Hollywood legend Rita Moreno charmed the campus community in April when she delivered the Spring 2023 Susan Resneck Pierce Lecture and spoke to a class. Now 91, Moreno is perhaps best known for playing Anita in the 1961 film West Side Story, a role that earned her an Academy Award for best supporting actress— and made her the first Latina to win an Oscar.
Summer around here has a different rhythm than the rest of the academic year. What does it feel like to you?
It’s not quite as busy on campus as it is between September and May, but it’s far from a ghost town. We have students here taking classes and doing summer research, and we have a very vital and busy conference schedule, among other activities. Conferences, summer camps, and our Summer Academic Challenge allow us to make the campus available to the broader community, where people are able to utilize our facilities in a variety of ways.
Faithlina Abeshima ’16 majored in music and psychology, but a work-study in technology set her on a different career path. Shortly after graduating, she was hired by the university as a technology support analyst; then, in 2019, she stepped into the role of information security administrator. We asked her for advice on steering clear of the hackers, scammers, and bots.
I’ve loved teaching the senior-level quantum mechanics course. At this stage of the game, students have enough math skills and physics background to delve deeply into the subject—it’s pretty exciting for them and for me as well. It all starts to come together. I learn more every time I teach the course.
- Greg Elliott, professor of physics, retiring after 30 years at Puget Sound
Sarah Strattan ’11 grew up in Evergreen, Colo., fascinated by the “Fourteeners”—the Colorado peaks that exceed 14,000 feet. In college, Puget Sound Outdoors introduced her to backpacking, and an outdoor leadership experience in Alaska taught her about mountaineering. She climbed Rainier, then Denali. Then she set her sights on the Himalayas. Strattan, who taught middle school science for a time and now works on the ski patrol at Aspen Highlands Ski Area, spends part of each summer challenging herself on Asia’s tallest peaks.
Ronald R. Thomas is home. For 13 years, from the summers of 2003 through 2016, that beloved home was here, as president of University of Puget Sound. His irrepressible enthusiasm for all things Puget Sound so animates the campus today that it’s impossible to speak of it in the past tense. He loved it all: every student, every possibility, every building, every blade of grass. The campus looks the way it does because he was a master of master planning.
TACOMA, Wash. — University of Puget Sound will remove the name of a former professor and proponent of eugenics from the college’s museum of natural history. On May 12, Puget Sound’s Board of Trustees unanimously voted to approve President Isiaah Crawford’s recommendation to remove the name “Slater” from the Slater Museum of Natural History following a request from a student and subsequent review by a committee.
TACOMA, Wash. — Following an extensive and highly competitive national search, University of Puget Sound has named Drew Kerkhoff as the institution’s new provost effective July 10, 2023. Kerkhoff comes to Puget Sound from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he currently serves as associate provost.
Every year, University of Puget Sound students are selected to receive highly competitive grants, awards, scholarships, and fellowships which enable them to continue their educations and dive deeper into their fields of expertise. This year is no different, with nine Loggers being named semi-finalists for the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, including four finalists for the award and one alternate.
As professor and director of the International Political Economy (IPE) program at Puget Sound, Emelie Peine combines tools from sociology, politics, geography, economics, and other social sciences to shed some light on how governments, markets, and societies interact to create the world we live in. Peine researches the role of multinational corporations in the global food regime. We recently sat down with her to learn about international trade, experiential learning, and why we should all be studying food systems.