Essays edited by Eastern alumna Summer Hess explore one of Spokane’s most interesting urban spaces.

Just southwest of the University District, near the corner of N. Browne St. and Main, lies one of Spokane’s most trendy city blocks, a bustling pocket of once neglected, now mostly restored historic buildings.    

The casual visitor might be forgiven for imagining that this hipster-friendly assortment of businesses is simply a funky shopping and entertainment hub. But as Summer Hess ’12 points out in a new account of the area, the mini-district collectively known as the Community Building Campus is, in fact, merely the latest phase in a two-decades-long attempt to create a more socially conscious, community-driven form of urban development. The idea being, as one civic leader puts it, to help “good people and good organizations [do] great things for our world.”

The book, One-Block Revolution, is a collection of 19 essays that reflect on the campus and its wider impact — both in Spokane and around the country. Hess says she first encountered the campus as an EWU work-study student in 2009. She later became an assistant and project manager for its founder, Jim Sheehan, a former public defender and activist. Hess says the essays’ aim is to provide “on-the-ground examples of experimental and non-traditional philanthropy and community-centered development.”

“Most private developers put profit first,” she explains, “and some try to make accommodations for sustainability or human happiness in order to make their projects more marketable or desirable. The Community Building Campus, on the other hand, puts people and the environment first.”

Putting people before profit is at the core of the “revolutionary” aspect of the one-block campus. “This book provides an alternative framework for how wealth can be shared and used for a more collective good,” Hess says.

One-Block Revolution, which best-selling novelist Jess Walter ’87 has called “a fascinating collection of pieces about my favorite neighborhood in Spokane,” is available at major retailers and through its locally owned publisher, Latah Books. 

Bob Quinn, a geography professor with a passion for the weather, died on Oct. 10.

In 1967, Robert “Bob” Quinn, a newly minted assistant professor of geography at Eastern Washington State College, arrived in Cheney to find himself confronted by the coldest, snowiest winter in the city’s recorded history. His new colleagues no doubt thought it odd that Quinn, who grew up in balmy Southern California, seemed right at home.

Over the next 49 years, faculty, students and staff at what became Eastern Washington University would learn that Professor Quinn was, in fact, a scientist who could make his home in an impressive array of scholarly environments. Among these was predicting weather, snowy or otherwise. 

“I’m not sure that I can spell meteorologist, but I want to be one” a youthful Quinn once told his mother. He would go on to become one of the nation’s premiere long-range forecasters, and today there is a weather station outside Isle Hall named in his honor.

By the time he retired in 2016, Quinn had used his amazing range of talents to guide hundreds of students through coursework in geography, oceanography, climatology and, of course, atmospheric science. He also pursued a passion for riparian ecology, founding a program in wetlands study at EWU and serving for years as the go-to wetlands consultant for Spokane County. 

Teaching and field work weren’t the only things that sparked Quinn’s enthusiasm and loyalty. As both a faculty member and retiree, he never waned as a faithful booster of Eastern Athletics. For many years he served as the faculty advisor for EWU’s club hockey team, while rarely missing the chance to attend Eagles football, basketball and volleyball games in person — no matter the weather.

Bob Quinn was 79 years old.

Erin Ross, EWU alumna and member of the Cowlitz Tribe, will guide Eastern’s Tribal Relations Office.

In July, Eastern named Erin Ross ’99, ’15, alumna and member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, its new director of tribal relations. For Ross, the job is all about extending and improving engagement with the Native communities upon whose ancestral lands Eastern resides.

“I know first-hand that Eastern does great work, meaningful work, for tribal governments,” she says, citing her own time as a student in urban and regional planning. “Our students have completed projects ranging from providing planning services and tribal transportation support, to saving lives by completing research and providing solutions that have significantly reduced traffic fatalities within reservations. Additionally, we collaborate with local school districts and organizations to bring Native American students to Eastern. We want students to understand that they are capable of attending college and pursuing their goals.”

Student outcomes aren’t the only focus of the position, she says. Tribal relations outreach also encompasses efforts to shore up connections with tribal governments in the region.

“Federally recognized tribes are in effect sovereign nations, so my primary responsibility is to facilitate the relationships between EWU and tribal governments,” Ross says, adding that her job also involves providing EWU with advice and assistance for these partnerships.

“Federally recognized tribes are in effect sovereign nations, so my primary responsibility is to facilitate the relationships between EWU and tribal governments”

It’s a role for which Ross, who has worked as a tribal activist, planning manager and professional political advisor, is particularly well suited. She says these experiences and others give her a “deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities governments face… Having this knowledge allows me to properly advise EWU in its efforts to build stronger relationships.”

And what about her years as a student? Might that help?

“Yes!” she says. “I am grateful to have the opportunity to serve Native American communities and students, and to play an active role in my alma mater. Go Eags!”  

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 within the last six months, underscore the extreme vulnerability of America’s — and the world’s —  digital infrastructure.   

