

February 10 | (QuantumX)
Dr. Krysta Svore is Vice President of Applied Research for Quantum Computing at NVIDIA, joining the company after 19 years at Microsoft, where she served as Technical Fellow and VP of Advanced Quantum Development and pioneered reliable quantum computing through the co‑design of hardware, software, and error correction. She began her career developing machine learning methods for web search before founding Microsoft’s quantum computing software, algorithms, and architecture program. Free.

February 11 | Ìę(Chemistry, Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, and Bioengineering)
Explore how cutting-edge research is driving material innovation in the built environment. Faculty whose work spans chemistry, engineering, and architecture examine how living systems can be integrated into material design to address pressing challenges related to sustainability, resilience, and the future of construction. Free.

February 11 | (History)
This lecture explores the wide variety of carceral practices in medieval Europe and examines how the recovery of Roman law and the concept of the state in the twelfth century began to transform those practices. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 11 | (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies)
Navigating Academia as a Transnational Scholar from the Global South: Treasuring All the Knowledges brings together the voices of 16 women and non-binary scholars who began their postgraduate journeys as non-elite international students and (un)documented migrants in countries positioned as economically more powerful than their places of origin. Inspired by the book’s creative and relational approach to knowledge, this event will also open a collective space for poetry and storytelling. Participants are invited to write and share short poetic or narrative reflections that speak to their own experiences of abundance, survival, care, and knowledge-making within academic spaces. Free.

February 12 | (Sociology)
The future will be old; Europe, the Americas and Asia will soon have the oldest populations ever known to humanity. Can we cope? It will require major changes in the way we think about youth, women, immigration, and globalization to avoid disaster. Free.

February 12 | Ìę(Jackson School of International Studies)
In Ghost Nation: the Story of Taiwan and its Struggle for Survival, Chris Horton compares Beijing’s claim that Taiwan has been Chinese territory “since time immemorial” with Taiwan’s actual history. Several different groups have controlled some or all of Taiwan over the last 400 years — the Dutch, Spanish, Tungning, Manchu, Japanese, Chinese, and now, Taiwanese. By looking at those who have ruled Taiwan, Horton also tells the story of the Taiwanese people, highlighting their intergenerational quest for self-determination — and the existential threat posed by an expansionist Chinese Communist Party. Free.

February 12 | (Simpson Center for the Humanities)
Athletes with ancestral ties to the Pacific Islands are dominant fixtures in some of the world’s most visible sports and over several generations have produced a modern sports diaspora. Tracing Samoan transnational and diasporic movement along divergent colonial pathways, this talk examines the relationship between embodied experiences of racialization and the emergence of Pacific sports excellence in three settler colonial countries (United States, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia). It then considers what recent efforts to mobilize Indigenous practice inside and outside sport tell us about the uses and importance of culture in contemporary sport. Free.

February 12 | Ìę(School of Music)
Faculty pianist Robin McCabe joins forces with guest artist Maria Larionoff in an evening of high octane duos for violin and piano. On the launch pad: Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, Beethoven’s Sonata in G major, Opus 96, and Faure’s impassioned Sonata in A Major.

Online – February 13 | 2026 Provost’s Town Hall
Join UW Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Tricia Serio as she discusses the state of the University from an academic perspective and the singular role that public research universities — and the UW in particular — play in our society. Featured speakers include Jodi Sandfort, dean of the Evans School, and Sarah Cusworth Walker, research professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Ted Poor, associate professor in the School of Music, will introduce the provost.

February 13 | (Open Scholarship Commons)
Douglass Day is an annual transcribe-a-thon program that marks the birth of Frederick Douglass. Each year, sites across the country gather thousands of people to help create new & freely available resources for learning about Black history. A transcribe-a-thon is an event in which a group of people work together to transcribe a collection of digitized historical materials. The primary goal of a transcribe-a-thon is to make the materials more easily accessible, but these events also serve to promote awareness of parts of Black history – and especially Black women’s history – that remain too-little-known. Free.

February 14 | (Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
Celebrate Valentine’s Day with 8x Grammy nominee and NAACP Image Award winner The Baylor Project — featuring vocalist Jean Baylor and drummer Marcus Baylor. Steeped in the heart of jazz, with dynamic performances that are soulful to the core, their musical roots are deeply planted in gospel, blues and R&B. Their eclectic sound and infectious chemistry provide the perfect backdrop for a memorable evening filled with vibrant, spiritual, feel-good music.

