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During her inspiring investiture speech, Dr. McMahan spoke about leading our university’s students — both present and future— along a “clear path to a bright future” (our cover story on Page 16), it immediately brought to mind memories of my own journey to Eastern.

For me, that path wasn’t all that clear. But, like so many other young people who end up at Eastern, I was at least hopeful that my future would be bright. 

It’s not that I didn’t think college was in my future. My mom especially had always urged me to take academics seriously. At Medical Lake High School, I had great teachers that pushed to bring out the best in me and my classmates.

As a serious athlete who worked hard to excel in both football and baseball, there were plenty of distractions. But with the urging and support of my family, I managed to do well in the classroom. By the time graduation rolled around, I felt ready for college — both academically and athletically — and I was hopeful of becoming a scholarship student  athlete playing football at EWU.

In fact, the scholarship offers came. Just not from Eastern. I considered signing with another school, but just couldn’t see myself as anything other than an Eagle. So I put my college ambitions on hold, and instead signed a contract to play ball with the Kansas City Royals.

Playing AA baseball in the Royals’ system was an experience I wouldn’t trade for the world. But when a career in baseball didn’t work out, I knew for sure that it was time to take the path leading back to Eastern. Many of you know my football story at EWU — a running back twice named to the All-Big Sky team and later honored as a member of the EWU’s 2000-2009 All-Decade Team. You may not know that in the classroom, I had a professor and mentor, Stu Steiner, who believed that I had the right stuff to be an electrical engineer. With hard work, and his guidance, I made it happen, later adding a Master of Business Administration degree. Today, I work for Avista as a director in generation production and substation support. It’s a job that I love.

As the new chair of the EWU Foundation Board, I feel like I’ve come full circle: Back at Eastern and in a position to help a new generation of students find their own “path to a bright future,” even if that path is as circuitous as my own.

Go Eags!

Alexis Alexander ’08, ’14

Eastern celebrates 100 years of coming home.

It was a Homecoming celebration a century in the making.

This year’s 100th anniversary edition of Eagle Family Homecoming, a must-attend happening that included both time-honored traditions and exciting new events, kicked off on Oct. 16. Before concluding a week later with a victorious football tilt against Weber State, the celebration brought Eagle Pride home for thousands of EWU students, alumni and friends.

Kelsey Hatch-Brecek ’21, director of EWU Alumni Relations, called it a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to indulge in all things Eastern. The EWU community was happy to seize that opportunity; hanging banners, painting windows and decking out campus classrooms and offices with red and white. Among the new events was a speculator, donor-funded fireworks extravaganza after the football game, and a “Lighting of the Water Tower” that permanently spotlighted the logo on Eastern’s iconic 102-foot-tall water receptacle. Transformed into a beacon of Eagle pride — one visible to the campus community and passing aircraft alike — the tower will now, say Eric and Denise Clements, the donors who made the lights possible, become an even more unambiguous landmark.

“We anticipated a big group of alumni and community members turning out to celebrate,” says Hatch-Brecek. “They did, and it was truly a once-in-a-century example of Eagle pride.”

After the lights flooded the tower, attendees were invited to walk down the hill to join Eagle student athletes at Reese Court for “Eagle MadNest,” another new event. MadNest featured members of the EWU women’s, men’s and wheelchair basketball teams, each of whom participated in skills contests, mingled with visitors in meet-and-greets, and offered insights into their upcoming seasons. 

Certainly no Homecoming would have been complete without the tried and true old favorites. In 2023, these included the annual president’s breakfast, decoration competitions, an evening pep rally and bonfire, and, of course, downtown bed races.

A particularly poignant feature of the 100th Homecoming Anniversary celebration was a walk-though exhibit mounted by the Alumni Association and the JFK Library Archives. The “Walk Through the Decades” exhibition, held in the beautifully restored Hargreaves Hall Reading Room, used photographs, video and memorabilia to document EWU’s development since 1923.

