Where will Eastern magazine be spotted next? Share a photo of you, our latest issue and the details of where your travels have taken you. Send to easternmagazine@ewu.edu.

Belgium

Alex Moskalyuk ’03 with his son, Daniel, age 12, at the Grand-Place in Brussels this summer.

Dominican Republic

On a cruise ship en route to the Dominican Republic last July, a flock of Eagle alumni gathered to take in the oceanic vistas. From left to right around the table: Jeff Watson ’90, Rob Ahrens ’93,  Shannon Bryan-Ahrens ’93 (holding her magazine), Pam Clayton ’00, and Karen Thompson-Watson ’89, ’90.

Germany

Dan Obenchain ’79, ’82, and his wife, Maria, recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary with a river cruise through Germany’s enchanting Rhineland.

Iceland

While in the southwest of Iceland, Doug Kelley ’83, treated himself and his magazine to the healing waters of the Blue Lagoon Spa, a place “where the powers of geothermal seawater create transformational spa journeys.”

Japan

Robert Adams ’90, celebrated his 64th wedding anniversary with a “sail by” cruise featuring a stunning view of Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi. Adams, a veteran, served with the rank of major in United States Marine Corps.

Clay Breshears ’83, on the bridge over the moat outside Osaka Castle, in Osaka, Japan. Breshears spent two weeks traveling around the country to attend 10 Nippon Professional Baseball games in 10 different stadiums. It was his eighth trip to Japan.

Korea

Casey Furuya ’22, a middle-school science teacher in Salem, Oregon, displays his Eastern magazine outside the Haedong Yonggungsa Temple in Busan, South Korea. Furuya’s temple tour came during a six-week summer sojourn to visit family.

Netherlands

Taking time out from what she describes as a “fun, touristy weekend”, Lauren Hegge ’10, posed for a photo at the iconic, and enormously popular, “I AMsterdam” sign.

While visiting Kinderdijk, a UNESCO World Heritage site near Rotterdam, Holland, Kent Richardson ’69 and Nancy McKay ’68 took in a scenic view of one of the town’s 18th-century windmills.

Mexico

Brendan Genther ’20 shows off his Eastern magazine on the beach in front of Puerto Vallarta’s stunningly modern Los Muertos Pier.

Norway

Earlier this year John Nelson ’90, and his wife, Cami, rode the Fløbanen funicular to the summit of Mount Fløyen, a popular peak high above the historic city of Bergen on Norway’s southwestern coast.

Thailand

During a two-week trip to Southeast Asia this summer, Shyann Morton ’18, and her brother, Trace Morton, stopped by a sanctuary for elephants in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Trace is a student in the EWU nursing program.

Turkey

Newlyweds Emily Ausere Holman ’22 and Zander Holman ’22 offered to add their magazine to the collection of the Library of Celsus in Ephesus, Turkey, an important center of scholarship during both classical and late antiquity.

Scott ’03 and Andrea LaPlant ’23 and their children visited the Hagia Sophia, one of the world’s greatest architectural and spiritual landmarks, during a summertime sojourn in Istanbul, Turkey.

United States

Samantha Creal ’08 joined her sisters, Heidi Birdsell ’05 and Tracy Eckersell ’12, and her brother-in-law Chase Eckersell ‘08 packed their magazine on a camping and hiking trip to central Oregon.

Ted Fritsch ’75 recently attended the 50th Anniversary Vintiques Auto Show in Yakima. He and his magazine are pictured with the same 1945 Dodge pickup that he used to drive to and from the Eastern campus while earning a degree in industrial technology. “I actually overhauled the engine in one of my classes,” Fritsch says.

While visiting historic Salem, Massachusetts, Harry Kautzman ’91 found himself in the stocks. Kautzman was in New England to experience the region’s splendid fall foliage.

During a Inside Passage cruise in Alaska, Joel San Nicolas ’83 and his wife, Teresa, took their magazine along on a visit to Juneau’s famous Red Dog Saloon.