Week of February 16

February 17 | (School of Art + Art History + Design)
Our question to consider: what does the work of indira allegra offer us when thinking about the project of liberation? This program is part of the year-long Liberation Book Club series exploring liberation through shared texts, art, film, music, and workshops. Free.

February 18 | (History)
In 1942, the U.S. government incarcerated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps based on the racist argument that they were likely “disloyal” to the United States. In the ensuing years of World War II, though, the U.S. government simultaneously sought to demonstrate the “loyalty” of Japanese Americans to American democracy. By placing U.S. wartime policies and Japanese American responses in different historical contexts, this lecture will interrogate the meanings of loyalty, democracy, and national security—during World War II and in our own time. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 18 | (Digital Arts & Experimental Media)
DXARTS presents an evening of 3D music, featuring recent work and world premieres by current staff and graduate students. Free.

February 18 & 19 | & (School of Music)
UW Jazz Studies students perform in small combos over two consecutive nights of original tunes, homage to the greats of jazz, and experiments in composing and arranging. Directed by Cuong Vu, Ted Poor, John-Carlos Perea, and Steve Rodby.ÌęFree.

February 19 | Ìę(Henry Art Gallery)
Poet, musician, and scholar Rasheena Fountain presents Speculative Land Blues, a blues guitar, poetry, and DJ set. Developed in collaboration with Adeerya Johnson, Associate Curator at the Museum of Pop Culture, the Henry presents Speculative Landscapes. Free.

February 19 | (Burke Museum)
Read the book ahead of time, or join to learn more about the selection. The February book is Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State by Elizabeth A. Nesbitt and David B. Williams. Free.

February 19 | (Jackson School of International Studies)
John Johnson is a recently retired Senior Foreign Service Officer whose career included leadership roles in Brussels, Afghanistan, and with the U.S. Mission to NATO. Since joining the State Department in 2002, he has served in Europe, Asia, and Washington, D.C., earning multiple awards for his service. A Seattle native and UW graduate, John speaks several languages and lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest. Free.

February 20 | Ìę(Political Science)
The Center for Environmental Politics hosts Amanda Stronza, professor in Texas A&M University Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, and co-founder of the Applied Biodiversity Science Program. Free.

February 21 | Ìę(Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
yMusic — named for Generation Y — is a genre-leading American chamber ensemble renowned for its innovative and collaborative spirit. yMusic has a unique mission: to work on both sides of the classical/popular music divide, without sacrificing rigor, virtuosity, charisma or style.

Week of February 23

Online – February 23 | Ìę(Jackson School of International Studies)
Presented by Ambassador Michelle Gavin who is currently Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies, Council on Foreign Relations. Trump in the World 2.0 is an online series of talks and discussions featuring guest speakers and faculty exploring global perspectives on a second Trump administration. Free.

February 23 | Ìę(Asian Languages & Literature)
UW Asian L&L and the Seattle International Film Festival co-host an award winning filmmaker Ash Mayfair at the SIFF Cinema Uptown for the screening of Skin of Youth (2025). A Q&A moderated by Assistant Professor Ungsan Kim will follow the screening.

February 23 | Ìę(School of Music)
UW music students perform music from the Baroque era under the direction of Tekla Cunningham. Free.

February 24 | (Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
Join us for a feature documentary that traces the remarkable history and legacy of one of the most important works of art to come out of the age of AIDS –choreographer Bill T. Jones’s tour de force ballet “D-Man in the Waters.” There will be a post-screening discussion with Bill T. Jones and Berette S Macaulay. Free.

February 24 | Ìę(Jackson School of International Studies)
Can political elites shape public opinion by influencing the tone of news coverage, even when they cannot dictate what gets covered? This study addresses that question using text analysis of more than five million Japanese news articles from 2004–2024, showing that rising negativity in legacy media closely corresponds with declines in cabinet approval. A newly compiled dataset of prime ministers’ daily schedules further reveals that periods of intensified elite engagement with journalists coincide with less negative coverage. Together, these findings suggest that incumbents may still temper media tone through proactive outreach, though this influence appears to weaken in the age of fragmented, digital media. Free.

February 25 | (History)
Prison is more than a place of punishment. It is also an archive. Yet the official story found in sentencing reports and conduct reviews is only part of the story. Incarcerated people generate a parallel counter-archive of resistance and transformation. The Washington Prison History Project is a multimedia digital effort to document this counter-archive at a local level. Across a series of publications, programs, and protests, incarcerated people have shown prison to be a central feature in the development of Washington State and the country. An examination of this archive tells a different history of our state—and its possible futures. Following the lectures, the recordings will be available online. Free.

