RELIGIOUS STUDIES - A team of three UO faculty members and one undergraduate student are creating a new, innovative curriculum for first-year Arabic at the UO.

Nayeon Kim believes there is benefit to society in reducing the prison terms of people of color and others victimized by excessive sentences and systemic racism. And she is dedicated to this work. Kim is finishing up her law degree at City University of New York (CUNY) in 2022, which puts her one step closer to that goal.

THEATRE ARTS - It’s been a breakout year for Jana Schmieding. Star of the Peacock network’s hit show Rutherford Falls, the Lakota Sioux Native is shattering the glass ceiling and making room for Indigenous creatives in the entertainment industry.

LINGUISTICS - Kaori Idemaru was a middle schooler living in the Japanese countryside when she discovered that learning a foreign language—English, in her case—could open a portal to a new world. Today, Idemaru studies how speech is learned and perceived.

FOLKLORE - The UO campus, which is dotted with buildings built in the 19th century, has its fair share of ghost stories. While some of them are far-fetched, others have developed lives of their own among students and faculty members.

BIOLOGY - Bee populations have been suffering sharp declines in recent years, part of a pattern of widespread loss of pollinator diversity and abundance. Now a UO biologist and former UO postdoctoral fellow have looked for ways to incentivize almond growers to adopt bee-friendly practices.

ANTHROPOLOGY - Sustainability is a 21st century buzzword, but a new interdisciplinary study shows that some communities have been conducting sustainable practices for at least a thousand years.

LINGUISTICS - Linguistics professor Don Daniels will spend next summer in Papua New Guinea, where he will document languages in the most linguistically diverse country on Earth. Daniels has been awarded a prized National Science Foundation Career Award.

PHYSICS - A research team that includes two UO physicists have outlined new techniques for controlling the building blocks of quantum computing, a potentially significant step toward making such computers more accurate and useful. Physicists David Allcock and David Wineland are founders of the new Oregon Ions Laboratory.

SOCIOLOGY - The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and shift to mostly remote instruction gave many students pause about starting, or returning, to college. Not Shawna Heurgue. The Springfield mother of three had been struggling to transition into a new career after leaving her longtime job as an emergency room nurse.

PSYCHOLOGY, BIOLOGY, THEATRE ARTS - The Center for Undergraduate Research and Engagement honored four faculty members this spring for excellence in mentoring students as they ask questions and seek answers.

Ten University of Oregon undergraduates had the chance to spend part of the summer honing their research skills through programs that offered a chance to pursue their own scholarly projects. The students were chosen for one of two types of research grants.

Twenty outstanding faculty members, the most since 2007, have been selected for the sought-after Fund for Faculty Excellence Awards for the 2021-22 academic year. The fund is designed to reward, recognize and retain world-class teaching and research at the UO.

COMPUTER SCIENCE - The University of Oregon’s annual Cyber Resilience Summit will bring in expertise from federal investigators as well as leaders from the private sector to discuss cyberthreats and share skills to combat them. The one-day online summit will be preceded by a new UO-hosted statewide cyber competition.

PSYCHOLOGY - Six grants totaling more than $92,000 will allow several University of Oregon researchers to study a range of topics aimed at helping protect consumers. The research funding came about through a 2014 jury trial involving the oil giant BP.