Papers published

• Undergraduate student Nhat Nguyen (Physics Minor 2023), together with  Andrés Aragoneses, and  Carleton College Professor, Arjendu Pattanayak, have recently published a paper:
  • “TARDYS: Extracting Temporal And Reversible DYnamical Symmetries” Published in Photonics (MDPI), open access: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.organomet.2c00353

Faculty candidate seminar and teaching demonstration

• Biochemistry candidate Steven Karpowicz, from Eastern New Mexico University, will deliver a seminar titled “Taurine metabolism: How to make an abundant molecule” on Thursday 12th of January at 14:00, at Patterson 128.
• Biochemistry candidate Steven Karpowicz, from Eastern New Mexico University, will deliver a teaching lecture on “The role of thiamine in metabolism” on Friday 13th of January at 11:00, at Patterson 128.

Coming outreach

• Suds & Science: On February 4th, at 7 PM at the Golden Handle Brewery (154 S. Madison, Spokane), Rene Buell and Andrés Aragoneses will be talking about the science in the movie The Martian.

Physics Teatime

• Physics will continue with its usual social teatime. This term it will be Fridays from 2PM to 3 PM.

Nobel Prize 2022 (not to the department this year)

• Physics: Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”
• Chemistry: Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, and K. Barry sharpless “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry”

Grant awarded

• Ashley Lamm has received a 1.5 million dollar Track 1 NSF Noyce Grant entitled “Expanding collaborations that recruit, prepare, and retain diverse and highly-qualified STEM teachers in Eastern Washington”.

This grant provides scholarships to recruit and prepare STEM majors to become K-12 teachers. The program seeks to increase the number of K-12 teachers with strong STEM content knowledge who teach in high-need school districts.

Physics Teatime

• Physics is hosting “tea & cookies” for physics students & faculty every Wednesday at 3 PM (CEB 318).

Outreach to the community

• Faculty and students from Chemistry & Physics will be present at the American Physics Society Division of Plasma Physics outreach event, on Thursday 20th in Spokane.
• Jason Stoke will be giving a presentation about “Solar Energy Science” .
  • • Spacetime coordinates:
      • Golden Handle Project in downtown Spokane (111 S. Cedar st.).
      • Saturday October 22nd at 7 PM.

Student’s research at international conference

• Andrés Aragoneses presented research done with two EWU students (Nhat Nguyen and David Spichak) at Dynamics Days Europe in Aberdeen (Scotland) in August.

Grant awarded

• Ashley Lamm has received a 1.5 million dollar Track 1 NSF Noyce Grant entitled “Expanding collaborations that recruit, prepare, and retain diverse and highly-qualified STEM teachers in Eastern Washington”.

This grant provides scholarships to recruit and prepare STEM majors to become K-12 teachers. The program seeks to increase the number of K-12 teachers with strong STEM content knowledge who teach in high-need school districts.

Alumni panel

• What do Physics do? A panel of EWU Physics alumni will share with our undergraduate students, and faculty, their experiences and perspectives as physicists after college. Tea and pastries will be served.
  • Spacetime coordinates:
    • ISC 009.
    • Friday June 3rd at 2 PM.

Outreach to the community

• Jason Stoke and Andrés Aragoneses, together with  Jessica Allen and Javier Ochoa-Reparaz (from Biology), will be giving a presentation about the Science of Star Wars: “May the Science be with you!” .
  • • Spacetime coordinates:
      • Golden Handle Project in downtown Spokane (111 S. Cedar st.).
      • Saturday June 4th at 7 PM.

By Katelin Killoy, Rebecca Brown, and Camille McNeely

This summer a team from EWU’s biology department and partners from the Methow Beaver Project collected data from 13 streams across the Methow and Okanogan watersheds. We focused our efforts on incised streams in wildfire affected areas. Stream incision occurs when channel downcutting into the stream bed causes streams to be disconnected from their floodplain, so water storage and riparian zones become diminished (Figure 1). This means that floodplains no longer become flooded, and important nutrient exchanges and channel forming floods do not occur. Additionally, when streams are disconnected; floodplains begin to resemble dry upland terraces. Stream incision often occurs from the loss of vegetation on banks, due to wildfires, grazing, etc., leading to high erosion. Wetland vegetation decreases, runoff into streams increases, channel downcutting increases, nutrient retention decreases, and water storage decreases. This is often compounded by the loss of beavers.

Figure 1: An incised stream. Look at how the stream and the floodplain are disconnected. This causes the floodplain to resemble dry uplands as you can see in the picture. This doesn’t look like a stable stream ecosystem fit for fish and wildlife.

Beavers increase water storage in incised streams by raising water levels in the stream and groundwater by creating dams. Water storage describes water that is temporarily held in the area. Beaver dam complexes increase water storage by slowing water and increasing water infiltration into the soil. Raising water storage restores floodplain water tables by extending groundwater infiltration throughout the floodplain. When beaver dams store precipitation and snowmelt longer, they can relieve drought stress and allow more floodplain and wetland plant species to grow. The resulting lush, wet floodplains provide important food for wildlife, and refugia during drought and wildfires. But that’s not all beavers do!