February 25 | (American Indian Studies)
Featuring Oscar Hokea(Cherokee Nation and Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma). Storytelling offers a spiritual connection, a sharing of sacred breath. Literature, similarly, preserves human experience and ideals. Both forms are durable and transmit power that teaches us how to live. Both storytelling and reading aloud can impact audiences through the power of presence, allowing for the experience of the transfer of sacred breath as audiences are immersed in the experience of being inside stories and works of literature.ÌęFree.

Online option – February 25 | The Office of Public Lectures presents: America’s Character and the Rule of Law with George Conway IIIÌę(Public Lectures)
This talk will explore the idea that the endurance of the rule of law in the United States relies not solely on the provisions of the Constitution—its structural framework, the institutions it established, or the rights it enshrines—but fundamentally on the character of its citizens. Qualities such as public-spiritedness, tolerance, moderation, empathy, mutual respect, a sense of fair play, and, ultimately, intelligence, honor, and decency form the foundation of constitutional democracy. Free.

February 26 | (School of Art + Art History + Design)
In this talk, Rachael Z. DeLue will share insights from her current research and teaching on the relationship between art and science in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, focusing on a suite of extraordinary chromolithographs created in the 1880s by the astronomer and illustrator Étienne-Leopold Trouvelot. Based on his work at the Harvard Observatory and the United States Naval Observatory, the chromolithographs represent the cross-pollination of art and science in an attempt to generate knowledge about astronomical phenomena that eluded perception and resisted visualization. Prof. DeLue will consider Trouvelot’s prints in relation to other such attempts on the part of fine artists and scientific illustrators to picture the celestial sphere at a time when technology was limited and space travel was still the stuff of science fiction. Free.

February 26 | Ìę(Stroum Center for Jewish Studies)
In this talk, Paris Papamichos Chronakis discuss his new book, The Business of Transition – Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule, and shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) skillfully managed the tumultuous shift from Ottoman to Greek rule amidst rising ethnic tensions and heightened class conflict. Bringing their once powerful voices back into the historical narrative, he traces their entangled trajectories as businessmen, community members, and civic leaders to illustrate how the self-reinvention of a Jewish-led bourgeoisie made a city Greek. Salonica’s merchants were present in their own—and their city’s—remaking. Free.

February 26 | Ìę(Simpson Center for the Humanities)
Taiwan is a unique site of innovation in disability rights. Despite being barred from becoming a States Party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) according to the diplomatic exclusion faced by Taiwan, it has become a model for the localization of the CRPD through its use “domestic review mechanisms.” Furthermore, Taiwan demonstrates the ways in which fundamental divides within human rights discourse, such as Western individualism and East Asian familialism, can be bridged using strategic adaptation that reimagine disability rights as a post-colonial hybrid. Free.

February 26 – March 1 | (Dance)
Presenting seven original student-choreographed works. This platform gives students the opportunity to express their creative voices through choreography and costume design, as well as collaborating with lighting designers and mentors.

February 26 – 28 | (Meany Center for the Performing Arts)
Thirty years after its historic premiere, the groundbreaking dance theater work by Bill T. Jones returns to the stage. Still/Here shatters boundaries between the personal and the political, exemplifying a form of dance theater that is uniquely American. At the heart of the piece are “survival workshops” Jones conducted with people living with life-threatening illnesses.

ArtSci Roundup goes monthly!

The ArtSci Roundup is your guide to connecting with the UW—whether in person, on campus, or on your couch.

Previously shared on a quarterly basis, those who sign up for the Roundup email will receive them monthly, delivering timely updates and engaging content wherever you are. Check the roundup regularly, as events are added throughout the month. Make sure to check out the ArtSci On Your Own Time section for everything from podcasts to videos to exhibitions that can be enjoyed when it works for you!

In addition, if you like the ArtSci Roundup, sign up to receive a monthly notice when it’s been published.

Do you have an event that you would like to see featured in the ArtSci Roundup? Connect with Lauren Zondag (zondagld@uw.edu).uw.edu).

A statewide initiative to put more healthy, climate-friendly grains on people’s plates has received a $19 million boost, which will sustain every step in building a network from the field to the fork.

The initiative, a public-private partnership led by Washington State University with support from the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ”, received a $10 million BioInnovation Grant from the and matching funds from several other organizations, including more than $3 million from the Washington Grain Commission.

It targets a global health problem: the lack of whole grains in people’s diets, which contributes to widespread health problems.

