News
Northwestern students, alumni and professors share insights into their research and performance around the world.
Earth and planetary sciences graduate students Leah Salditch and Molly Gallahue spent a week in September hunting down earthquake anecdotes on California excursion. The memories they gathered will help inform state hazard maps of quake-vulnerable areas.
Five Northwestern alumni and students share details on their Fulbright research, including river restoration and its impact on local fish populations in the United Kingdom, the evolutionary advances of an extinct family of giant clams in Poland and the burial practices of the ancient Aksumites in Ethiopia.
Last winter two beavers were spotted on the Evanston campus. University archivist Kevin Leonard ’77, ’82 MA says the Evanston campus has long been home to more than Wildcats, with bats, raccoons, skunks, “semi-domesticated” squirrels, foxes and coyotes living on or near campus.
Oklahoma highway patrolman Clinton Riggs was a student at the Northwestern Traffic Institute, now the Center for Public Safety, in 1939 when he created the yield sign as a class assignment. His goal was to improve public safety and determine liability in an accident.
The year Irving Rein first taught his now-famous course Persuasive Images: Rhetoric of Contemporary Culture, the nation was engrossed in Woodstock, the first moon landing and the first draft lottery for the Vietnam War. Fifty years later, Rein is still teaching the course.
“People have tried to classify personality types since Hippocrates’ time, but previous scientific literature has found that to be nonsense,” says William Revelle, professor of psychology and a self-proclaimed skeptic when it comes to personality types. So when his Northwestern colleagues Luís Amaral of the McCormick School of Engineering and Martin Gerlach, a postdoctoral fellow in Amaral’s lab, proposed a study to outline new personality types, Revelle, who specializes in personality measurement, theory and research, balked.
Five Northwestern students share their adventures from a summer abroad, including Shakespeare in marionettes, food culture in Italy, the effects of habitat degradation on Madagascar’s lemurs and assessing stress among Tsimané, an Indigenous group in lowland Bolivia.
It started off as just another hazy post-graduation idea: Two Northwestern alumni traveling in Amsterdam decided to quit their jobs in the U.S. and move to the Netherlands to start an improv group.
As they near the completion of their doctorates, Jennifer Ferrer and Arianne Rodriguez have faced their fair share of challenges. Lab work is rarely glamorous, and responding to carefully planned experiments gone awry can be difficult.