While visiting Kachemak Bay on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, Paula ’75 and Jim Perez ’75 paused to show their Eastern pride at a sign celebrating the scenic city of Homer.

Shari McMahan, EWU’s president, joins a group of the Eagle football luminaries during a tailgate before an Eastern road game.

Vietnam

Ciara Johnson ’22 a brought her magazine with her to the post office in Hoi An, Vietnam, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Johnson, who lives in Changshu, China, was in town for a conference, but was able to take time out for Hoi An’s famous fall full-moon festival.

Just after the beginning of the 2023 academic year, Eastern’s Board of Trustees met to discuss, among other pressing issues, how the university could better share its strengths with the wider world: “How might we more authentically communicate who we are,” they asked, “while differentiating ourselves in our region’s competitive higher education landscape?”

Eastern’s leadership responded by working with a Baltimore-based consulting group, idfive, and faculty representatives from EWU’s four colleges to engage the entire campus community in the quest for answers.

After months of research and market analysis, strategic-planning and surveys of stakeholders, a plan that emphasizes Eastern’s long history of hands-on, experiential learning took shape. And earlier this year, with the BOT’s approval, that plan became official: Eastern, in both mission and messaging, would now publicly define itself as “the region’s polytechnic” — “polytechnic” being broadly defined as an emphasis on applied learning — as it works to provide its students with experience-based pathways for success.

“There has been a lot of chatter, and even a few news stories already, about this next evolution for Eastern — our regional polytechnic brand,” Shari McMahan, Eastern’s president, said with a laugh during her annual convocation address in September. “As I continue to say, this is an exciting opportunity for us to differentiate ourselves and to capitalize on the work we are already doing… Our goal is to make applied learning a hallmark of every EWU degree.”

“To be clear,” she continued, “we are still a regional comprehensive public university grounded in a liberal arts education.”

Currently, some 75 percent of EWU students graduate with experience in their intended career fields. Eastern will now be working even harder to provide professional experiences to all of its students. “There has been a lot of listening that’s gone into this — a lot of back-and-forth and creativity,” McMahan said. “To me, it really defines the authentic Eastern Washington University.”

One of Eastern’s most prominent faculty members, Stuart “Stu” Steiner, in June was awarded the Trustees’ Medal, the university’s most prestigious  faculty accolade.

Steiner ’01, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, is the founder and director of EWU’s Center for Network Computing and Cybersecurity. The center is home to a nationally prominent program that has placed Eastern students at the forefront of international efforts to make digital technologies less vulnerable to attacks.

The Trustees’ Medal is the university’s highest form of recognition for faculty achievement. Since 1978, it has honored teaching excellence, significant contributions to scholarship and research, and accomplishments in the development of academic programs and curricula. The award consists of a silver medallion and a $1,500 cash prize from the EWU Foundation.

Steiner, who has served on the Eastern faculty for more than 20 years, has a reputation for operating an inclusive program that opens doors for all students. This commitment to the university and his “unwavering support” for students was cited in the multiple endorsements that supported his Trustees’ Medal nomination.

In a letter signed by more than 60 Eagle undergraduates, for example, Steiner was credited for significantly advancing their academic and personal development.

“His larger-than-life presence can be felt in every corner of the campus, and we have always known that we can turn to him with any concern, however big or small,” the letter said.

On a professional level, his students’ experiences include helping small Washington cities, among them Liberty Lake and Kittitas, fend off cyberattacks. An Eagle team coached by Steiner also earned a national title for EWU at the 2023 NCAE Cyber Games in Florida.

His contributions to the university aren’t limited to academic work. In addition to serving on the EWU Foundation board, Steiner and his wife, Shirlee, have contributed significant scholarship support for students who are underrepresented in the cybersecurity field. Steiner also works to engage next-generation students by organizing cyber camps, regional competitions and mentoring activities.