The funding will allow WSU researchers to continue developing new crop varieties for farmers. It will fuel efforts to bring more whole grains to the public, including into school lunchrooms and will expand Washington state’s commercial infrastructure for storing, transporting, milling and marketing whole grains. The funding will also support the establishment of a commercial kitchen at the UW to help entrepreneurs bring whole-grain foods to market.

“This work is about making sure that nutritious grains reach the people who need them,” said , a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the UW. “By understanding the policies, systems, and human decisions that shape food production and the supply chain for school meals, we can help bridge the gap between innovation and impact.”

Two teams of UW researchers will contribute to this effort.Ìę

, professor of industrial & systems engineering and of mechanical engineering at the UW, will help lead development of ready-to-eat meals and will support private organizations using UW facilities to produce sample meals for school breakfast and lunch.Ìę

The UW’s implementation science team, which includes Otten, assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences , and assistant professor of epidemiology , will examine how innovations in grain breeding and food product development can be successfully adopted in school settings. They will study what policy, budgetary, and social factors help ensure that new whole grain and legume varieties are embraced across the supply chain and, ultimately, by school-aged children who rely on them for the nutrition they need to grow and thrive.

This team will also lead study-away programs, where students can learn about new whole grains and legumes in both urban and rural areas of Washington state. Curriculum from these five-week summer programs will be made publicly available.Ìę

“The timing of the grant is perfect,” said , a WSU professor of international seed and cropping systems and director of the WSU Breadlab, who will lead the grant work. “We’re right at the stage where we’ve got a critical mass of cross-disciplinary research, encompassing a range of agricultural, food and health sciences. Now we can start commercializing, getting these crop varieties to farmers, getting whole grains on our plates and into schools.”

The grant funding will be matched by contributions from the Washington Grain Commission, the USA Dry Pea and Lentil Council, the American Heart Association, The Land Institute, and food and technology companies.

“This is truly a historic investment for Washington farmers,” said Casey Chumrau, CEO of the Washington Grain Commission.

Adapted from . For more information or to reach the project team, contact Alden Woods at acwoods@uw.edu or WSU’s Shawn Vestal at shawn.vestal@wsu.edu.

The historic Norwegian tall ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl set sail for San Francisco from the Port of Seattle on Monday, marking the end of and another stop on the to support a sustainable future at sea.

The ship, built in 1914, boasts three towering masts and hails from Bergen, Norway. During the inaugural One Ocean Week Seattle, organized by , it docked at Pier 66 to welcome attendees and members of the public aboard to explore and learn.

The drew hundreds of people to Seattle to discuss marine ecosystems, the seafood industry, shipping and renewable energy, and more. ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” scientists joined policymakers, educators and industry leaders to define and address priorities in stewardship and ocean science.

, a UW affiliate professor and research scientist at the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels, served as a panelist on the “Coast to Coast Collaboration in Research” aboard Statsraad Lehmkuhl on Friday morning.

Moore contributed her expertise as a marine mammal ecologist to help launch the in the Pacific Arctic in 2010, leading to an international effort to establish a network of observatories in the Arctic to track ecosystem health amidst physical changes to the region.

The panel, part of a series hosted by , offered a chance to discuss shared goals as melting ice opens the Arctic up to more traffic.

“It was an important opportunity for international collaboration and public engagement regarding rapid ecosystem changes in Arctic, and local, waters,” Moore said.

, a UW professor of mechanical engineering, helped lead a “behind the scenes” lab tour hosted by the , which joins researchers at UW, Oregon State University and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

During the tour, researchers showcased marine energy monitoring projects at the , including videos and sonar documenting interactions between marine life and tidal energy turbines, sensors to detect underwater collisions, and systems to monitor how much noise is produced by the devices that help harness energy from waves and currents.

“These tools help us identify and minimize environmental effects associated with harnessing energy from waves, tides and rivers,” Polagye said.

, a UW principal research scientist of aquatic and fishery sciences participated in a panel discussion, where he shared his work on habitat in , which borders downtown Seattle. Toft’s lab studies how shoreline development impacts habitat value for young salmon.

“Although the shorelines of Elliott Bay have been heavily modified, restoration efforts have had positive results,” he said. “The panel gave us a chance to discuss the importance of maintaining a healthy shoreline along a major urban working waterfront.”

Despite the density of human activity along the shores of Elliott Bay, these waters are home to key species, including kelp, orcas and salmon. Maintaining functionality without losing habitat is a challenge, requiring input from various stakeholders, and creativity.