Beaver ponds improve water quality by trapping and converting nutrients (Figure 2). Increased runoff into streams can increase nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in streams from fertilizers. When this happens, algae abundance increases from the high availability of nutrients. When the algae die, microbes decompose the algae, resulting in reduced dissolved oxygen in the stream, which can be very harmful for our native trout and salmon populations. Streams with beaver ponds have lower streambank erosion and contribute the least soil and phosphorus into streams. Additionally, the retention of phosphorus from beaver ponds help aquatic ecosystems recover from wildfires by trapping nutrients. There is a common belief that beaver ponds are not good for salmonids and ecosystems, but we are now discovering how beneficial they are.

Despite the many beneficial ecosystem functions beaver dams provide, beavers are not found in many of their historic watersheds. Human conflict, trapping, and degraded floodplains prevent them from reaching their historic population levels. While beaver reintroduction may help restore streams, there are areas where reintroduction may not be feasible or may require prior floodplain restoration to ensure the habitat is viable for beavers.

Figure 2: Beaver pond on Benson Creek in the Methow watershed. You can visually see how the dam is storing water, and the dam is surrounded by lush vegetation.

Figure 3: A crew from the Methow Beaver Project building a Beaver Dam Analog. They hammer in posts across the stream and then weave trees such as willows or alder through the posts. These are designed to mimic natural beaver dams.

Where beaver reintroduction is not feasible, Beaver Dam Analogs (BDAs) may be a useful tool (Figure 3). BDAs are man-made structures mimicking beaver dams. Although, they are maintained less frequently and often use more porous materials, it is not known how effective BDAs are at mimicking natural beaver dam ecosystem functions. The few existing BDA studies have low replication, and are usually based on one BDA complex. Yet despite the limited research on their efficacy, BDAs have  become an increasingly popular restoration tool.

To address the need for more research, I am conducting a large-scale study of multiple BDA and beaver dam complexes in the Methow and Okanogan watersheds funded by a grant from Seattle City Light to my mentors, Dr. McNeely and Dr. Brown. Our study is making use of eight BDA complexes being established by the nonprofit, Methow Beaver Project, with over a million dollars in funding from the Washington Department of Ecology and the Wildlife Conservation Society. Last summer, we collected data on topography, vegetation, water quality, and water storage (Figure 4 and 5) before the BDA complexes were installed, and next summer I’ll be collecting data after installation. Our study will be the first step of a long-term study assessing BDA success over time, and will help guide agencies’ use of BDAs as a restoration technique. My study will determine whether BDAs can play a similar role to Beaver dams in increasing ecosystem resilience to climate change induced drought and wildfire.

Figure 4: Graduate student Katelin Killoy holding a stadia rod to measure topography at a beaver pond on Bonaparte Creek in the Okanogan Watershed. Look at how green the floodplain is.

Figure 5: Undergrad field technician Catie Schwartzmann, and Dr. Rebecca Brown conducting a vegetation transect across Tunk Creek in the Okanogan Watershed. This is a future BDA complex site. Pre-restoration data was being collected. Look at the stream incision.

Alumni summer research

• Joel Price (’21) did a presentation at the American Vacuum Society (AVS) 2021 conference about the optical properties of LaNiFeO3, based on his research this summer at PNNL with Dr. Stoke. He won first place for the undergraduate presentations.

Science Outreach

• Andrés Aragoneses will give a presentation on the Science in the work of Salvador Dalí, at The Hive (Spokane Public Libraries), on Saturday October 23rd at 14:30.

Nobel price 2021

• Not to the department, but we’ll continue working hard:
  • Chemistry The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 was awarded jointly to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis.”
  • Physics The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was awarded “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems” with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming” and the other half to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”

Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Environmental Protection Chief Bill Sherman will be joining in a virtual discussion with EWU students on Tuesday, December 8th from 12-1pm. They will be speaking to the litigation under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) against the Trump Administration.

The panelists will discuss the importance of NEPA and how it helps to protect our environment here in Washington State. AG Ferguson will discuss the rules the Trump Administration is proposing and how it will eliminate or reduce scrutiny for federal decisions and harm Washington. Participants will learn how the changes restrict NEPA’s application and scope and how the failure to conduct environmental review will affect our public health by the proposed regulatory changes. The presentation will include a Q&A session with the panelists.

This event is incorporated into the PLAN 431/571 Environmental Review and Environmental Impact Statements course, offered by Professor Margo Hill, who has opened up this unique opportunity to the EWU campus community. This is sure to be an insightful conversation for all of those interested in environmental planning and protection and those intrigued by the role our state plays in this regulation on a national stage.

If you are interested in this event, please connect via Zoom using this link.