A prominent EWU scientist and his students, Marcos Monteiro among them, explore new ways of thinking about
a devastating neurodegenerative disease.

By Charles E. Reineke

Thanks to advances in genetic sequencing technology, the human gut microbiome — that vast ecosystem of bacteria and other microbes that live in our GI tract — has recently emerged as a key area of interest to scientists around the world. Among the most intriguing areas of investigation involve the role gut bacteria may play in human pathologies, and not just infectious diseases.

Here at Eastern, Javier Ochoa-Repáraz, an assistant professor of biology, is among those scientists who are exploring how the gut microbiome may play a role in neurological disorders, specifically those involving neurodegenerative autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis.

Autoimmunity, at its most straightforward, involves a failure of the immune system to distinguish between healthy and diseased cells and tissues. No one is sure why such failures occur, or how to stop autoimmune attacks against healthy cells. But in a 2018 paper in the journal Medical Sciences, Ochoa-Repáraz summarized a host of intriguing insights suggesting the microbiome may play a key role.

Chief among these is that autoimmunity disorders such as MS appear to have a “bidirectional relationship” with the gut microbiome; that is, microbial abnormalities may play a role in development of MS, while progression of the disease itself later reshapes the microbiome’s structure and function. This is important because it suggests that new therapeutic interventions could be effective in both preventing and treating MS.

“If the bidirectional association between the gut microbiome and disease is better understood by researchers — including our lab and research students at EWU — clinicians could better interpret the changes of the microbiota observed,” he says. “For example, perhaps we could determine whether clinical remissions or relapses are associated to a different microbiota, or anticipate the next stage of the disease based on the composition of the microbiota. We might also be able to better understand why some immune-mediated drugs are more effective with some patients than with others.”

Ochoa-Repáraz says his ultimate goal, one he’ll pursue with the help of students like Monteiro, is to locate a specific set of microbial targets to develop a probiotic treatment for MS patients.
A recently awarded grant from the National Institutes of Health will not only advance this goal, but will provide a means of getting more student researchers — particularly undergraduate researchers — involved in the project. “The NIH project is specifically designed to train undergraduate students in neuroimmunology, multiple sclerosis and the microbiome,” Ochoa-Repáraz says. “For the next three years we will likely work with more than a dozen students.”

Working alongside these undergraduates will be more advanced students like Monteiro, he says. Theirs is an especially critical role. “It would be impossible to conduct any meaningful research at EWU without their help. In our case, undergraduate students work together with graduate students like Marcos to conduct all the laboratory experiments. They also take part in lab meetings and discuss the results.”

The experience, he adds, will do more than just provide his lab with skilled labor. “It will,” he says, “teach students whether basic science is something they find interesting and like working on, and whether they can see themselves doing this work in the future. It will also provide a background on a very impactful disease that affects many people, particularly here in the Northwest, and on the study of the microbiome, a research area receiving more and more attention.”

Noelle Covarrubias left Eastern, but dreamed of returning. A new online degree program is making it happen.

By Eastern Magazine

She was a sophomore studying at Eastern when her family in the Tri-Cities decided to relocate to the Midwest. When Noelle Covarrubias, a talented vocalist and music performance major, got the news, she was torn. Move with the family she loved, or stay at the university she adored?

Family ties and personal considerations won out, and Covarrubias made the move.

Covarrubias never quite got over leaving EWU, however, vowing to herself that one day she’d be back. Now, seven years later, the university’s new Online MBA Program is providing that opportunity.

But she never quite got over leaving EWU, however, vowing to herself that one day she’d be back. Now, seven years later, the university’s new Online MBA Program is providing that opportunity. And Covarrubias used social media to let the world know how happy she is about it.

“One of my biggest regrets was leaving @easternwashingtonuniversity in the middle of my sophomore year,” she wrote in an Instagram post in June.

“It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made but I got through it and left a little piece of my heart in Cheney…I said if I were ever to pursue my master’s degree I would go back to EWU to finish what I started.”

Covarrubias says she fell in love with the university after her high school choir teacher recommended she attend the EWU Jazz Dialogue Summer Camp her freshman year.

“It was such a great experience for me. I learned a lot,” says Covarrubias, who went on to attend the summer camp after each of her four years of high school. After enrolling at Eastern she had every intention of graduating as an Eagle.

When her plans changed in the winter of 2012, Covarrubias transferred to Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota. There she earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology with minors in music and gerontology.

Covarrubias says she knew the time was right this spring when EWU announced the start of a new Online MBA Program. She applied, was accepted, and started with the inaugural class this fall. Covarrubias will pursue her degree while working full time at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Because the program is fully online, Covarrubias won’t physically return to campus. But she fully intends to return to Cheney for graduation, she says.

A colorful celebration of discovery now enlivens the Science Building.

