Popular Herbicide Could Be Impacting Infant Health
One of the most widely used herbicides in the United States—and across the world—could be harming infant health, according to PhD candidate Emmett Reynier and economics assistant professor Edward Rubin.
In agricultural counties with increased exposure to glyphosate have shown to lower birthweights and gestations. The College of Arts and Sciences economists published this research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A research fellowship with the US Environmental Protection Agency supported the research.
Glyphosate is used to kill plants that aren’t genetically modified to withstand the herbicide, such as weeds. Since the introduction of genetically modified crops, the annual use of glyphosate has increased by about 750%, according to the US Geological Survey.
“What this means is that, for whatever reason, if an infant is expected to be at the very low birthweight end of the scale, then glyphosate exposure could affect you more,” Rubin said. “It’s like being sick and then getting hit with another illness. You’re more vulnerable.”
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Undergraduate Studies
Wherever your academic goals eventually take you at the UO, all Ducks begin their journey with foundational courses in CAS. More than 60 percent of students go on to pursue a major in a CAS department or program. With more than 50 departments and programs, there’s an intellectual home for almost any interest, talent, or career aspiration.
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The College of Arts and Sciences faculty members are a driving force of the high-output, high-impact research activity that has earned the UO membership in the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU). Our world-class faculty members are inspiring teachers.
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You will find more than 50 majors and a multitude of minors within CAS, and seemingly endless opportunities for personal exploration and discovery. Whether you are an incoming first-year student, a grad student or a transfer student, you can map an exciting future and be part of a fun, warm, engaged liberal arts community here. Come join us. And go Ducks!
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Happening at CAS
Welcome back, Ducks! Cheers to a great summer term. 🎉#UOCAS pic.twitter.com/xmTL3jke4A
— UO College of Arts and Sciences (@uocas) June 24, 2024
10:00–11:00 a.m.
Please join us Tuesday mornings for a free cup of coffee, pastries, and conversation with your history department community. We’re excited to continue this tradition for our history undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff. We hope to see you there!
4:00 p.m.
Presented by the Oregon Humanities Center
Our world has become rife with peril and uncertainty. Indigenous writer Patty Krawec asks, “How do we survive everything that is happening? From climate change to polarizing politics to a seemingly endless cycle of displacement and erasure for modern-day land grabs, we live in a world that profits from instability and precarity. How do we survive? We survive not by drawing boundaries around ourselves and hoarding resources that must be expended to protect what will inevitably slip through our fingers. We survive by becoming kin. By remembering what it means to be related not only to each other but to the worlds around us. Revisiting our traditional stories, whatever those traditions may be, and re-imagining them in our contemporary world, can help us find new ways to see each other and forge the solidarities we need to survive.”
As the 2024–25 Robert D. Clark lecturer Patty Krawec will give a talk titled “Surviving Together.”
Krawec is an Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer and speaker belonging to the Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory Canada.
She is a founding director of the Nii’kinaaganaa (we are all related) Foundation which challenges settlers to pay rent for living on Indigenous land and disburses those funds to Indigenous people, meeting immediate survival needs as well as supporting the organizing and community building needed to address the structural issues that create those needs.
In her book, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (2022) Krawec critiques the harmful impact of European Christian settler colonialism on Indigenous Americans. She details Indigenous American history from the first humans to populate the Americas through the present and outlines ways in which descendants of European colonizers and Indigenous people can become ‘good relatives’.
Krawec’s talk, part of this year’s “Re-imagine” series, is free and open to the public and will be livestreamed and recorded. Please register.
4:00–5:00 p.m.
Join Global Education Oregon for an information session on our Summer 2025 Cinema Studies in Dublin program! This summer program is a fantastic opportunity to work both critically and creatively, taking courses on contemporary Irish cinema and digital filmmaking, as well as attending Ireland’s largest film festival held every year in Galway, the Film Fleadh. Weekly excursions and local outings in and around Dublin and the Irish countryside allow you to learn on location about the country’s rich film history and explore the sites where important historical events, and films about those events, took place.
This program has received high interest, and students are encouraged to apply early. The Cinema Studies in Dublin program is on a rolling admission application process, and the final deadline to apply in March 15.
4:30 p.m.
The Creative Writing Program invites you to a poetry reading with Peter Vertacnik.
Peter Vertacnik is the author of The Nature of Things Fragile (Criterion Books, 2024), winner of the 2023 New Criterion Poetry Prize. His poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in journals such as 32 Poems, Bad Lilies, The Cortland Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Poet Lore, and THINK, among others. With Chase Dearinger, Vertacnik is the co-director of the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize at Pittsburg State University. Currently he resides in northeast Florida where he teaches at Episcopal School of Jacksonville.
Free and open to the public.
For more information about the Creative Writing Reading Series, please visit https://humanities.uoregon.edu/creative-writing/reading-series