Sixteen UO faculty members are being honored with the Presidential Fellowships in Humanistic Studies for their contributions to the arts and humanities. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the College of Arts and Sciences is recognizing and celebrating both the 2020 and 2021 fellows together.

The College of Arts and Sciences will introduce the new School of Global Studies and Languages this fall. The University Senate approved the school at the end of April. The school will bring together roughly 100 core faculty members across four language and literature departments, five area studies programs, the Yamada Language Center, and the Global Studies department.

BIOLOGY, LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, GLOBAL STUDIES - Two UO students have been awarded prestigious Udall Undergraduate Scholarships, a first for the university and all the more rare because it is the second award for one of the Ducks.

CHEMISTRY & BIOCHEMISTRY - Ultrahigh resolution, high-speed imaging of fruit fly brains has allowed University of Oregon scientists to capture mechanical motions that stem cells use to make neurons, the cells that make up the brain.

THEATRE ARTS - When Ty Burrell, the award-winning actor and die-hard Duck fan, addresses the UO’s class of 2021 at next month’s commencement, he will have plenty of pearls of wisdom to dispense to the graduates.

ANTHROPOLOGY, INDIGENOUS, RACE, AND ETHNIC STUDIES, WOMEN'S, GENDER AND SEXUALITY STUDIES - Caribbean Women Healers is a University of Oregon digital humanities project featuring elders who currently live and work in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the US Pacific Northwest.

BIOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY - Home is where the microbes are. That’s one takeaway from newly published research by an interdisciplinary University of Oregon team that found a shared home environment to be the strongest predictor of human microbiome similarity.

ANTHROPOLOGY - One of the world’s largest ancient cities lay in the jungles of Southeast Asia in the greater Angkor region located in contemporary Cambodia. This medieval site was home to the Angkor or Khmer Empire from the ninth to 15th centuries.

POLITICAL SCIENCE - On April 6, 2021, despite Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s veto, Arkansas became the first state to prohibit physicians from providing gender-affirming medical care like hormone treatments designed to delay puberty in transgender youth.

BIOLOGY, COMPUTER SCIENCE - Plant community ecologist Lauren Hallett and computer scientist Lei Jiao are getting a boost from the National Science Foundation through prestigious Career Awards, which are among the most sought-after grants from the foundation.

The UO’s Undergraduate Research Symposium is back this year with a virtual format that organizers say will make for an inspiring and accessible event. The symposium itself is May 27, but related events are going on throughout the week as part of the Week of Research.

MATHEMATICS - When I was teaching mathematics in the 1990s, before the internet, I had a book of “women mathematicians.” This was helpful for sharing inspirational stories with my middle school students, but there were just six women in this short book.

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art will livestream the premiere of “Sanctuary: A Performance,” an artist collaboration exploring the collective experience of women and queer people of color seeking refuge from persecution under the ongoing violence of colonization.

ANTHROPOLOGY - Archaeologists, including the University of Oregon’s Alison Carter, report that 700,000-900,000 people lived in Cambodia’s medieval Greater Angkor region. The sprawling tropical city thrived from the ninth to the 15th centuries before being abandoned.

EARTH SCIENCES - Two UO graduates let the cat out of the bag this month, identifying a new saber-toothed cat species that roamed North America 9 to 5 million years ago. Weighing in at 600 to 900 pounds, the animal emerges as one of the largest cats in Earth’s history.