The University Sunrise Rotary Club program this week will feature a presentation by Dr. Bruce Balick, Professor Emeritus in Astronomy at the University of Washington.  Dr. Balick’s topic is “Beyond Space and Time.” Dr. Balick has been so popular with the Club that this will the third time he has addressed us. The Zoom connection opens at 7 a.m. and the meeting will run from 730 a.m. until 830 a.m. No reservation is required: just click here Thursday morning!

---

From a cosmic perspective, the Earth and the entire Universe is but a pebble in the vast ocean of possible realities.  How do we know that?  How far an we see?  Where do we come from? Were we the long-debated Something from Nothing? These are the simple yet profound questions (not all with answers) that drive the quest to probe our cosmic past and to predict our cosmic future.

Balick joined the UW Astronomy Department in 1975. Subsequently he served as its chair, became active in faculty governance, and participated in the design of new instrumentation for Hubble. Since his retirement in 2014, Balick continues to publish research papers using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and to supervise astronomy undergraduates in research and public outreach.

He is a coauthor on a research paper based on one of the newly released images from the James Webb telescope.

---

Jenny Andrews, Executive Director, Malaria Partners International

• Graduated from Miami University (the Ohio one!) with a bachelor’s degree in biology and the University of Oregon with a master’s degree in Business Administration.
• Spent most of my career working in the nonprofit sector for organizations including the Girls Scouts and World Visions.
• In 1997, co-founded a business called Verus which built websites and web solutions in the healthcare industry. Verus was one of Deloitte’s “Fast 500” companies in 2000 and the Puget Sound Business Journal’s “100 Fastest Growing Companies” three years running. Sold the company in 2007, just before The Great Recession”.
• Became interested in global health because of my first trip to Ethiopia to vaccinate children against polio. Involved in over a dozen Rotary International service projects in various countries in Africa and Asia.
• Worked in the global health field since 2007 and currently serve as Executive Director of Malaria Partners International.

Malaria Partners International

Malaria Partners International is a non-for-profit organization run by Rotarians and community leaders. We focus on advocacy within the Rotary community and on projects and large-scale programs in the regions where malaria is most prevalent. Malaria Partners International works in close alignment with national malaria control programs in endemic countries and has established chapter organizations in Zambia and Uganda. Our efforts, in concert with our strategic partners, can reduce malaria morbidity and mortality through multi-faceted efforts at the national, provincial and community level.

We work to ignite an international Rotarian campaign for the global eradication of malaria. We advocate for support of Malaria elimination through presentations at numerous Rotary clubs throughout the U.S. and Africa. In addition, we participate in international malaria advocacy events to bring visibility and funding for malaria prevention and treatment.

Our vision is that malaria is eliminated worldwide.

Following the merger in March 2022, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center is now an independent, nonprofit, unified adult cancer care and research center that is clinically integrated with UW Medicine, a world leader in clinical care, research, and learning. Together, their fully integrated research and clinical care teams seek to discover new cures to the world’s deadliest diseases and make life beyond cancer a reality, a reality now supercharged by gifts from the Sloan Foundation and the Bezos family. Join us and choose to learn more about our new patient-supportive services, our continued leadership in the field of microbiome and viral research, our field-defining immunotherapy work, and the promise of precision oncology.

Dr. Amitabha (Uh-Myth-aabh) “Guppy” Gupta got his Ph.D. in Cellular, Molecular, and Biophysical Sciences from Columbia University before moving to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to do his post-doctoral research. While he was doing his American Cancer Society-funded research and applying to be a teacher at a small liberal arts school, the Hutch convinced him to stay and talk about their research. He currently serves as the Scientific Content Strategist for the Philanthropy Department, where he keeps his finger on the pulse of the research going on at the Hutch and helps translate it to the general public.

Dr. Denise Buenrostro (Boo-en-rose-trow) was born and raised in Chula Vista, CA. She is a scientist, a cancer survivor, dance enthusiast and dog lover. After finishing her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University’s Cancer Biology Program, she began a post-doctoral fellowship at Fred Hutch in Aude Chapuis’ lab in the Program in Immunology to study and improve immunotherapies. She has since transitioned into a role in Hutch’s philanthropy department with the hope of continuing to engage with external partners, particularly underserved communities.

Additional Research Documents created by Helen can be found below.

---

Helen has been interested in Family history since the early 1960’s. Having been raised by an aunt and uncle in Tacoma (University Place), childhood curiosity has always been there.  [After an extensive search, she finally found her biological mother in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia which opened a few more doors for her research.]

In the late 1960s, she became custodian of her great grandfather’s genealogical research on his Williams family and his wife’s Wooddell family which totaled about 6” of history when placed in a binder.  This was a blessing (and hindrance?) at the same time because she was relying on someone else’s research and didn’t know how to do original research.  She did not learn good research techniques until she joined the Fiske Library in the early 80’s and gained a mentor, Betty Kay Anderson.  After she started going to Salt Lake City with the group, a whole new way of researching opened up to her.

Adding to her Williams and Wooddell treasure trove, she has added her own work on her Swenholt/Lysne family, and her mother’s Arenz family.  She became custodian and added to Steve’s Barton/Stelle family and has done original work on Henry Barton, Steve’s 4^th great grandfather.

Today she will discuss how to get started, resources, on-line tools, and most importantly documentation. 

Here are Sam Kaplan’s Slides:

Over the last ten years there’s been a trend away from democracy and towards authoritarianism around the world. This is despite the obvious advantages democracy brings of freedom and human rights and despite study after study showing economies do better under democracy than autocracy.

Xi Jinping’s China offers a great illustration of how democracy is better than autocracy. Learn the latest on China and the continuing Competition of Competence between China and the West this Thursday morning as Sam Kaplan presents Democracy > Autocracy.

Sam Kaplan is the author of Challenging China, publisher of the Weekly e-newsletter International Need to Know and Director of the Center of Excellence for Global Trade and Supply Change Management.

Sam’s latest book is Challenging China: Smart Strategies for Dealing with China in the Xi Jinping Era. At Sam Kaplan (samkaplanauthor.com), there are links to a variety of places to buy the book. The Amazon link is here.

The University Sunrise Rotary Club program will feature an encore presentation by Astronomy Professor Bruce Balick on the topic of Mass Extinctions on Earth this Thursday morning, September 29.

The Zoom connection opens at 7 a.m. and the meeting will run from 730 a.m. until 830 a.m.

No reservation is required: just click here Thursday morning!

Five major mass extinctions have occurred in the past billion years. The latest one, 66 million years ago and triggered by a huge asteroid impact and massive volcanic eruptions in India, undermined the food chain and erased 75% of the species on Earth. Astronomers are confident that similar extinction events lie in wait. (That may be a good thing: catastrophic extinction events have always opened opportunities for major evolutionary advancements.) In this talk Bruce Balick, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy, U.W., reviews what happened in previous extinctions and what can be expected in our future.

Bruce Balick was a member of the faculty of the Astronomy Department at the University of Washington from 1975 to 2014, including five years as its Chair.  He is best known for the discovery of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.  His research portfolio includes studies of mass ejected from dying stars and violent outflows from galaxies.  He has served an many leadership roles for NASA, the American Astronomical Society, and the Faculty Senate of UW.  He presently supervises students in research projects and leads the UW outreach program at the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory on the campus.