researchers launched a pilot app that maps ‘little free pantries’ throughout the Seattle area and gives pantry users and donors new tools to communicate with and help one another.


researchers launched a pilot app that maps ‘little free pantries’ throughout the Seattle area and gives pantry users and donors new tools to communicate with and help one another.

Discovery Days gives K-12 students from across Washington state a chance to experience science and engineering concepts for themselves at the ’s Seattle campus.

researchers created BikeButler, a demo web app that lets users find personalized bike routes in Seattle. Cyclists plug in their destination and origin — just like in other mapping apps — and can then toggle sliders for eight attributes to create personalized route options.

UW News spoke with Paul Wiggins, a associate professor of both physics and bioengineering, to learn about a surprisingly relatable behavior prompting bacteria to stockpile huge reserves of essential proteins.

researchers developed a system called VueBuds that uses tiny cameras in off-the-shelf wireless earbuds to allow users to talk with an AI model about the scene in front of them. For instance, a user might look at a Korean food package and say, “Hey VueBuds, translate this for me.” They’d then hear an AI voice say, “The visible text translates to ‘Cold Noodles’ in English.

At the brand-new Quantum Technologies Training and Testbed lab, researchers from across the UW probe the “spooky” mysteries of quantum phenomena.

The ’s graduate and professional degree programs again were recognized as among the best in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2026 Best Graduate Schools released late Monday.

New research shows that as winters get warmer, more icy crusts may form within snowpacks in much of the Pacific Northwest, increasing the risk of avalanche in some areas and changing the behavior of wildlife across the region.
Researchers at UW and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are simulating something in the lab that they hope will rarely happen in the wild: a collision between underwater turbines and marine animals.

Forest managers in the eastern Cascades selectively thin forests to promote wildfire resilience. New research from the UW shows that the same process can also increase seasonal snowpack, providing some relief to drought-prone areas throughout central Washington.

Tohoku University and the , two leading academic research institutions of the Pacific Rim, announced “Q-DREAM,” a significant expansion of their decades-long collaboration.

A team led by researchers has created DopFone, a system that uses an off-the-shelf smartphone’s existing speaker and microphone to accurately estimate fetal heart rate. The phone mimics a Doppler ultrasound, emitting a tone and listening for the subtle variations in its echo caused by fetal heart beats. A machine learning model then estimates the heart rate.

The and Microsoft have announced the expansion of their long‑standing partnership uniting world-class academic research with world-leading technology. UW and Microsoft aim to accelerate AI discovery, prepare students and workers for an AI-driven economy, and help communities understand and use AI responsibly.

Five faculty members have been awarded early-career fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The was awarded $2.5 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to fund 16 postdoctoral fellows in a number of fields across the College of Arts & Sciences, the College of Engineering and the College of the Environment.

A UW and Ai2 research team built OpenScholar, an open-source AI model designed specifically to synthesize current scientific research. In tests, OpenScholar cited sources as accurately as human experts, and 16 scientists preferred its response to those written by subject experts 51% of the time.

A new smart glove from the UW Wearable Intelligence Lab could help physical therapy patients track progress and train robotic hands to grasp.

Lucas Meza, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the , started his lab to build a new generation of tough and light nanomaterials inspired by natural materials like wood, shell and bone. Instead, he discovered “big gaps” in our basic understanding of what makes a material tough or brittle. Meza spoke to UW News about his strange and surprising journey into the nano realm.

New research from the UW and the Toyota Research Institute explores how drivers trade off between cognitive tasks, driving and using the vehicle’s touch screen. Researchers placed participants in a driving simulator and had them complete memory tests while interacting with the simulator’s touch screen.

A new study suggests that AI could learn cultural values by observing human behavior, similar to how children learn by watching and interacting with adults. Researchers had AI systems observe two cultural groups playing a video game. The AI systems were able to learn each group’s degree of altruism and apply this to a new situation.

Researchers at the UW have developed AI-powered headphones that automatically isolate conversation partners in a noisy soundscape. The system employs AI models that listen for the back-and-forth pattern of conversation and mute voices that aren’t following the established rhythm.