Beyond the EWU campus, his work has earned the attention of the federal National Security Agency, which tapped him to mentor faculty members at other universities as they work to establish their own cybersecurity programs,

“In all my time working in higher education, I can think of few people with both the passion, the expertise and, most critically, the commitment to the institution that Stu Steiner embodies,” said David Bowman, dean of Eastern’s College of STEM. “I can think of no person more deserving of EWU’s highest honor.”

Like many colleges and universities, Eastern is always looking for ways to better serve its students, support its faculty, and maximize the value it provides to the wider community.

One recent initiative, a potentially transformative, two-year “strategic resource allocation” review, reached a critical phase earlier this fall.

In September, senior administrators issued their initial response to recommendations made by a Strategic Resource Allocation Task Force comprised of EWU faculty and staff members.

Those recommendations, divided into separate reports for “university services” and “academic programs,” contained the task forces’ findings on whether particular university programs and services should be expanded and invested in, maintained as currently operated, streamlined, transformed, or disinvested.

Moving forward on the recommendations will be a multi-year process, Shari McMahan, EWU’s president, has stressed, adding that she does not expect that any of the reallocations will involve faculty or staff layoffs. But some form of restructuring, she wrote in a letter to the university community, is inevitable.

On the services side, McMahan said, her leadership team “has prioritized finding ways to maximize productivity, reduce redundancies, and build a better customer service and learning environment for the campus community and visitors.”

Decisions on investment, transformation, or disinvestment of academic programs, meanwhile, will be finalized in early 2025, said Jonathan Anderson, EWU’s provost, in an earlier campus communication.

At this stage, he said, 27 programs have chosen to make program modifications, whether through curricular reorganization and/or resource reduction. Plans from those programs were completed by Nov. 1.

Additionally, Anderson wrote, “55 programs mutually agreed to consolidate or eliminate their offerings. There are currently 20 programs working through the program review and discontinuance process as outlined in academic policy. We expect the Board of Trustees to take final action on discontinuance recommendations in February 2025.”

Strategic allocation decisions are never easy, and administrators have said difficult choices will need to be made throughout the university.

But the goal, they add, is straightforward: “To ensure that our academic programs are best aligned to meet regional workforce needs, and our university services aligned in such a manner as to ensure the student experience is meaningful and campus resources are efficient and effective.”

Increasing participation among underrepresented university faculty members, particularly in STEM fields, is critical to building and maintaining our nation’s knowledge and science economies, experts say. Now, thanks to a three-year, $975,000 initiative funded by the National Science Foundation, EWU will be better equipped to make its own STEM faculty more representative.

Led by principal investigator Edwin Elias, an associate professor of Chicana/o/x studies at EWU, the new program is called Utilizing Practices to Leverage Institutional & Intersectional Formative Transformation, or UPLIIFT. It was funded through the NSF’s ADVANCE program, which, since 2001, has invested over $270 million to support projects at more than 100 university and STEM-related not-for-profit organizations. Eastern last received support from the ADVANCE program in 2010.

“[The grant] allows me to conduct research and to provide tangible solutions for retaining and recruiting historically excluded faculty,” Elias says, emphasizing that at Eastern, as elsewhere, barriers to boosting inclusivity remain substantial.

According to an UPLIIFT project overview released by Elias and his team of co-investigators, the new work at Eastern will utilize “an intersectional approach to examine and mitigate the processes that create inequities.”

This approach, says Elias, will help him and his team create a “more complete picture of the specific challenges underrepresented groups face, allowing us to enact institutional practices, structures, relationships and campus climate into an equitable and meritocratic workplace.”

Work for the UPLIIFT project began this fall. It is funded through the summer of 2027.

It’s not at all surprising that university research libraries, according to the nonprofit Council on Library and Information Resources, are taking on a range of new roles in the digital age, becoming “more deeply engaged in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.”