“We anticipated a big group of alumni and community members turning out to celebrate,” says Hatch-Brecek. “They did, and it was truly a once-in-a-century example of Eagle pride.”

Dillon Dalton, a recent computer science graduate, joins the space race.

For recent Eastern graduate Dillon Dalton, not even the sky’s the limit. Dalton, a 23-year-old computer science alumnus, is currently part of a NASA team working on the Mars Sample Return project. The goal? To bring rock and atmospheric samples from the Red Planet back to Earth.

Dalton’s team, an elite group of seven, works specifically on the cameras that will guide a Sample-Retrieval Lander as it makes its way through Mars’ notoriously thin atmosphere. “The cameras are pretty instrumental in navigating the spacecraft,” Dalton says. “They also generate the data which give you more information on different geographical features of Mars, like its topography and map products.”

The cameras are just one part of a complex system designed to help guide the lander during its six-month collection sojourn. When completed, a capsule containing the surface stuff will be launched toward an Earth Return Orbiter circling the planet. The orbiter will then snag the samples and prepare them for their journey home. The mission will take an estimated five years. Launch is expected to happen as soon as 2028.

Dalton’s work takes place at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “We have something called the Mars Yard,” he says, “which is essentially just dirt and rocks that look like Mars, where they do testing for the different spacecraft.”

JPL is a world-renowned center of robotics, the facility where former NASA space greats such as Voyager, Curiosity and Perseverance were built. “If it is in some way robotic, JPL has had a hand in that,” Dalton says. “There’s a lot of history here.”

One piece of JPL’s history, however, is a tradition based not at all on science. “We have lucky peanuts,” Dalton explains. “It’s a tradition at JPL to have peanuts on hand when there’s something crazy going on, like a landing or launch.” Lucky peanuts, he adds, have already been passed around among his colleagues — colloquially known as “Martians” — in preparation for their lander’s mission.

Uprooting his life and moving to California has been quite the experience for Dalton, who says he’s had a “fascination with space” since childhood: “To walk into some of the clean rooms —which is where they build the spacecraft — and to see the process of things getting assembled was an incredible experience.”

Dalton says he still can’t quite believe he’s now working among scientists he once watched in documentaries. Getting on board wasn’t easy: the application process lasted two months and involved nearly 10 interviews. Undaunted, Dalton made the grade and started work in October 2022.

He credits Eastern for helping to make it happen. “I don’t think being from a smaller school was a hindrance,” Dalton says. “I had the skills and experience they were looking for.”

Eastern’s 75-year-old radio station confronts a “changing media landscape.”

Eastern announced earlier this fall that its long-running non-commercial jazz radio station, 89.5 KEWU-FM, has transitioned to DJ-free, “pre-loaded” jazz as part of a phase-out plan that could eventually result in the university ceding ownership.

The decision to potentially offload the station did not come lightly, EWU officials said. The move, they added, had the support of program faculty and university administrators who recommended that Eastern would be best served by looking at new broadcasting opportunities in the future.

“KEWU has provided quality entertainment as well as classic and contemporary jazz to the Inland Northwest for nearly 75 years, and we are proud of that accomplishment,” says Jonathan Anderson, provost and vice president for academic affairs at EWU: “With how dynamically the media landscape is changing, there will be new opportunities for the university to explore.”

KEWU’s long history began on April 7, 1950, when KEWC (as it was originally named) first hit the airwaves. It operated as a free-form student station until 1986, when it increased its transmitter output from 100 watts to 10,000 watts. At that time the format changed to straight-ahead jazz  —  such as big band, swing and bop — as well as modern and smooth contemporary jazz. Over the years KEWU has also hosted local artists in the studio to showcase their music.

Elizabeth Farriss, who joined the station as program director in 2004, was twice named Best Small Market Jazz Programmer by Jazz Week Magazine. The same publication named KEWU “best small market station” two different times.

“Elizabeth Farriss’ expertise and dedication over the years established KEWU as a leader in jazz programming and a well-respected ambassador of the university,” says Pete Porter, an EWU professor of film, the academic program which currently administers the station: “Eastern was fortunate to have someone of her caliber at the helm of its flagship radio station for so many years.”