, a coastal hazards specialist at , provided an update on observed and projected sea level rise during a Friday workshop bringing together coastal managers and tribes around the Puget Sound region.

“The opportunity to meet in person with that many people who all came for the workshop was invaluable,” he said.

To connect with a UW expert in ocean or environmental science, contact Gillian Dohrn in UW News at gdohrn@uw.edu.

Electronic waste is piling up around the world , partly because to recover useful materials from discarded gadgets. When processed improperly, spent electronics to lead, mercury and other toxic chemicals. Without systemic changes, our global appetite for electronics could produce an annual .

This conundrum inspired a team at the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” to create an easily recyclable material that could one day replace many traditional circuit boards, the foundation of most electronics. The new material is flexible, self-healing and can be made conductive without additional components.

This suite of features could help produce a more sustainable generation of wearable electronics, soft robotics and more.

“We created a lot of functionality within one material,” said senior author , a UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “Our goal is to build a widely useful platform for flexible, reusable devices.”

in Advanced Functional Materials.Ìę

Conventional circuit boards pass electrical signals through conductive metal traces, which are bonded to a rigid board commonly made of fiberglass and resin. In contrast, the new material is a soft and stretchable composite made from a recyclable polymer infused with microscopic droplets of a liquid metal alloy based on gallium. A circuit can be created on this composite by lightly scoring a pattern into its surface, which connects adjacent embedded droplets and allows electricity to flow. The rest of the material remains electrically insulating.Ìę

has been experimenting with liquid metal-infused polymers since 2019 — the team uses . It’s proven to be a promising class of materials, but the rising cost of the liquid metal motivated the team to focus on reusability.

The new composite has a few tricks up its sleeve. The polymer holding the liquid metal droplets is still stretchy and strong, but it can be broken down through a simple chemical process, freeing the metal for reuse. In experiments, researchers recovered 94% of the metal from their samples.

The composite also has self-healing properties. Users can cut the material into pieces, rearrange them, and bond them back together using only heat and pressure. An electrical circuit chopped up in this manner will still function when reconnected in a new configuration.

Malakooti envisions a new wave of electronics built with composites like this one, but also a new paradigm for use and reuse. Instead of mass producing gadgets and then tossing them out, he argues, we could design devices and their components to be used, repaired, reconfigured and ultimately recycled.Ìę

“We’re trying to make a difference now to shape the future of flexible and wearable electronics,” Malakooti said. “We can’t make all these devices and then go back and try to figure out how to recycle them. That’s how we ended up with the electronic waste problem we face today. I want to tackle this problem from the very start.”

Co-authors include , a UW doctoral student of mechanical engineering; , a UW undergraduate student of mechanical engineering; and , and at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

For more information, contact Malakooti at malakoot@uw.edu.

In September the Biden-Harris Administration to 25 projects focused on bringing battery manufacturing back to the U.S. as part of the administration’s “” agenda. This new funding . While a new administration could bring changes, a focus on domestic manufacturing and growth in electric vehicles is likely to continue.

, ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” professor of mechanical engineering, has worked on battery research for the past 20 years, including applications in electric vehicles, sensors and grid energy storage. UW News asked her about batteries and how academia can help support the growing domestic battery manufacturing industry.

You’ve compared a battery to a body. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

Jie Xiao: A battery is made up of many components including positive and negative electrodes, the electrolyte, current collectors and more. Similar to different body parts, each battery component has its own role and function. For example, the electrolyte is like the blood that every battery needs. If the electrolyte dries out, the battery dies. And usually the more electrolyte, the longer the lifespan of the battery. To make a battery work well and have a long life, all components need to work together.

Can you talk about how industry and academia can work together to advance battery technology?

JX: Through collaborations with industry over the years, I’ve seen that industry is facing many technical challenges that individual companies may not have the time or resources to understand and overcome. Here’s where academia could help. We researchers have many different scientific tools, facilities and smart students, but we need to know which problems to tackle first.

Being able to understand the true challenges industry is facing and being able to cross-validate potential innovative solutions at industry-relevant scales is the key to advancing battery technologies. If we can’t validate new materials or methods in practical batteries, our good ideas will remain on paper and never get implemented by industry.

Can you give an example of what this could look like?

JX: I’ve developed protocols for small battery testing vehicles called “coin cells” to bridge the knowledge gap between lab and industry. Almost all the battery research groups use coin cells to evaluate new materials or battery technologies in the lab.

