CAS Connection Research & Innovation archive

PHYSICS, CHEMISTRY, BIOCHEMISTRY, BIOLOGY — A new cutting-edge major in the University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences prepares students to drive technological change through high-demand careers in fields such as semiconductor manufacturing, energy and sustainable materials development.

BIOLOGY - Marine biologist Alan Shanks has a simple trap that allows him to predict the amount of Dungeness crab will be available for fisherfolk. For the past 25 years, Shanks has compared the yields of the winter commercial catch to the baby crabs his water-jug trap collects each summer.

SOCIOLOGY - New research by sociology Associate Professor Claire Herbert and doctoral student Amanda Ricketts examined three US case studies where squatting was used as a tool to influence local and state decision makers. The two CAS sociologists published their findings in the article “Resisting and Reclaiming: Squatting as Contentious Urban Politics in the US” in the November 2025 issue of Social Problems.

CHEMISTRY AND BIOCHEMISTRY - It's August, and the fall term is around the corner, but associate professor Carl Brozek is heading to Japan through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. None of them, including Brozek or the lab in Japan he'll be working in, know that he’ll be there when his research colleagues at Kyoto University get some epic news about their work on structures known as metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs.

PHYSICS - An assistant professor of physics at the University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen has been named the 2025 recipient of the American Physical Society’s (APS) Maria Goeppert Mayer Award. Named after a German American theoretical physicist who was co-awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics, this award honors exceptional achievement by a woman physicist in the early years of her career.

Researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences secured $83 million in sponsored grants to fund 199 research projects across the three divisions: Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. This year’s annual report provides a glimpse into the curious minds of researchers and their work.

PHYSICS - Far from home, Eric Torrence, a physics professor at the University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences, will spend the next year and a half being the ATLAS Run Coordinator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). After being elected to the position fall 2024, Torrence ensures the largest particle accelerator in the world continuously produces usable data from May 2025 to July 2026.

COMPUTER SCIENCE - Assistant Professor Yu Wang's research uses machine learning to model enormous sets of data on a graph where related nodes representing pieces of information are linked. “With current AI, if you ask who the president of the United States is, it can definitely answer correctly,” Wang explains. “But if you ask any kind of domain-specific question, like related to cybersecurity or some biomedical topic, it is highly likely that it does not know. So how can we mitigate the gap here?”

SOCIOLOGY - Professor Jessica Vasquez-Tokos' new book "Burdens of Belonging: Race in an Unequal Nation" explores how race shapes the everyday experiences of individuals and what it means to be a “so-called problem” in the predominantly white state of Oregon in the 21st century. "How does racial status inflect one’s sense of belonging in the nation?” Vasquez-Tokos said.