When retired Boeing executive John Monroe ’79 talks with high school students about careers in aerospace, he enjoys telling them he started at $1.92 an hour. “Their jaws kind of drop,” says Monroe. He goes on to tell them that, 37 years later, he was in charge of Boeing’s 777 airliner program. 

Until 2020, T’wina Nobles had no intention of running for the state Senate. She was doing work she loved as president and CEO of the Tacoma Urban League, and had just been re-elected to the University Place School Board. Community members and legislators had occasionally suggested she run for state office, and she would say, “Nope. It’s not my time.” 

When David Moore was a grad student at the University of Utah, his advisor, Paul Florsheim, invited Moore to help him develop an ambitious study of 1,000 young unwed parents. The researchers were especially interested in young fathers: “We explored what kind of fathers they hoped to be, what they were concerned about, what they were excited about,” says Moore, 49, a father of two who has taught at Puget Sound since 2002. They’ve turned their research into a book, Lost and Found: Young Fathers in the Age of Unwed Parenthood (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Artist, mom, and adventurer Abby Williams Hill paints a portrait of the American West in journals

Chet Selis ’18—and his Logger recruits at Loopie—want to help with your laundry

Michael Purdy ’76, M.B.A.’79 still owns a copy of his favorite book from childhood, Facts About the Presidents. He didn’t pursue a career as a historian, but he never lost his passion for presidential history. Now retired from a career as a procurement manager, he’s found the time to write extensively on the subject, including a 2019 book, 101 Presidential Insults: What They Really Thought About Each Other—and What It Means to Us. We asked him for perspective on the 2020 race.

Hoover, an international political economy major at Puget Sound, has been working with reproductive health programs around the globe for more than six years. Last year, the Gates Institute named her one of “120 Under 40: The New Generation of Family Planning Leaders.”

Kaela Hamilton ’20 presented her senior thesis research in biology in late April from a room in her boyfriend’s house in Tempe, Ariz. Using her laptop and Google Meet software, she showed a series of slides about her research on the composition and distribution of epiphytes on bigleaf maple trees while her advisor, Assistant Professor Carrie Woods, and about two dozen faculty members and students watched from their respective homes.

Chemist Dan Burgard is at the forefront of an exciting—and stinky—field: wastewater analysis