Eagle Excellence: February 2026

Eastern Washington University faculty, staff and students make a daily impact, both here on campus and in communities that stretch across the state, county and globe. Eagle Excellence recognizes outstanding work that shines a positive light on EWU and supports its transformational mission.

Here are the Eagle Excellence shout-outs for February 2026:

• Brian Davenport, director of organizational leadership, partnered with Professional and Continuing Education last fall to provide 32 hours of training for MultiCare’s new leaders.

• Film Studies professor Chase Ogden premiered his feature-length documentary The River Speaks last fall at The Garland Theater. The film takes English professor Paul Lindholdt’s book The Spokane River as its foundation and explores the stories, histories and spirit of the river, helping viewers appreciate its past and understand efforts to protect its future. Some 150 people attended the premiere.

• Under the guidance of computer science professor Shamima Yasmin, a paper authored by graduate student Dominic Mosley was accepted in the IEEE AIxVR 2026 conference. The conference brings together researchers and professionals from across the spectrum of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality. The paper Handwriting Recognition in VR for Enhanced Learning and Immersive Interaction Experience, reports the initial findings of Mosley’s thesis work. He presented the paper in January in Osaka, Japan.

• Thanks to a McKinstry Catalyst Grant, EWU Design hosted a riso residency. The visiting risograph expert was Alex Egner, a Western Washington University design professor, who created a series of illustrated political commentary posters — each featuring barnyard animals — that explored rage, greed and ambition through deadpan humor and deliberately naive drawings.

• Tony Espinoza, an assistant professor and director of the cybersecurity graduate program, recently co-authored a study accepted by the ACM Computing Surveys journal. The paper, A Taxonomy and Comparative Analysis of IPv4 Identifier Selection Correctness, Security, and Performance, explores IPv4, one of the Internet’s oldest and most fundamental protocols. The team investigated a component called the IPID field, which hackers have historically used as a “side channel” to peek into private network properties or hijack web traffic. The article tracks a quarter-century of exploits and how security methods have evolved to stop them, while providing best practice recommendations to help developers and engineers build more secure networks.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit items for the Eagle Excellence monthly column! You can help us celebrate our collective wins by submitting your own news and accomplishments or sharing kudos for a colleague, team or department at this link.