For the first time, Eugene’s lesbian history is preserved and publicly accessible through a digital exhibit of archived interviews and documents: The Eugene Lesbian Oral History Project. Students, educators, or anyone with internet access can listen to individuals discuss the LGBTQ history they’ve lived, offering curated paths of exploration for research and teaching projects.

To what extent is white supremacy acknowledged or erased in National Landmarks across the U.S.? How can the landscape provide a path toward greater honesty and racial justice? This project investigates the ways white supremacy, associated with the creation of U.S. territories, states, and the nation, is represented through historic and National Landmarks. Ranging across the U.S., this project will also produce a database of all National Landmarks along with a historical atlas.

The South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve is located in the Coos estuary, which boasts ecological, economic, and cultural richness. However, the area itself is vulnerable to natural and human causes of environmental decline. This project will investigate the impacts of water quality deterioration, climate change, and land use changes on the native oyster and eelgrass beds, both of which are critical habitats in the Coos estuary ecosystem.

Octopuses have large and complex brains, accompanied by powerful visual systems that support remarkable behaviors, such as camouflage and detecting polarized light. This project will be the first to describe neural computations in the central visual system of cephalopods. The project will use advanced microscopy methods to measure the activity of neurons within octopus brains to determine how they respond to different stimuli. The team will then build a computational network that summarizes the neural processes performed by the creature’s visual systems.

Launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, RAPID-EC is an ongoing national survey of households with children from infancy to five years old. Twice a month, 1,000 caregivers in all 50 states are asked questions regarding well-being, hardships, access to childcare, and health care. The goal is to ensure that the struggles caregivers and families are facing are heard and considered by policymakers. The collected data is given to key stakeholders to make informed decisions about immediate and long-term policies.

There has been much success with the standard model of particle physics for describing the nature of matter on small scales and explaining the fundamental interactions of elementary particles in our universe. But many questions remain unanswered. This project targets the discovery of long-lived particles produced from electroweak processes by the Large Hadron CERN (Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. This work will illuminate the most promising hiding place of weak-scale solutions to many of the remaining mysteries of particle physics while advancing the instruments used in the searches.