TACOMA, Wash. – Josh Cunningham of Boise, Idaho, and Gwen Lindberg of Minneapolis, Minn., have been named University of Puget Sound Lillis Scholars. The university's most prestigious and competitive award honoring incoming students for their academic excellence, the Lillis Scholarship covers tuition, fees, and room and board for up to four years.

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.

Soon after the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in the U.S., Allie Highsmith ’22 started hearing people call it the “the China virus,” the “kung flu,” and other xenophobic names. As a double major in Chinese language and culture and sociology and anthropology, Highsmith wanted to study how people cope with anti-Asian sentiment during the pandemic. Soon after she submitted her summer research proposal, a gunman killed six Asian women in Atlanta, bringing the subject of hate crimes directed at East Asian Americans into the national spotlight.

Marshall Casebeer ’22 didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the rights of North African women or anti-corruption efforts taking place in the Middle East—but he does now. As an intern with the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, Casebeer works with Reconnaissance Research, a think tank dedicated to building ties between the United States and Kuwait to tackle issues like authoritarianism and refugee crises in the Persian Gulf. Through the program, he's getting to conduct research with far-reaching implications for the region.

On the rooftop of Thompson Hall, Adam Schmidt ’23 emerges in a white jumpsuit, a wide-brimmed hat with a mesh face veil, and thick protective gloves. Carefully, he approaches the hive, a 5-foot-tall stack of wooden boxes located behind a greenhouse near the roof’s edge. Schmidt, a molecular and cellular biology major, isn’t interested in these bees for their honey—he wants to study their brains in an attempt to understand the progression of neurodegenerative diseases in humans.

Tacoma, Wash. – Today, the University of Puget Sound announced its “Remake the World” initiative which celebrates the class of 2025 by empowering admitted students to engage with local nonprofit organizations. Each incoming student will choose one of five community programs to receive a small donation made by the university in their honor, with a total of $25,000 being donated across select local organizations in Pierce County focused on issues of climate, hunger, sexual abuse, equity, social justice and more.