TACOMA, Wash. – Ainsley Liberty Feeney of Memphis, Tenn., and Kaushal Raghu of Sunnyvale, Calif., are the University of Puget Sound’s two newest Matelich Scholars. The pair were awarded the prestigious scholarship in recognition of their outstanding potential to excel academically, succeed as inspirational leaders, and give back to their communities through sustained personal growth and a lifetime relationship with the university. The award covers tuition, fees, and room and board at the university for up to four years.

Projects covered a range of topics: nonconformist gender presentation in stories of courtly love and other high medieval source material, disability justice and racial equity in high school classrooms, what honeybee brain science can show about Parkinson’s disease, and more.

See a sample of student projects:

Clarissa Troutman ’22 has spent a lot of time on the Puget Sound, hanging out with friends, but last summer she made repeated visits there for a different purpose: to collect seawater for her undergraduate research project. Troutman has been working with Oscar Sosa, assistant professor of biology, to better understand the unaccounted-for biological sources of methane in the ocean.

Devin Anderson ’22 spent the summer feeding dogs for science.

Anderson worked with Erin Colbert-White, associate professor of psychology, on a project to understand how humans influence dogs—and the extent to which humans’ behavior can make a dog override its own judgment.

Addie Tinkham ’22 spent last summer taking a closer look at local beaches. She was one of the students who participated in summer research at Puget Sound in 2020. Working alongside her faculty advisor, Professor Berry Goldstein, Tinkham cataloged slope, length, and sand grain size at 10 Tacoma-area beaches. A volunteer from Citizens for a Healthy Bay worked with Tinkham to collect the data that will be used as a baseline for future scientists to apply to their research. This project was the first of its kind in the Tacoma area.

As a professor of science, technology, and society, Kristin Johnson has interests ranging from conservation biology to the history of science and religion. She’s also a prolific writer whose newest book is set against the backdrop of the heated argument surrounding evolution in the 1920s. Her novel, The Species Maker is now available for pre-order and will be in bookstores on Oct. 26.

When Adam Willard ’03 emerged from high school in Bend, Ore., and prepared to enroll at Puget Sound as a pre-med major, he hated chemistry so much that he made his teacher a promise: He would never take another chemistry course that he wasn’t absolutely required to take.

A few years later, after deciding he didn’t want to go to medical school, Willard discovered that the only way he could graduate on time was by majoring in chemistry. When he took a quantum mechanics course, he realized he’d found a branch of chemistry that he actually enjoyed.

In March 2020, Julie Davidson ’96 made a pivot. A certified facilitator, coach, and consultant—and president and CEO of her own consulting company, The JD Group— Davidson started to see her contracts dry up as employees were sent home in the early days of the pandemic. So, she leaned into a hobby: kombucha brewing.