Archive: stories

Eastern students take on the cyber crooks.   A ransomware attack shuts down Colonial Pipeline, largest fuel supplier to the East Coast; a cryptocurrency heist drains $600 million from the accounts of the PolyNetwork blockchain site; a data breach exposes the personal information of 50 million T-Mobile account holders: These brazen cyberattacks, all pulled off…

EWU’s Get Lit! festival goes digital, and earns accolades.   Eastern’s annual week-long literary festival, Get Lit!  —  a gathering where authors both famous and up-and-coming participate in public readings, workshops and panel discussions — has long been a banner event on the Inland Northwest’s cultural calendar.  Given its ambitious scale and scope, organizing Get…

Monica Jaenicke, athlete, alumna and sports communicator, will lead EWU Athletics’ outreach. Over the course of his 31-year career at Eastern, Sports Information Director Dave Cook became the omnipresent go-to for all-things Eagles. After Cook announced his retirement earlier this year, his long-time assistant, Monica Jaenicke ’14, stepped up to fill the void. This October…

  Once they were migrant and seasonal farm workers. Soon they’ll launch careers in health care.   CAMP, the College Assistance Migrant Program, is a federally funded program designed to help young people from migrant and seasonal farm worker backgrounds enroll in — and succeed at — the nation’s colleges and universities. Eastern’s program, led…

Along with his students, an EWU chemist takes his place among the quantum vanguard. Few recent scientific developments are as promising to contemplate, or as maddeningly difficult to comprehend, as quantum computing — a process in which the 1s and 0s of traditional digital processing are replaced with the exponentially more capable quantum bits, or…

Kelsey Hatch-Brecek, EWU’s new director of alumni relations, shares her Eastern story.   I am thrilled to be back at my alma mater as the new director of alumni relations. And since every Eagle has a story, I’d like to share my Eastern journey with you.  Back in 1999, I was a senior in high school…

Auriana Mitchell brings a youthful perspective to Eastern’s 130-year-old governing body.  Beginning in the 1970s, the nation’s higher education governing boards gradually began to acknowledge that student voices deserved a place at the table. Though the state of Washington was a little late to the game, for just over two decades its regional university boards…

Travel restrictions fail to deter Eastern’s determined geologists.   Covid-19’s disruptions over the past year-and-a-half haven’t just affected indoor learning at Eastern, they’ve also upended many of the outdoor experiences that make higher education in the magnificent Inland Northwest so rewarding. Happily, organizers in EWU’s geosciences program found a way to preserve perhaps the premiere…

After a year-and-a-half long pandemic-induced hiatus, Eastern’s interim president celebrates students’ return.   On a near-perfect, end-of-summer Tuesday in September — less than 24 hours before the university’s much anticipated return to in-person instruction — Eastern’s interim president, David May, took the stage in Showalter Auditorium to deliver an emphatic message: “We are back!” “There…

A new, NSF-supported project aims to unravel one of nature’s enduring mysteries.   For decades, biologists have grappled with questions involving nature’s way of distributing plants and animals: Why, in short, are some species found all over, while others barely budge from their ancestral homes? The search for solutions is more complicated than one might…