Western Washington University’s Center for Instructional Innovation and Assessment will host its annual “Innovative Teaching Showcase Learning Event” from Noon to 2 p.m. Tuesday, June 1, in College Hall 310.

The theme of this year's Showcase is “Planning for Large Classes.” On June 1, community members are invited to meet the featured instructors, view videotaped interviews with those instructors and find out more about teaching large classes at Western.

Western Washington University’s Wayne Landis, professor of Environmental Science, will speak on “Risky Business; Integrating Science-Policy to Manage the Environment” as part of Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment speaker series at 3 p.m., Friday, May 14 at WWU’s Communications Facility Room 125.

The event is free and open to the public.

John Rybczyk (Environmental Science), with five undergraduate co-authors in Huxley College (Stephanie Tetreault, Matt Kurle, Peter Fosmire, Ramon Feskens and Tracey Pennell), had the paper "Total Suspended Solids Removal in a Constructed Stormwater Treatment Wetland in Bellingham, WA." presented at the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Society of Wetland Scientists' annual meeting. Pennell, a senior in the Department of Environmental Science, presented the paper.

Andy Bunn, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at WWU, presents “The Polaris Project: A barge, twenty bunks, and a river at the top of the world,” discussing his work in the Siberian Arctic with undergraduates from eight American and Russian universities. The project’s guiding scientific theme is the transport and transformations of carbon and nutrients as they move along the Kolyma River from terrestrial uplands to the Arctic Ocean. This is a central scientific issue as scientists struggle to understand a rapidly changing Arctic.

Andy Bunn, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Western Washington University, participated this summer in the Polaris Project in the Siberian arctic. It was the second consecutive summer that Bunn took a pair of WWU undergraduates on the summer research project to study the effects of climate change on these ecologically vital and sensitive areas.

Story by John Thompson | WWU

Western Washington University graduate student Ian Gill spent his summer researching the predator-prey dynamic between grizzly bears and the chum salmon up close and personal in the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary on Alaska’s Cook Inlet in an effort to understand the factors affecting the success of individual bears, how they learn, and how this interaction affects the health of both populations.

Andrew Bunn, assistant professor at Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment, is a primary investigator in a new initiative at the Woods Hole Research Center known as the Polaris Project, which will train future leaders in arctic research and education, and inform the public, both of which are essential given the rapid and profound changes under way in the Arctic in response to global warming.