Joe Biden, presidential candidate, December 2019

Kris Hay, who has worked in Career and Employment Services for more than 20 years, has compiled a collection of recipes from chefs and restaurants in Tacoma—specifically, ones that thrive on local, sustainable ingredients. She wanted her cookbook, called Tacoma Aroma: Savor the Flavor, to benefit the region so 25.3% of proceeds (a wink to the 253 area code) will be donated to nonprofit organizations like Pierce County’s Emergency Food Network. Here, Hay recommends some of her favorite spots close to campus.

Ella Slattery ’25 had only been on campus for a few weeks when she laid eyes on the plasma chamber. As a first-year student at University of Puget Sound, she was on a tour of the physics department and got to chatting with postdoctoral researcher Brett Klaasen Von Oorschot about a project he was working on with some of his students—a small, silver device connected to a mass of wires and sitting on a rolling cart.

“I’d never seen a fusor before. It was utterly fascinating,” Slattery recalls. “I immediately knew I wanted to get involved and learn as much as I could about it.”

The discipline of philosophy is more than 2,500 years old, but it still has plenty to say about how we live, how to grapple with our darkest impulses, and how to relate to others. Associate Professor Sara Protasi teaches courses in ethics and ancient Greek philosophy, and is the author of The Philosophy of Envy. We sat down with Protasi to discuss her professional journey from Rome to Tacoma, her love of Aristotle, and the value of a liberal arts education.

It’s midmorning at Driveline Baseball, a performance training facility in Kent, Wash., and Kevin Covarrubias ’23 is spraying a thin layer of adhesive on the skin of an athlete in preparation for attaching 45 reflective markers to their arms, legs, chest, and back. Once the markers are in place, he has them step into the center of a massive, motion-capture camera rig that will record their tiniest movements, track the movement of each marker, and send the data to a computer for analysis. It’s all part of the company’s data-driven approach to helping baseball players perfect their form.

Lexi Brewer considers herself a sustainability generalist, having worked with city government, nonprofits, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before becoming University of Puget Sound’s director of sustainability. Since March 2022, she’s has been getting to know the campus community and starting to lay the foundations for new initiatives to help Puget Sound achieve its environmental goals. We recently sat down with Brewer to discuss the new role, how environmental justice has to figure into any climate plan, and more.

TACOMA, Wash. – College Success Foundation (CSF), a national nonprofit organization that helps students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds achieve their dream of a college education, recently relocated its Tacoma regional office to the campus of University of Puget Sound. The foundation hosted an open house event Aug. 25 for local principals and school officials, community leaders, and more, to show off the new space. 

In 2019, as the federal government began preparations for the 2020 U.S. Census, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science Courtney Thatcher was doing a lot of thinking about the problem of redistricting. Every 10 years, population data from the census is used by states to redraw election maps. In theory, this redistricting process ensures that there are the same number of people in each district, giving them equal representation in Congress. In practice, this process is often mired in partisan attempts to gerrymander districts to benefit one political party.

Get the latest university info about COVID-19 and monkeypox (MPV).

TACOMA, Wash. – University of Puget Sound graduate Avalena Everard ’20 is among the first Peace Corps volunteers to return to overseas service since the agency’s unprecedented global evacuation in March 2020. The Peace Corps suspended global operations and evacuated nearly 7,000 volunteers from more than 60 countries at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.