The problem with coin cells is that the key parameters used to build and test those small cells are usually quite different from realistic full-sized batteries. For example, the amount of electrolyte in a coin cell could be 20 to 30 times more than in a practical battery. Therefore, if people observe a coin cell with a long lifecycle, it won’t necessarily translate into a long-lasting battery because the coin cell has an excessive amount of electrolyte — remember, that’s the battery’s “blood.”

I have published a few coin cell protocol papers to help our community standardize the testing conditions to ensure fast evaluation but still generate results that are relevant to industry.

What else are you working on to support battery manufacturing in the U.S.?

JX: One of my missions is to cultivate a more diversified workforce — from facilities operators to people with doctoral degrees — to support the battery manufacturing industry in the U.S.

I also plan to work with my colleagues at the UW to develop more industry-specific courses that include battery research projects. This will both accelerate the manufacturing process and help students understand how to use textbook knowledge to address real problems in battery manufacturing. These classes will also provide hands-on skills to the students so they will feel prepared to join the clean energy industry in the future.

Finally, I am also working with my colleagues at UW and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to organize a series of industry workshops in 2025 to help develop a roadmap for an upcoming test bed facility that has the aim of accelerating the technology translation from lab to market. This joint UW/PNNL project of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in the Department of Energy.

For more information, contact Xiao at jxiao4@uw.edu.

One of the drawbacks of fitness trackers and other wearable devices is that their batteries eventually run out of juice. But what if in the future, wearable technology could use body heat to power itself?

UW researchers have developed a flexible, durable electronic prototype that can harvest energy from body heat and turn it into electricity that can be used to power small electronics, such as batteries, sensors or LEDs. This device is also resilient — it still functions even after being pierced several times and then stretched 2,000 times.

The team published Aug. 30 in Advanced Materials.

“I had this vision a long time ago,” said senior author , UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “When you put this device on your skin, it uses your body heat to directly power an LED. As soon as you put the device on, the LED lights up. This wasn’t possible before.”

Traditionally, devices that use heat to generate electricity are rigid and brittle, but Malakooti and team so that it can conform to the shape of someone’s arm.

This device was designed from scratch. The researchers started with simulations to determine the best combination of materials and device structures and then created almost all the components in the lab.

It has three main layers. At the center are rigid thermoelectric semiconductors that do the work of converting heat to electricity. These semiconductors are surrounded by 3D-printed composites with low thermal conductivity, which enhances energy conversion and reduces the device’s weight. To provide stretchability, conductivity and electrical self-healing, the semiconductors are connected with printed liquid metal traces. Additionally, liquid metal droplets are embedded in the outer layers to improve heat transfer to the semiconductors and maintain flexibility because the metal remains liquid at room temperature. Everything except the semiconductors was designed and developed in .

In addition to wearables, these devices could be useful in other applications, Malakooti said. One idea involves using these devices with electronics that get hot.

“You can imagine sticking these onto warm electronics and using that excess heat to power small sensors,” Malakooti said. “This could be especially helpful in data centers, where servers and computing equipment consume substantial electricity and generate heat, requiring even more electricity to keep them cool. Our devices can capture that heat and repurpose it to power temperature and humidity sensors. This approach is more sustainable because it creates a standalone system that monitors conditions while reducing overall energy consumption. Plus, there’s no need to worry about maintenance, changing batteries or adding new wiring.”

These devices also work in reverse, in that adding electricity allows them to heat or cool surfaces, which opens up another avenue for applications.

“We’re hoping someday to add this technology to virtual reality systems and other wearable accessories to create hot and cold sensations on the skin or enhance overall comfort,” Malakooti said. “But we’re not there yet. For now, we’re starting with wearables that are efficient, durable and provide temperature feedback.”

Additional co-authors are , a UW doctoral student in mechanical engineering, and , who completed this research as a UW postdoctoral scholar in mechanical engineering and is now an assistant professor at Izmir Institute of Technology. Malakooti and Han are both members of the UW Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Meta and The Boeing Company.

For more information, contact Malakooti at malakoot@uw.edu.

Everyone is watching women’s sports. From the record-breaking of the 2024 NCAA women’s basketball title game to the two , and even , female athletes are finally having their moment.

Even though there’s much to celebrate, there are still some huge gaps. Pay is one example, with . Several common injuries also seem to haunt women’s sports, such as the ACL tears that . An ACL tear is two to eight times in the same sports.

, a ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” assistant professor of mechanical engineering, studies differences between how male and female tissues recover after sports injuries. Specifically, Robinson is interested in designing better methods to help female athletes train to prevent and recover from injuries.