The is proud to announce that 56 faculty and researchers who completed their work while at UW have been named on the Highly Cited Researchers 2025 list from Clarivate.

The today announced a foundational $10 million gift from philanthropists Charles and Lisa Simonyi to support groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.

The public-private partnership led by Washington State University with support from the UW targets a global health problem: the lack of whole grains in people’s diets, which contributes to widespread health problems.

Researchers at the UW have created a recyclable, flexible and self-healing composite material that could replace traditional circuit boards in future generations of wearable electronics.

The is one of nine universities to receive two years of funding from Amazon’s new AI PhD Fellowship program, which was announced on Tuesday. The UW will receive $2.2 million over two years, with total funding across all universities reaching nearly $10 million annually.

Targeted drug delivery is a powerful and promising area of medicine. Therapies that pinpoint precise areas of the body can reduce the medicine dosage and avoid potentially harmful “off target” effects. Researchers at the UW took a significant step toward that goal by designing proteins with autonomous decision-making capabilities. By adding smart tail structures to therapeutic proteins, the team demonstrated that the proteins could be “programmed” to act based on the presence of specific environmental cues.

UW researchers discuss their study which surveyed 166 gamers about how video games sparked meaningful changes in their lives.

New research from the UW tested how much a car owner’s perception of public charger reliability influences their willingness to buy their first EV. The results were dramatic: Participants with a negative view of public charging were far less likely to choose an EV than those with a moderate view.

In her new book, Katharina Reinecke explores how “digital culture shock” manifests in the world, in ways innocuous and sometimes harmful.

In a recent paper, researchers argue that a key standard for deploying medical AI is transparency — that is, using various methods to clarify how a medical AI system arrives at its diagnoses and outputs.

New research led by the provides clear evidence that highly walkable areas lead to significantly more walking. Authors compared the steps per day of 5,424 people who moved one or more times among 1,609 U.S. cities. Across all relocations, when the Walk Score rose or fell more than 48 points, average steps increased or decreased by about 1,100 per day.

Antimicrobial resistance is a lurking threat in hospitals around the world. As more strains of bacteria and other microbes evolve defenses against available drugs, more patients run the risk of contracting infections that defy treatment. Now, researchers offer new insights into measures currently used to control the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria and other infectious agents in health care facilities.

researchers recruited self-identifying Democrats and Republicans to make political decisions with help from three versions of ChatGPT: a base model, one with liberal bias and one with conservative bias. Democrats and Republicans were both likelier to lean in the direction of the biased chatbot they were talking with than those participants who interacted with the base model.

UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics Jim Hermanson took a ride Wednesday morning aboard a U.S. Navy Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet — better known as one of the Blue Angels.

Researchers at the and Microsoft developed a new type of low-carbon concrete by mixing dried, powdered seaweed with cement. The seaweed-fortified cement has a 21% lower global warming potential while retaining its strength.

researchers developed the game AI Puzzlers to show kids an area where AI systems still typically and blatantly fail: solving certain reasoning puzzles. In the game, users get a chance to solve puzzles by completing patterns of colored blocks. They can then ask various AI chatbots to solve and have the systems explain their solutions — which they nearly always fail to do accurately.

In 2023, researchers recruited a group of 29 laid-off U.S. tech workers to discuss the effects of recent mass layoffs on employees. Overall, the group was ambivalent about tech work. They said it was often unfulfilling, despite their plans to continue in the industry.

UW researchers designed a headphone system that translates several people speaking at once, following them as they move and preserving the direction and qualities of their voices. The team built the system, called Spatial Speech Translation, with off-the-shelf noise-cancelling headphones fitted with microphones.

A UW-led team has developed a system, called ProxiCycle, that logs when a passing car comes too close to a cyclist (four feet or less). A small, inexpensive sensor plugs into bicycle handlebars and tracks the passes, sending them to the rider’s phone. The team tested the system for two months with 15 cyclists in Seattle and found a significant correlation between the locations of close passes and other indicators of poor safety, such as collisions.