By Eastern Magazine

Even as the new Interdisciplinary Science Center rises next door, the old Science Building at EWU remains a vital center for learning and discovery. It is also now a destination for art aficionados, thanks to a massive, science-celebrating mural recently completed by a creative group of EWU students. “The Enduring Beam of Science,” as the new work is titled, depicts all major areas of study represented in the building.

The mural was the brainchild of Nigel Davies, a scientific instructional technician in geology, who felt something was needed to adorn the bland walls framing the Science Building’s temporary entrance. Davies contacted EWU art instructor Lena Lopez Schindler, who agreed the walls needed attention, and a creative collaboration was born.

Lopez Schindler suggested the project would make a powerful experiential course for her students. In total, a dozen students from the departments of art, visual communications design, and biochemistry signed on to work with Lopez Schindler.

They began by immersing themselves in the details of the various scientific and scholarly projects ongoing in the building.

“It became apparent to the class the overwhelming amount of visual information that was in the Science Building,” says Lopez Schindler. “From the research posters lining the hallways, to display cases full of geology samples, stuffed birds, reptiles and mammals, to lecture announcements covering recent scientific discoveries.”

To make sense of this wealth of visual fodder, the students formed groups and compiled sketches, eventually formally presenting their ideas to an audience of faculty, administrators and facility operators. Once

“The Enduring Beam of Science” theme was ratified, the students began painting.

Lopez Schindler says the project was structured as a sort of seminar on how profession

al artists work in the real world, with lots of moving parts, critiques and working during “off” hours to avoid high-traffic times during the school day.

“For a collaboration to come to fruition every part of the project, from design to painting, is rigorously discussed and worked over as a group, individuals working as a team — much like a symphony playing a piece of music.”

Visitors can view the mural during business hours via the west entry to the Science Building.

Professional architects agree, Eastern’s PUB is the place to be.

Eastern’s Pence Union Building, recent recipient of a $47 million remodel, has become everything renovation advocates had hoped for: an inviting center for student activities, a welcoming gathering place for the campus community, and a symbol of Eastern’s commitment to a new era of higher education. Now add another plaudit: architectural icon.

In October, the new PUB received a citation from the Washington Council of the American Institute of Architects recognizing it as exemplifying “design excellence in publicly funded projects located in Washington state.” Only eleven other projects were so honored.

The awards, according to the citation, highlighted projects with the highest standards in sustainability, innovation, building performance and overall integration with the client and surrounding communities. In the PUB’s case, judges were particularly entranced with the its gleaming front elevation and its soaring interior staircase that, they said, “integrated the life of the whole building.”

EWU students travel in the footsteps of America’s civil rights icons

By Eastern Magazine

Spring break is traditionally known as a week to relax and unwind, perhaps even to travel to a warmer climate and lay by a pool or the ocean. For 15 EWU Africana Studies students, however, spring break involved a different kind of trip — a “1,000-mile tour” that wasn’t about catching the sun’s rays and enjoying drinks with festive umbrellas. It was instead about experiencing personal growth through exploring a turbulent and transformative time in American history: the movement for civil rights.

The “1,000 Miles Civil Rights Tour” took students to prominent movement sites in six southern states: Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia. From March 22-29 the group visited museums and monuments that capture the impact of the long struggle for equality.

The tour provided a unique opportunity for the students to “taste and see” the price paid by so many heroic individuals whose demands for equity and equality forever changed America’s laws and culture.

The impact of this experience is something that is not easily translated to the pages of a magazine. That is why, upon their return, the students put together a campus presentation and video to tell their story.

“There’s no way to truly prepare for this trip,” says EWU student Chelsea Smith in the video. “Emotionally, physically and mentally—there’s no way.”

The tour provided a unique opportunity for the students to “taste and see” the price paid by so many heroic individuals whose demands for equity and equality forever changed America’s laws and culture.

“Looking at my peers on this trip, I saw no dry eyes,” another student, Kris McLemore, says. “I saw lots of weary eyes and I saw pain that they never thought they would see before.”

“I felt sad, but also hopeful,” adds fellow student Monica Winn.

Watching the video, viewers feel a sense of the deep impact this journey had on the students’ hearts and minds — an emotional journey that couldn’t be duplicated in a classroom or in a textbook. A real-world and deeply meaningful learning experience is exactly what Scott Finnie, the university’s Africana Studies Program director, was hoping for. “We were able to, in a sense, turn something cold, historical and distant, of the past, and make it an emotive and present reality,” he says.

The 1,000 Miles Civil Rights Tour was the culmination of a winter-quarter class that covered the history of America’s civil rights struggle during the post-World War II period. The course involved daily journaling and led up to several class presentations. Finnie hopes to make the class and the Deep South trip an annual experience for EWU students.
You can find the 1,000 Miles Civil Rights Tour testimonial video on the university’s YouTube channel: ewuvideo.