Eastern’s JFK Library & Learning Commons is no exception, having evolved in recent years to accommodate the latest advances in collection development, information access and user services.

This summer saw more progress as the library completed a much-anticipated series of services upgrades, including an expansion of digital resources, improved organization, greater access to its collections and an increase in quiet study and collaborative spaces.

Many of the changes, library officials say, came in response to feedback from the campus community, including faculty members who requested additional databases to support student-faculty research and experiential-learning projects.

Other improvements included a consolidation of books on the upper level of the library’s campus building, which increased access to — and convenience in — browsing among the stacks. Books that hadn’t been borrowed in 20 or more years were shipped out, creating additional space for current and emerging curriculum needs. Maps were redesigned to help students more easily discover resources, services and study areas.

“We’ve already had positive feedback from patrons over the summer and intercession. We encourage everyone to check out the improvements, both physical and new online resources,” says Ielleen Miller, an associate professor at EWU who serves as library faculty chair and director of the School of Libraries.

Many of the projects were years in the works, says Miller, adding that “they were only made possible with the dedication of all of the library staff, faculty and our fantastic student workers.”

In September, Drew Shirk, director of the Washington State Department of Revenue, was named by Gov. Jay Inslee to the university’s Board of Trustees. He joins new members Carol Evans ’91 and Alexis Alexander ’08, ’14, who were also named to the eight-member board in 2024.

As Eastern’s governing body, the Board of Trustees establishes and reviews university policies and oversees the general management of EWU. It also sets the university’s strategic direction, approves budgets and ensures its fiscal integrity.

Shirk comes to the board with a long history of public service. In his current role as director of the Department of Revenue, he leads an agency of 1,500 employees. The Wenatchee native earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Washington, and attended the Master of Public Administration Program at EWU. Shirk received the Governor’s Leadership in Management Award in July 2013.

Carol Evans was named to the board earlier in 2024. She was the first woman to serve as tribal chair for the Spokane Tribe of Indians, breaking barriers and paving the way for future generations of Indigenous women leaders.

In addition to her bachelor’s degree from EWU, Evans was awarded an honorary doctorate from Eastern last June in recognition of her outstanding contributions to her tribe and community. “We must continue to educate ourselves throughout life,” says Evans “I am honored to be appointed to the EWU Board of Trustees, and hope to help make college education a success for all students.”

Alexis Alexander, also appointed earlier in 2024, holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Eastern, where he was a standout student athlete. He currently serves as director of information-technology infrastructure with Spokane’s Avista Corporation. “I am humbled by the opportunity to serve the university, particularly among such a talented leadership team,” says Alexander.

Across the nation, the use of clean, renewable energy sources is revolutionizing the way Americans power their lives and livelihoods. Already, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, alternatives to the carbon-based status quo are generating hundreds of billions in economic activity, with much more to come.

Now, thanks to a Washington Climate Commitment Act grant from the state’s Department of Commerce, EWU is poised to play a bigger part in pioneering more planet-healthy ways of fueling our future. Earlier this fall, EWU was awarded close to $2.2 million to support two projects that will advance both Washington’s and the university’s clean energy goals. Project leader Erik Budsberg, EWU’s director of sustainability, says the clean energy initiatives will also provide applied-learning opportunities for Eagle students who one day hope to solve tough climate challenges as working professionals.

“These learning opportunities will give students a chance to get hands-on experience as they build careers that will ultimately tie into the clean energy revolution and help them secure good jobs  — jobs in which they can help address the root causes and impact of climate change,” Budsberg says.

The bulk of the funding, $1.9 million, will support development of a carbon dioxide capture component for the university’s natural-gas powered steam heating system. EWU will partner with CarbonQuest, a local engineering and manufacturing firm, to implement this “demonstration carbon capture system,” which will reduce emissions while providing a research space for investigating new, emission-reduction technologies.