Faculty and students in Eastern’s computer science and electrical engineering department, led by Stu Steiner, an assistant professor of computer science, are at the forefront of training those who can blunt the threat. The program’s cyber defense initiative, for example, has created regional partnerships that not only assess and secure critical infrastructure, but also provide real-time monitoring for regional municipalities. Among their many real-world interventions, Eagle students have already blocked Russian hackers from infiltrating the city of Spokane Valley’s computer network and have worked with Washington’s Office of the Secretary of State to ensure election security.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency designated Eastern Washington University as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense.

Such efforts are about the get a big boost. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency designated Eastern Washington University as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense, a classification that will steer more federal resources into Eastern’s cybersecurity program.

EWU is the only four-year institution on the east side of the state of Washington to earn this classification. It means the university will be a validated cyber defense program of study through 2026. Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, NSA director and head of the U.S. Army’s Cyber Command, will present a certificate recognizing Eastern’s national center designation in the coming year.

In recognizing EWU’s program, NSA cited the university’s ability to meet the demands of the cyber defense field, one that faces a critical shortage of professionals with the skills to combat the growing threat from often state-supported cyber criminals. 

“Earning this federal recognition demonstrates how EWU is leading the region in developing cybersecurity professionals to help protect the critical infrastructure of the nation,” says Steiner.

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 Lit! has always been a heavy lift. Making it pandemic-proof took the challenge to a whole new level. But EWU’s Kate Peterson, Get Lit! Programs director, Claire Walla, her graduate student assistant, and their team of undergrad interns got things just right. So right, in fact, that this year’s event was named 2021 Best Virtual Arts Event by The Inlander, Spokane’s popular alternative weekly newspaper. “It’s super exciting that we were able to win this year,” Peterson says. “It validates a lot of our hard work.”

“It’s super exciting that we were able to win this year,” Peterson says. “It validates a lot of our hard work.”

The digital iteration of Get Let! included a mix of live events via Zoom and prerecorded offerings that attracted nearly 3,800 active participants from the U.S. and more than two dozen other countries. Another 400 or so people have dropped in post-festival to view Get Lit! videos on YouTube. 

Among the most popular live events was an appearance by EWU alumnus Jess Walter, the Spokane-based author whose most recent novel, The Cold Millions, has earned both critical acclaim and international best-seller status.

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 she was named Cook’s permanent successor.

Jaenicke’s new job will come with a new title, assistant athletic director for communications. In the role she will work under Todd McGann, who was recently elevated to interim deputy athletic director for external operations, in directing media and public outreach for all 14 of Eastern Washington’s athletics programs. Jaenicke has served as the assistant director for communications for the past four-and-a-half years.

“Monica is a very talented writer with a solid grasp on the various and ever-changing media platforms that intercollegiate athletics must address,” says EWU Athletic Director Lynn Hickey. 

“She has established relationships with our local and Big Sky media partners, and as an EWU alum and former Eagle student-athlete, she will be a great asset as we continue to build our communications office.” 

Before joining Eastern’s professional staff, Jaenicke — who, like Cook, is a talented distance runner — worked as an undergraduate student assistant in the sports information office. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in communications, and was a Big Sky Conference All-Academic honoree in each of the four years in which she competed with Eastern’s cross country, and track and field teams. Jaenicke also holds a master’s degree in sports management from Western Illinois University. 

“I am looking forward to continuing to give back and publicize what our student-athletes and department are accomplishing in and out of competition,” Jaenicke said after accepting her new gig. “I would not be in this position today without my friend and mentor, Dave Cook. I am thankful for all he taught me and am committed to continuing his efforts.”

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 by CAMP alumna Rocio Rangel, is quickly becoming one of the region’s most successful.  

Among its other accomplishments, earlier this year five undergraduates from EWU CAMP were selected to receive the Sea Mar Executive Internship, a prestigious 8-week program with the
Sea Mar Community Health Centers in Seattle. The program will provide them with intensive, hands-on experiences in different areas of health care and management.

The students, CAMP participants Lizeth Tostado in dental hygiene, Lucia Cuevas Ramos in nursing, Maria Sedano in biology, Rebecca Covarrubias in criminal justice, and Zitlaly Cazares in nursing completed their internships this summer.

 “We would like to formally congratulate our CAMP Scholars on this amazing achievement,” says Rangel. 

The Sea Mar Health Centers were founded by Latino community leaders and health activists who worked to develop a comprehensive health center for the Latino community in Seattle, with satellite clinics in rural communities in Western Washington. Sea Mar is today one of Western Washington’s largest providers of community-based health and human services, including primary medical and dental care.

Eastern’s CAMP program has a distinguished history of sending students to the Sea Mar Executive Internship. Marcella Godina ’21, (pictured above in the story banner) is a CAMP alumna who was selected for the internship in 2019. She says it was a great “opportunity to shadow so many providers, care coordinators, medical assistants, counselors, registered dieticians, health educators, clinic managers and echocardiogram specialists.”

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 “qubits.” Suffice it to say that, thanks to the work of a select group of international scientists, quantum applications represent a potentially game-changing breakthrough in data processing and storage.