Eastern physical therapy students learn by assisting little ones in need.

By Eastern Magazine

Watching children grow, play and learn is a timeless joy. It’s a pleasure made even more palpable when kids with developmental delays and disabilities are doing these things with the help of EWU physical therapy students.

This was the scene last summer at the Joya Child and Family Development Center in Spokane, a facility that provides developmental therapy for children up to age 3. Therapy at Joya often looks like play time — with toys, cheers and laughter — especially when the personalized sessions are led by enthusiastic Eagles.

The students’ work with the Joya kids was a clinical internship requirement of EWU’s Pediatric Summer Seminar, a course created last year by EWU instructor and Joya physical therapist, Ginette Kerkering.
She says she set up the internships after realizing that working with kids at Joya would be a perfect opportunity for Eastern students to get hands-on training at a pediatric facility.

“The lab on campus is really just set up for adult clients and students,” says Kerkering. “Because they are able to come to Joya to complete this, they are able to work with children in a kid-friendly environment with all of the standard equipment that is available.”

The seminar, she adds, is aimed at physical therapy graduate students interested in working with the youngest of patients. “This is a great experience for them to get some hands-on time learning to evaluate and develop a treatment plan for children,” says Kerkering. “Then they get to follow through on their treatment plan and make changes daily depending on what works and what doesn’t work. They also get exposure talking to parents.”

“It’s been amazing so far,” says third-year graduate student Hannah Carey-Brown. “It’s been our first clinical experience working with pediatric patients and so we got to apply what we’ve been learning for the past two years.”

Parents with kids at Joya do not pay anything extra for their children’s time with EWU students. During one therapy session over the summer, it was obvious that the adults in the room very much shared the joy as their happy little ones grew stronger with each student-led session.

“The EWU students have so much creativity and enthusiasm and are very invested in their little clients,” Kerkering says. “And our little clients get to be teachers to the graduate students by showing them their skills and how [the students] can help them move. I think that everyone goes home tired but smiling.”

An Eastern arts expert masters the business case study.

By Eastern Magazine

Jonathan Middleton, a professor of music at EWU, is a champion of the fine arts. He is not, strictly speaking, a business person. But after a recent conference he may need to update his CV.

In September, Middleton and Jeff Culver, an information systems and business analytics lecturer, attended a three-day clinic at the University of Tampa designed to help them take advantage of a program called the “experiential classroom.” The idea behind the experiential classroom clinic was to help scholars to develop creative and innovative ways to teach entrepreneurship and develop entrepreneurship programs.

The attendees from EWU are developing curriculum for the new bachelor of arts in music technology and entrepreneurship degree at Eastern, a collaboration between the Music Department and the College of Business.

On day one of the program, Middleton found himself in unfamiliar territory: tasked with teaching a business-related class. “Nothing more daunting for a music teacher,” he says. But Middleton figured he could get by with focusing on the fundamentals of pedagogy, an area he knows well after more than 20 years at EWU.

“There has to be a common place where all great teaching starts—no matter what the subject is,” Middleton explains. “In my music classes, I ask a lot of questions and this creates engagement with students; it draws them in and draws out solutions to problems. In this manner, the students claim some ownerships and they become more attached to the learning process.”

The next day, Middleton and his peers taught a 45-minute business case study. The team placed first among the 14 groups taking part in the workshop. “While I did not know the subject matter, I did know how to structure an engaging classroom experience. That paid off,” he says.

An alumnus craftsman and his wife present Eastern with a tuneful, long-lived contribution.

By Eastern Magazine

Lynn Nelson ’69 is a luthier; i.e., a maker of stringed musical instruments. During a Thanksgiving event in Hargreaves Hall earlier this year, Lynn and his wife, Gail, presented the university with a gift as unique as it was generous—a string-quartet’s worth of instruments: two violins, a viola and a cello, each exclusively for use by Eastern’s music department.

“We are so honored to receive these works of art, which I trust our students and faculty will use to express their art for generations to come,” said master of ceremonies Shari Clarke, the vice president of diversity and inclusion at EWU.

EWU and music run in Nelson’s blood. After earning a degree from the university in music education, Nelson moved to Oregon and worked in K-12 education for many years. But back in the 1980s he made a transition to his true passion: repairing and crafting stringed instruments.

Years later, fueled by that passion, Nelson used maple from the Swiss Alps and spruce from Bavaria and Austria to begin work on Eastern’s new pieces. The end result? A truly valuable gift designed to last far beyond the tenure of students studying music at Eastern now.

“In my three decades as a luthier,” Nelson says, “it was common to work on one hundred and two-hundred-year-old instruments. I say this because I have the expectation that these instruments should survive at Eastern at least three centuries.”