With the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony upcoming on July 26, UW News asked Robinson, who is also the endowed chair in women’s sports medicine and lifetime fitness in the orthopaedics and sports medicine department in the UW School of Medicine, to discuss common injuries for female athletes and how her research field is working to address them.

Let’s talk about ACL tears. We seem to hear about them happening in a variety of sports. Why?

ACL tears are extremely common in activities that require cutting, pivoting, quick turns of directions (high strain rate) and/or high-contact sports. We see this injury often in sports such as soccer, basketball, rugby, downhill skiing and football. I tore my ACL and my lateral meniscus playing soccer when I was 12 years old.

Why is it more common for women to tear their ACL?

There are many possible reasons including anatomical differences that lead to altered biomechanics, differences in tissue structure and properties, and sex hormone differences, including fluctuations that occur in women during the menstrual cycle.

How are ACL tears typically treated?

If the ACL is completely torn, it needs to be reconstructed. One method involves grafting a tendon from another part of the body. For example, using patellar or hamstring tendons are some of the most common options. But this can lead to additional risk for injury at the donor site — I strain my hamstring often because my hamstring tendon was used to repair my ACL tear.

Sometimes the reconstructions are torn again, which requires revision surgery. It’s not career-ending the first time this happens, but any subsequent injuries and/or post-traumatic osteoarthritis can make this career ending.

What makes an injury career-ending for female athletes?

I was just reading up on Olympian ’s total knee replacement this past spring. She’s 39 years old and the typical age range for these types of surgeries is 60 to 70 years old. She’s had so many knee surgeries to treat multiple ACL, MCL and meniscus tears. That is career-ending.

This is personal for me. When I tore my ACL and meniscus, my orthopedic surgeon told me to stop playing soccer — I was 12 years old — to reduce the risk of additional injuries or post-traumatic osteoarthritis. When I was 16, I went back to the doctor with pain and they confirmed it was post-traumatic osteoarthritis. They told me again to just stop playing soccer, insinuating this wasn’t a major part of my life, a part of my identity, something I could make into a career.

If there has ever been a time to invest in ACL injury prevention, it’s now. For professional athletes, tracking ACL risk is critical for reducing the likelihood of degenerative conditions after acute injuries. These steps ensure athletes have long careers, livelihood and support for their families. Understanding ACL injury risk is also important for non-professionals, youth athletes, parents and coaches as well. It ensures a lifetime of peak physical and mental health.

How does your research focus on female athletes’ recovery from injuries?

We may think we know how women’s bodies operate. But we don’t. Most of the research is based on men’s bodies or bodies of undisclosed sex. Also, much of the research is based on what’s happening at the tissue and joint level without considering how the cells within the tissue are responding based on hormonal and mechanical signaling cues. But changes at the cellular level happen first and then lead to changes at the tissue level.

My research group is trying to determine what cues lead to tissue scarring versus regeneration so that we can develop processes that inhibit scarring and promote regeneration. How do sex hormones and mechanical cues regulate tissue structure and function? What happens to the cells in these tissues when there are different mechanical or hormonal changes?

We need this information to be able to design methods that reduce or prevent injury, provide clearer and more patient-specific surgical and therapy recommendations, and develop techniques to promote functional regeneration and reduce scarring.

Women’s sports are also having a moment in your research field. You’ve been attending multiple conferences that focus on women’s health and engineering. What are these conferences like?

This past summer I have been part of two meetings that bring together professionals in engineering for women’s health — the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance: Transforming Women’s Health Outcomes Through Engineering meeting and the ElevateHER meeting. They are both supported by the National Science Foundation and they aim to define the major questions we need to tackle in the next 50 years, especially around developing strategies to understand female physiology and address conditions that disproportionally impact women.

While I’m in these meetings, my thoughts have gone something like this:

• I’m so happy to be in a room with all these amazing researchers focused on women’s health! I’m pumped to continue working on these major questions
• Wow, there are so many basic questions that we don’t have any clue how to answer
• Oh, but the people in this meeting can figure it all out
• Wait, they don’t know how to approach these questions either
• Ahhh, we have so much to do
• OK, but there is hope because people are working in areas that we previously were clueless about and doing some really impactful research
• Now that we all know each other we can brainstorm and slowly but surely start to tackle these problems

This is a necessary step, and it’s been wonderful being in the same space with people who are all focused on women’s health and how to use engineering design principles and tools to tackle questions.

For more information, contact Robinson at jrobins1@uw.edu.

