As Winter quarter draws to a close and the days get longer, I reflect with pride on our numerous successes in SEFS’ research, teaching, and engagement activities. This issue of our newsletter highlights some important research successes: in identifying and mapping stored carbon in forested wetlands, and in understanding the recovery of west-side forests after fire. It also highlights our highly successful engagements with the USGS, as host of the Washington Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and adult learners, through the education programs at the UW Botanic Gardens. The end of the quarter also brings numerous presentations that represent culminations of the hard work of our students in classes and thesis work. These are all great examples of how our collective work is making a real difference in advancing fundamental knowledge, student readiness, real-world decision making, and broader public awareness on environmental and sustainability challenges and choices.

The winter quarter was enlivened by a steady stream of candidates for faculty positions in the areas of bioresource systems engineering, ecological restoration and management, and quantitative sciences. This has provided a window into the leading thinking in these areas and elevated our anticipation of adding some of these excellent early-career scholars to our faculty.

Looking forward, the spring quarter brings a number of annual events, providing opportunities to gather and celebrate our achievements together. In addition, we look forward to upcoming SEFS events in spring quarter and encourage you to save these dates.

• We hope you will join us for the Sustaining our World lecture on April 17, presented by Prof. Lucy Hutyra (BS ’98), professor at Boston University and 2023 MacArthur Genius Award winner.
• Our end-of-the-year celebration, on the evening of May 22 in the SEFS courtyard, is an opportunity for all of us to recognize and celebrate each other’s accomplishments.
• Finally, our commencement to recognize this year’s graduates will be held in the afternoon of June 7 in Kane Hall, followed by a reception in the SEFS courtyard.

In addition to these usual events, this year we have added excitement as the Anderson Hall renovation project gets more real. The design-build team is busily working on the detailed design for the renovation, with groundbreaking to start after the end of spring quarter. This means that we are sorting building contents for storage, surplus, and moving and packing up for the move. By summer quarter, Anderson Hall occupants will have decamped for our 18-month Condon Hall residency. While this gives us more work to do in the short term, we are excited about the potential of the renovated building to provide a more modern and collaborative learning environment for our students, researchers, and external partners, along with greater accessibility and safety.

We have also been working on redesigns of our two undergraduate programs (ESRM and BSE), which are making their way through the curriculum approval processes. These redesigns are intended to both update our curricula to better serve their respective student populations and provide more points of intersection between these two programs around the theme of sustainability.

Dan Brown

School of Environmental and Forest Sciences
Corkery Family Director’s Chair
Professor and Director