CAS Connection - JAN - 2025

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Timothy Chadwick

Serenade for La La Land

Cinema studies students gain show business experience working behind the scenes in
LA on the set of a CAS professor’s upcoming feature film, La Serenata.

By Henry Houston

 

In Focus  |  Around CAS  |  Liberal Arts at Large  |  Q&A  |  In the News  | Student Spotlight  |  Faculty Spotlight  |  Alumni Spotlight |  Page Turners  |  Past Issues

College of Arts and Sciences alum Devan Chandler on set of show ‘Ghosts.’

Around CAS

Get Your
Winter Binge On

Need something to watch? Check out our list of movies and TV shows featuring CAS faculty and alumni.

By Nicole Krueger

Kaley McCarty

Alumni Spotlight

Growing Global
Connections

Environmental studies alumna Kaley McCarty attends the world’s biggest climate change conference.

By Grace Connolly

Newspaper clipping of an old article

Faculty Spotlight

Fueling Cultural
Debates

Professor Mark Whalan explores how media coverage of a 1920s criminal trial sparked a national debate.

By Grace Connolly

headshot of Brice Kuhl standing in front of a brick building

Faculty Spotlight

Unlocking
Memory

Brice Kuhl receives the Posner Professorship for his investigation of how our brains encode memories. 

By Leo Brown

An exoplanet orbiting a sun with stars and galaxy in the background

In Focus

Strange New Worlds

Could life exist elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy? A group of undergraduate planet hunters are helping NASA discover unknown worlds beyond our solar system. 

By Nicole Krueger

Around CAS

Learn Today, Change Tomorrow

Research and scholarship in the College of Arts and Sciences are so forward-thinking at times, they almost feel like science fiction. That’s what real innovation looks like—and our undergraduate students are getting in on the action through experiential learning opportunities that prepare them for cutting-edge careers.

Discover what Dean Chris Poulsen has to say about how experiential learning propelled him toward a career as a climate scientist.

CAS News

a three panel from a comic book
New graphic novel uses nostalgia as a superpower
CREATIVE WRITING – Creative writing professor Mat Johnson's new graphic novel, "Backflash," deals with loss and grief in a wild, time-traveling thriller where nostalgia is a superpower. Portland-based artist Steve Lieber provided the illustrations that mix humor and heart.
Octopus under sea
Octopuses have some of the oldest known sex chromosomes
BIOLOGY - University of Oregon researchers have identified a sex chromosome in the California two-spot octopus. This chromosome has likely been around for 480 million years, since before octopuses split apart from the nautilus on the evolutionary tree. That makes it one of the oldest known animal sex chromosomes. Doctoral students Gabby Coffing, Andrew Kern and their team described the findings Feb. 3 in the journal Current Biology.
two people in a lab setting, person on the left holding a cylinder as a person on the right looks at it
Bad bacteria can trigger gut pain, new research shows how
BIOLOGY, PHYSICS - A new study published in the journal mBio shows how one kind of bacteria, Vibrio cholerae, triggers those painful contractions by activating the immune system. The research also finds a more general explanation for how the gut rids itself of unwanted intruders, which could also help scientists better understand chronic conditions like inflammatory bowel disease. The research was led by Julia Ngo, a now-graduated doctoral student in Karen Guillemin and Raghu Parthasarathy’s labs.

All news »

From the Media

an illustration of a woman sitting at a top of a flight of stairs in the heavens
So You Reached Your Goal. Now What?
The comedown after an accomplishment is normal. What to do next? CAS Psychology Professor and Natural Science Divisional Dean Elliot Berkman is quoted in the New York Times, saying it’s important to ask yourself what drove you to set a particular goal. If your ambitions are rooted in your values, there’s a greater chance you’ll stay motivated, he added.
a baby and a tractor
Common Herbicide Linked to Low Birth Weights in Rural Areas
Newsweek featured work by CAS economics doctoral student Emmett Reynier. "We had heard some pretty broad claims about the effects of pesticides on health that seemed to be based more on correlations than on causal effects," Emmett Reynier—an author of the paper and a doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon, supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—said in a statement.
a mountain in the sunset
The Cascade Mountains Have Been Hiding a Precious Natural Resource. A Research Team Just Found It.
Popular Mechanics covered the recent finding by CAS researchers of water in the Cascade Mountains. “It is a continental-size lake stored in the rocks at the top of the mountains, like a big water tower,” UO’s Leif Karlstrom, a co-author of the study, said.

All media news »

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CAS Connection is produced by the CAS Communications Department and edited by Nicole Krueger.

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