In the meantime, two students and two faculty members were awarded the inaugural performance with the instruments. Faculty members Julia Salerno and John Marshall joined graduate students Alexis Andrus and Nicole Leach in an arrangement of the tune “Waltzing Matilda.”

A cornucopia of organic produce aims to take a bite out of hunger.

By Eastern Magazine

Recent upgrades to the university’s sort-of-secret Sustainability Garden — already a cornucopia of gorgeous organic produce — are giving this out-of-the-way plot a more prominent role in helping food-insecure students eat better.

The changes this season, according to EWU Sustainability Coordinator Erik Budsberg, have been something of a turning point for the garden. This, he says, is chiefly thanks to a redesign that has made it more manageable.

“This is something anybody can build in their backyard if they have a limited space or want something easy and contained,” Budsberg says.

“What we’ve done here is a more traditional row crop,” Budsberg says. “The garden used to be a lot more spread out, so we took everything and packed it into a tighter area. Before we would have grass and weeds in between the beds and that was just getting too hard for me to manage.”

Budsberg says the changes aren’t only about weed management; they are also about introducing the campus community to do-it-yourself food production. “We wanted to showcase two different ways to make food,” he says.

The first way — crop rows — are typically bursting with many of the vegetables you would expect: corn, beans, cucumbers, beets, carrots, onions, potatoes, peppers, turnips, tomatoes, squash, zucchini and pumpkins. There are also raspberries, grapes and an orchard with apple and peach trees.

The second growing method, new to the EWU garden this year, involves raised beds — essentially large boxes framed with wood or cement block. Filled with composted topsoil, raised beds can help gardeners overcome less-than-perfect soil conditions in their native grounds.

“This is something anybody can build in their backyard if they have a limited space or want something easy and contained,” Budsberg says.

Earlier this fall, EWU’s raised beds were packed with lettuce, kale, spinach, chard, broccoli, peas, radishes, turnips and beets. Budsberg says these “salad mix” plants have a shorter growing season and are more frost tolerant.

The goal, he adds, is to have much of this food ready when the majority of students return to campus. During fall quarter, for example, free food from the garden was distributed via “Fresh Market” events that were held on Thursdays in front of the PUB. Anything left over was given to food-pantry cabinets around campus, while more perishable items were forwarded to EWU Dining Services for use in campus meals.

“We’re trying to make something that is really useful for the university,” adds Budsberg. “For students to be able to use but that also is not a big draw on resources.”

An Eastern alumna’s outdoor market is bringing Hawaiians together.

By Charles E. Reineke

The Hawaiian word lokahi, roughly defined, means “balanced, unified and harmonious.” For Michelle Horton ’10, and others who call the Aloha State home, the term is often deployed to describe the sort of benevolent, communitarian way of living that they and their neighbors aspire to perfect.

Horton is from Kailua, a small city on Oahu’s Windward Coast. In recent years her hometown, thanks in part to social media shout-outs and celebrity stopovers, has earned a place on the short list of Hawaii’s most visit-worthy spots. Horton says such a distinction, while hardly a civic liability, has recently created a veritable tsunami of growth-related tensions that are endangering the lokahi vibe.

“Hawaii’s economy relies predominantly on tourism, and so naturally there will be some unintended consequences that come as a result,” Horton says. It’s not tourism per se, she says, that’s the problem. “It’s more of everyone’s inability to compromise that has contributed to the deterioration of the lokahi spirit.”

A 2019 report by researchers from the University of Hawaii agreed, finding that, in general, the state and its visitors have been “negatively affected by rapid growth, diminishing economic contributions, and the lack of a comprehensive tourism management plan.”

Horton, who focused on the effects of globalization while studying political science at Eastern, says her own research as a graduate student at the University of Hawaii indicated that such issues are particularly acute in places like Kailua, where rising rents and strained infrastructure have put people on edge.

Her answer? More lokahi. “One of the most interesting findings from my research was that despite the conflict taking place, there was also an underlying, shared desire to establish a more balanced and harmonious dynamic within the community,” she says.

In an effort to further leverage that dynamic, Horton has founded a new community market that she hopes will “be a place where we leave our differences aside and come together to experience the talents of others, support local farmers, health and wellness enthusiasts, and foodies.”

Named, quite naturally, the Lokahi Kailua Market, it has already attracted a healthy cohort of vendors and visitors during a “soft opening” in September. Its grand opening celebration was Dec. 2.

“The whole idea is that everyone in life has a gift, and it is our ‘kuleana’ — the Hawaiian word for responsibility — to share our gift in a positive way to uplift others,” Horton says.

“In the short time in which we’ve been in operation, the changes we’ve observed have been incredible. It’s a true blessing to see so many people coming together and, even if only for a moment in time, we work together in a harmonious and positive way.”