Perched on a log above the Mashel River a few miles from the Puget Sound campus, Daniel Sherman explains the complex and often harrowing plight of perhaps the most iconic creature in the Pacific Northwest: the salmon.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS

A Sound Past chronicles through historic photographs the people, buildings, events, athletics, and campus environment that make the University of Puget Sound such a unique place.

Tacoma, Wash. – University of Puget Sound will be featured in Amazon Prime’s popular series The College Tour beginning Feb. 8 and is now available to watch at pugetsound.edu/thecollegetour. The 30-minute episode takes a broad look at all aspects of the Puget Sound experience, designed to challenge and support students who seek to make a difference in the world.

Assistant Professor Tina Huynh wants to share the joy of music with everyone. Whether she’s collecting Vietnamese children’s music, teaching undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in music and music education at University of Puget Sound, or serving as the Tacoma Refugee Choir’s project scholar, Huynh is passionate about preserving music and passing it on to her students and to the community. We recently sat down with the music scholar to talk about her creative and scholarly projects, her favorite instruments, and her new documentary.

After a decade as a high school English teacher, Molly Pugh MAT’03 joined University of Puget Sound’s School of Education, where she helps aspiring teachers find their footing through real-life classroom teaching experience.

Police brutality incidents, such as the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, have made the issues surrounding policing and racism more visible than ever before. The social movements sparked by these incidents, and dozens like them in the last decade, have caused many, including Puget Sound students and professors, to ask tough questions about the current American justice system.

When Tanya Erzen is not in a university classroom, she can be found in prison.

Born in a multi-ethnic region of China, Yu Luo, Puget Sound’s Suzanne Wilson Barnett Chair in Contemporary China Studies and assistant professor of sociology and anthropology, didn’t realize how little she knew of her heritage until college. It was through her doctoral fieldwork in her home province that she noticed how unique her perspective could be as both an insider and outsider of her own culture. We talked with Yu about her research on China’s ethnic minority groups, what it’s like studying something so personal, and how her research translates to teaching.

Academia is in Steven Neshyba’s DNA. The son of an oceanographer, the chemistry professor recalls that dinner table conversations while he was growing up were always very intellectual. “My father ... did a lot of work in the Arctic and the Antarctic, so when he brought that home, that kind of got into my blood,” he says. Neshyba’s research centers on ice, specifically ice in clouds and how global warming is changing the makeup of that ice. In the classroom, he has received attention for his “class flipping” approach to teaching, which challenges traditional higher education models.