A new summer event aims to sell kids on STEM.

Despite making tremendous professional progress over the past several decades, women are still distressingly under-represented in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. According to the National Science Board, last year they represented only 26 percent of the college-educated workforce in STEM occupations.

One key to improving these numbers, science educators say, is giving girls an early introduction to the allure and excitement of hands-on STEM activities.

Hence the creation of EWU’s new Girls+ STEM summer camp, a fast-paced, two-day romp that saw girls (and boys) in grades 3-5 growing colonies of microbes, calculating Barbie doll bungee jumps, and creating wetlands in a bottle — all activities designed to get campers, especially the girls, psyched about science.

Organizer Melissa Graham, an EWU senior lecturer and CSTEM faculty fellow for diversity, equity, inclusion and justice, said the camp was made possible by a $2,000 Diversity Initiative Grant from the EWU Board of Trustees. Seven Eastern STEM faculty members — all with advanced degrees— volunteered their time.

Students paid just $20 each to join the instructors at Eastern’s Interdisciplinary Science Center during the August camp. Although it was designed with girls in mind, the camp was open to all students, regardless of gender.

“I think that it was a great experience. If I could go again next year I would go, but I can’t because I’ll be a sixth-grader,” says Grace Lynch, 10, a student at Betz Elementary School.

Lynch says she particularly enjoyed a session on the chemistry of making lip balm: “It was fun because we had to get the ingredients at just the right number.”

Other exercises involved using a compass to solve a scavenger hunt, creating chemical reactions to tie-dye shirts and etch jewelry, building a circuit board to power a light, and swabbing various surfaces to collect and identify interesting-looking microbes.

Graham started recruiting faculty members to help with Girls+STEM back in February. Planning sessions began in March.

The experience for participating kids was a great “first-foot-in-the-door to Eastern,” says Graham, who adds that she considers year one a resounding success. “What I wanted them to take away is that they can be scientists, and that there are lots of different ways to do it,” she says.

In collaboration with No-Li, Eastern’s craft brewers make their mark internationally.

Universities, EWU among them, are more typically associated with the consumption, rather than the production, of malted beverages. For the past year Eastern’s innovative program in craft brewing has been working to change that. Now the whole wide world of beer is taking notice.

The Craft Beer Industry Professional Certificate at EWU, according to program director Chris Cindric, is designed “to educate and enhance the knowledge and practical skills of students, and to provide professional development for the greater community in craft beer.” Part of this mandate includes introducing students to local craft-brewing professionals, who, through activities such as guest lectures, facility tours and internships, generously share their experiences and expertise with aspiring Eagles.

Spokane’s No-Li Brewhouse and its owners John and Cindy Bryant have been among the most supportive of these community partners.

Spokane’s No-Li Brewhouse and its owners John and Cindy Bryant have been among the most supportive of these community partners. Not only did the Bryant’s make a significant cash contribution to help the certification program get rolling, they’ve committed members of their No-Li team to working with program students on a variety of projects. Perhaps the most consequential of these — certainly the most tasty —  has been a recent collaboration that has produced a distinctively Eastern brew.

The beer produced by the partnership, a Belgian-style dubbel, or “double” ale, is appropriately named “E Dubbel U.” The malty brown tipple, replete with the fruity esters so prized by traditional Belgian brewers, was a big crowd-pleaser at the No-Li Brewhouse this summer. More recently it made an even bigger splash on the other side of the world, scoring a bronze medal at the prestigious Asia International Beer Competition held in Singapore.

The honor represents the first time a collaboration between a collegiate program and a professional brewer has been so honored internationally, says No-Li’s John Bryant. 

“Winning an International Brewing Medal in collaboration with Eastern Washington University is a testament to not only the brewing talent in Spokane, but the brewing education that the region provides,” Bryant says. “This award gives validation that students participating in the Eastern Washington University brewing program can get their brewing certificate and create world class beer.”   

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