Christine Portfors, associate professor of biology and neuroscience and head of the Hearing and Communication Laboratory, has received two federal grants totaling more than $1.1 million over three years. The grants will be used to study how neurons in the brains of mice detect, discriminate and categorize different types of sounds mice use to communicate.

Funds include $453,000 from the National Institutes of Health (through the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders) and $660,158 from the National Science Foundation. The intertwined research projects are exploring how different brain regions process these important types of sounds.

Read full release.

Noon – 3 p.m. Oct. 23
Dengerink Administration Building, Room 129

Celebrate Campus Sustainability Day by attending Zero Waste Sustainability on Wednesday. The event will feature a selection of Ted Talks, short informational lectures given by leaders in their fields, and will focus on all forms of sustainability, including sustainable business practices, food development, resource preservation, industrial practices and education.

Zero Waste Sustainability is cosponsored by Campus Sustainability and the Environmental Science and Sustainability Club.

Beginning at 11:30 a.m. Oct. 24
Café in the Dengerink Administration Building

As part of a larger Food Day celebration, the Café is offering a Local Farmer’s Lunch on Thursday. Enjoy grilled herb chicken with tomatoes and peppers, new mashed potatoes and a fresh, local vegetable medley for $5.39. The featured soup will be pumpkin and apple.

10:30 a.m. – 3 p.m. Oct. 31
Sports Field

Faculty and staff are invited to try their luck at the annual Pumpkin Chunkin’. For $2 you can launch a pumpkin with a trebuchet, a French siege engine used in the Middle Ages. The seasonal gourds travel an average of 110 feet.

This event creates campus involvement and raises money for the WSU Vancouver section of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. ASME is dedicated to serving diverse global communities by advancing, disseminating and applying engineering knowledge for improving the quality of life and communicating the excitement of engineering.

Open Enrollment is Nov. 1 – 30. This is a time when you can make adjustments to your employee benefits including:

• Enroll or re-enroll in a flexible spending account or Dependent Care Assistance Program—these MUST be renewed annually; they DO NOT automatically renew
• Add an eligible family member to your PEBB coverage
• Remove a family member from your PEBB coverage
• Change your medical and/or dental plan
• Waive PEBB medical coverage, if you have other comprehensive group medical coverage
• Enroll if you previously waived PEBB medical coverage

Changes to your medical and dental coverage can be made online. However, if you are adding a new dependent that has never been on the plan or if you are removing a spouse or domestic partner due to divorce or dissolution of a partnership, you cannot make those changes online and will have to use a paper form available after Nov. 1 in the human resources office, Dengerink Administration Building, Room 126.

In addition, enrollment and re-enrollment in the flexible spending account or Dependent Care Assistance Program cannot be done online. Forms will be made available for download and in the human resources office after Nov. 1. 

Two informational presentations will be offered to discuss any changes to employee benefits over the last year. Sessions will be held:

• 3 – 4:30 p.m. Nov. 5 in the Library, Room 265
• 9 – 10:30 a.m. Nov. 7 in the Library, Room 260

If you are unable to attend the presentations or have additional questions regarding your benefits, come to the Benefits Fair 1 – 4 p.m. Nov. 8 at the Gaiser Hall Student Center at Clark College. Vendors will be on site to answer questions, and you can learn about changes in rates, benefits, plans and service areas. There will be a presentation on flexible spending accounts from 12:30 – 1 p.m. in the Penguin Union Building, Room 257. 

Find more information about Open Enrollment online.

An art exhibit created by printmaker Judith Baumann titled “Parts Unknown” is on display in the Dengerink Administration Building gallery through Feb. 7.

The phrase “parts unknown” was once used in professional wrestling to keep the location of a wrestler’s hometown a secret, making them seem mysterious. Baumann uses tiling, scaling, building and layering, which gradually appears looser throughout the exhibit, reflecting this idea that each piece comes from something different—from parts unknown.

In “Parts Unknown” ideas of classism and escapism permeate each body of work. The exhibit offers tributes to Baumann’s former childhood heroes and childlike perceptions of comparative wealth, coupled with the realization that only comes from age and experience—heroes are mere men, mortal all the same, and wealth is not measured by streets of identical split-level houses.

Baumann experiments with commercial printing processes from offset photolithography and sign printing to hand-drawn four-color print halftones. Her work is normally print-based, but this exhibit includes a combination of prints and colored pencil drawings designed to mimic the CMYK printing process.

Baumann is an artist and educator currently living in Olympia, Wash. She is a visual arts faculty member at Evergreen State College and is a founding member of the Olympia All Ages Project, a nonprofit organization that strives to develop, foster and promote music and art as experiences essential to the lives of youth in Olympia. She is the 2005 recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship Award in Printmaking.

The October edition (PDF) of IT Happens is available. In this issue you'll meet student workers, learn how to handle mixed content blocking and more.