The hands-on study of emission capture, Budsberg says, will position Eastern to provide a road map for other institutions and businesses seeking to mitigate their own near-term, carbon-emission challenges — all while planning for deeper decarbonization in the future.

The state also awarded EWU a $275,000 planning and pre-development grant to explore installation of a 3.5-megawatt solar-energy system. Among the issues to be investigated, Budsberg says, are potential construction challenges, utility impacts and interconnection agreements.

EWU’s projects were among 46 grants funded as part of the Washington Climate Commitment Act. “We’re very thankful to the Department of Commerce and the state of Washington for seeing the potential for clean energy development in Eastern Washington and, specifically, at Eastern Washington University,” Budsberg says.

Cola Boyer, an Eastern graduate who has excelled in training next-generation tribal leaders, was recently named the university’s new director of tribal relations.

Boyer ’20 says she’s “incredibly excited” to return to EWU where, she adds, “I’m going to be in a place where I can make a difference with tribal relations and tribal communities.”  

EWU President Shari McMahan said Boyer, an enrolled member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation, brings a wealth of knowledge, cultural advocacy and relationship-building experience to the role. “We’re confident in her abilities to lead with passion and dedication in fulfilling the mission of EWU,” McMahan said.

Prior to accepting her position at Eastern, Boyer established herself as a force in leadership training and development via her role as administrator of the Kalispel Leadership Academy, a tribal education program established by the Kalispel Tribe of Indians. Her success with the academy was recently recognized by the Spokane Journal of Business, which last year selected Boyer as a “rising star.”

As an alumna, Boyer has stayed active at EWU by volunteering, most notably as a member of the EWU Alumni Association Board of Directors. What stands out about her service, says Kelsey Hatch-Brecek, director of alumni relations, is her collaborative leadership style.

“Cola makes everybody just come together. She is all about unity and how we can use even our differences to come together,” Hatch-Brecek says. “I’m really excited for the doors she will open here.”

For her part, Boyer says her leadership role at Eastern will allow her to grow a stronger campus presence for Native people, helping both students and tribal community members overcome obstacles, and build upon successes, as they go forward.

“I look forward to spending some more time with all the faculty and staff and really building that strong collaboration with everybody,” she says.

For Police Chief Jewell Day, and the officers who serve with him at Eastern’s University Police Department, keeping up with best practices in policy, procedures and enforcement techniques has always been crucial to serving and protecting the campus community.

In June, that dedication to professionalism was recognized by a certificate of accreditation from the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, IACLEA, the nation’s leading authority for campus public safety.

Fewer than 100 agencies have earned this recognition, and Eastern is the only university in Washington to be IACLEA accredited.

“We are extremely proud to have earned our first ever accreditation as a police agency,” Day ’95 says. “This signifies that we have achieved the highest professional standards for policing, and have made a commitment to our community to continue being progressive in implementing and adhering to industry best practices and standards.”

According to its statement of standards, IACLEA accreditation signifies an agency’s ongoing commitment to excellence and state-of-the-art performance in every aspect of its operations. Such standards, it continues, should guide the recruitment, selection, training and professional development of agency personnel and overall agency operations.

Eastern received its accreditation after a rigorous evaluation process that included a site visit to EWU by an IACLEA assessment team. Eastern’s police prepared for the visit, in part, by updating policies and operations. Police officials also gave the public an opportunity to provide comments to the visiting assessors.

Among the benefits of accreditation are increased accountability from agency personnel and a commitment to continuous improvement to maintain excellent operations, Day says. The EWUPD will seek re-accreditation in four years.

“We congratulate the Eastern Washington University Police Department on achieving IACLEA accreditation, a unique distinction among campus police and public safety agencies,” said IACLEA President Paul Dean, chief of police and assistant vice president for public safety and risk management at the University of New Hampshire. “The men and women protecting your campus have proven through policy and practice the commitment to operate at the highest level of the profession.”