Count EWU’s Jamie Manson, a professor of chemistry, as a member of the quantum cognoscenti. His ongoing work, funded by a newly renewed, three-year grant of more than $395,000 from the National Science Foundation, is helping to create the underpinnings for future quantum computing applications.

Manson’s contribution involves designing, building and testing molecular-level structures or “lattices” that host the electron arrangements he studies. Chief among these are “skyrmions,” intriguing but little understood phenomena first identified by the British scientist Tony Skyrme in the early 1960s.

“Skyrmions are a new class of spin textures or topologies wherein the electrons can adopt particular alignments that can be easily switched using external stimuli such as magnetic or electric fields,” Manson says. “This switching behavior is ideal for applications such as computing, memory storage and other device technologies.”

The NSF grant, for which Manson in the sole principal investigator, is his fourth consecutively funded project from the agency. It will allow him to not only continue his own work, but will also fund participation of a number of Eastern undergraduate researchers; students whose daily activities will mostly be centered around tasks in chemical synthesis, optical spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. “Over the coming year,” he says, “I plan to attract at least six students to work on the project.”

Manson’s work with students was of particular interest to proposal evaluators at NSF’s Division of Materials Research. “EWU students have ample opportunities to participate in experiments; meet and interact with collaborators; assist in data analysis and prepare manuscripts for publication; help shape future research directions; and present their results at conferences and workshops,” the award abstract reads. “For this project, Professor Manson has established a diverse undergraduate research group that consists mostly of women, a group largely underrepresented in STEM.”

Manson says an added benefit for students includes the likelihood of their working with him and other scientists at some of the nation’s most advanced research facilities.

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 — among them Eastern’s Board of Trustees — have welcomed a student representative, approved by the governor, to “bring a student voice and perspective” to universities’ governing panels. This years’ EWU Board of Trustees student representative is Auriana Mitchell, a 19-year-old Cheney resident who, thanks to her participation in EWU’s Running Start program, is already nearing completion of a Bachelor of Science degree in data analytics. Her answers have been edited to fit this space.

What’s on the minds of your fellow Eastern students?

Every single person that you ask would probably have a different, if maybe similar, response to that. I personally have spent a lot of time trying to understand who we are as Eastern, academically speaking. One of the really important things for me as a student trustee is advocating for the programs that we students want and need; not only those programs that benefit us today, but also those that will help us be successful in the future.

Are you confident that we’re headed in the right direction?

After we made some program cuts last year, I had some concerns. But one of the things that Dr. May [Eastern’s interim President David May] is keen on is not only evaluating program offerings based on fiscal measures, but also what makes the most sense for us students. So that’s something I’ve really gotten on board with, and tried to learn more about.

How do you see yourself interacting with your fellow trustees? 

The public meetings are pretty structured… I do get involved in conversations, but I generally try to keep my comments to either, “How is this helping students?” or “Are we keeping students at the center of this?” As far as less formal interactions, there is a little bit of an age gap between me and the other trustees, so it’s not like we’re going to the bars together or anything. I do have their cell phone numbers.

What about your communications with campus groups, particularly those advocating for underrepresented students?

I think it’s my job to seek [underrepresented] students out to make sure they are getting what they need. It’s really about talking to people, hearing what they’re involved in and saying, “Hey, that’s really cool. Can I come to your next meeting?” Seriously, I don’t want anyone on campus to see me as someone who they can’t approach. This will be my fourth year here; I’ve had three on-campus jobs. I know this place. I love this place. Just generally being part of the family here is the best thing I can do, because then I can be sure I know what’s going on, and can be plugged in with everyone. 

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 event of outdoor academe: geology field camp.  

EWU’s Geology Field Camp is an intensive, hands-on capstone requirement that allows budding geologists to take to the hills (and gorges and valleys and lakes and rivers) to sharpen their problem-solving skills amidst some of the most dramatic features of our ever-evolving planet.

Because such camps typically require interstate travel and shared lodging, last summer universities across the nation cancelled their camps due to covid concerns. But EWU’s Chad Pritchard, associate professor and chair of geosciences, wasn’t ready to pull the plug on Eastern’s annual event. 

Instead, Pritchard and his team put in long hours to create a 4-week camp that eliminated risky travel and adhered to best-practices for social distancing. Camp organizers realized early on that keeping students safe would necessitate foregoing the trip to Eastern’s typical gathering place in Dillon, Montana. This year’s camp was thus held closer to home, where students successfully mountain biked, hiked, climbed and paddled to pursue investigations in semi-remote locations in their own backyard. 

Staying local had the benefit of allowing other EWU organizations to pitch in. A mapping project on Bonnie Lake, a lovely lowland body of water just south of the Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge, involved EWU’s EPIC Adventures providing canoes. EPIC also provided transportation to projects conducted at Tower Mountain on the Cascade Crest and Spokane County’s historic Silver Hill Mine. 

In addition to those activities, Pritchard’s students also used drones and legwork to map 200 acres of land recently acquired by the City of Cheney for wastewater treatment lagoons. They afterwards submitted a report for faculty feedback. 

“It was a professional-level report and they presented it really well,” Pritchard says.