Ignite Northwest, a business accelerator located on our campus and an important partner of ours, recently won a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). Ignite will also welcome its first class of ten companies to begin courses this fall that include mentoring, and other aspects of building a business.
WSU Spokane was the setting this week for the TEAM Conference, a two-day event that brought first responders and mental health professionals together to discuss ways our community can work together on issues of mental health.
Research from our campus played a big role in having the conference on campus.
We’ve written about it once and we’ll write about it again: research is a problem solver.
With that established, here’s some news from our campus: researchers in the WSU College of Pharmacy recently discovered a new role for protein in cell division.
REM sleep (it stands for rapid eye movement) is important for a good night’s rest. A lack of REM sleep gives way to a number of health consequences.
But did you know that REM sleep may be even more important for young brains, and helps them create memories? Research by Marcos Frank on the WSU Spokane campus tackled that issue. Frank also found that certain medications interfere with REM sleep, creating other problems.
We’ve written before about how research is a problem solver.
Recently, two items of research on campus have helped problems move closer to being solved.
The latest episode of the Health Sciences Update – airing on Comcast channel 17 in the greater Spokane area – features discussions on two types of research.
The first segment features Georgina Lynch from our Speech and Hearing Sciences department talking about her research on autism. The second segment features Bryan Vila and Steve James, both in our Criminal Justice department, talking about their innovative research.
Having a robust research campus is good for the economy. Commercializing that research is even better, and can solve a lot of problems.
Mark VanDam, WSU Spokane
Mark VanDam is a researcher in the Speech and Hearing Sciences Department here at WSU Spokane. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, VanDam provided a research-based answer to an interesting question:
Who’s better at baby talk – mom or dad?
Research is many things.
Groundbreaking. Vital. Expensive. Worthwhile.
It is also a problem solver.
The WSU Spokane health sciences campus sits along the Spokane River on the east end of downtown Spokane. Photo courtesy of Isaacson Aerial Photography.
(Ed. Note: The latest edition of the WSU Spokane Magazine is available as a PDF here. It is also distributed statewide to WSU alumni and friends. This is the final story from the magazine. Enjoy!)
By Terren Roloff
From as far back as Spokane’s early years, the 50 acres a few blocks east of downtown were anything but pretty.
By the 1960s, when community leaders realized that area and the rail yards downtown had become a blight on the community, those 50 acres were plagued by waste and neglect.
Fortunately, it wasn’t too long after that realization that things changed for the better.