A recent found that the world generated 137 billion pounds of electronic waste in 2022, an 82% increase from 2010. Yet less than a quarter of 2022’s e-waste was recycled. While many things impede a sustainable afterlife for electronics, one is that we don’t have systems at scale to recycle the found in nearly all electronic devices.

PCBs — which house and interconnect chips, transistors and other components — typically consist of layers of thin glass fiber sheets coated in hard plastic and laminated together with copper. That plastic can’t easily be separated from the glass, so PCBs often pile up in landfills, where their chemicals can seep into the environment. Or they’re burned to extract their electronics’ valuable metals like gold and copper. This burning, , is wasteful and can be toxic — especially for those doing the work without proper protections.

A team led by researchers at the ÁńÁ«ÊÓÆ” developed a new PCB that performs on par with traditional materials and can be recycled repeatedly with negligible material loss. Researchers used a solvent that transforms a type of — a cutting-edge class of sustainable polymers — to a jelly-like substance without damaging it, allowing the solid components to be plucked out for reuse or recycling.

The vitrimer jelly can then be repeatedly used to make new, high-quality PCBs, unlike conventional plastics that degrade significantly with each recycling. With these “vPCBs” (vitrimer printed circuit boards), researchers recovered 98% of the vitrimer and 100% of the glass fiber, as well as 91% of the solvent used for recycling.

The researchers published April 26 in Nature Sustainability.

“PCBs make up a pretty large fraction of the mass and volume of electronic waste,” said co-senior author , a UW assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “They’re constructed to be fireproof and chemical-proof, which is great in terms of making them very robust. But that also makes them basically impossible to recycle. Here, we created a new material formulation that has the electrical properties comparable to conventional PCBs as well as a process to recycle them repeatedly.”

Vitrimers are a class of polymers first developed in 2015. When exposed to certain conditions, such as heat above a specific temperature, their molecules can rearrange and form new bonds. This makes them both “healable” (a bent PCB could be straightened, for instance) and highly recyclable.

“On a molecular level, polymers are kind of like spaghetti noodles, which wrap and get compacted,” said co-senior author , a UW assistant professor in the mechanical engineering department. “But vitrimers are distinct because the molecules that make up each noodle can unlink and relink. It’s almost like each piece of spaghetti is made of small Legos.”

The team’s process to create the vPCB deviated only slightly from those used for PCBs. Conventionally, semi-cured PCB layers are held in cool, dry conditions where they have a limited shelf life before they’re laminated in a heat press. Because vitrimers can form new bonds, researchers laminated fully cured vPCB layers. The researchers found that to recycle the vPCBs they could immerse the material in an organic solvent that has a relatively low boiling point. This swelled the vPCB’s plastic without damaging the glass sheets and electronic components, letting the researchers extract these for reuse.

This process allows for several paths to more sustainable, circular PCB lifecycles. Damaged circuit boards, such those with cracks or warping, can in some cases be repaired. If they aren’t repaired, they can be separated from their electronic components. Those components can then be recycled or reused, while the vitrimer and glass fibers can get recycled into new vPCBs.

The team tested its vPCB for strength and electrical properties, and found that it performed comparable to the most common PCB material (). Vashisth and co-author , a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and an affiliate assistant professor in the Allen School, are now using artificial intelligence to explore new vitrimer formulations for different uses.

Producing vPCBs wouldn’t entail major changes to manufacturing processes.

“The nice thing is that a lot of industries — such as aerospace, automotive and even electronics — already have processing set up for the sorts of two-part epoxies that we use here,” said lead author , a UW doctoral student in the Allen School.

The team analyzed the environmental impact and found recycled vPCBs could entail a 48% reduction in global warming potential and an 81% reduction in carcinogenic emissions compared to traditional PCBs. While this work presents a technology solution, the team notes that a significant hurdle to recycling vPCBs at scale would be creating systems and incentives to gather e-waste so it can be recycled.

“For real implementation of these systems, there needs to be cost parity and strong governmental regulations in place,” said Nguyen. “Moving forward, we need to design and optimize materials with sustainability metrics as a first principle.”

Additional co-authors include , a UW postdoctoral scholar in the mechanical engineering department; , a UW doctoral student in the mechanical engineering department; , a senior applied scientist at Microsoft Research; , a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and an affiliate researcher in the Allen School; and , a UW professor in the Allen School and the electrical and computer engineering department. This research is funded by the Microsoft Climate Research Initiative, an Amazon Research Award and the Google Research Scholar Program. Zhang was supported by the UW Clean Energy Institute Graduate Fellowship.

For more information, contact vpcb@cs.washington.edu.