The Veterinary Leadership Experience (VLE) is a global leadership education program for veterinary students, faculty and allied professionals. Originally developed from the Cougar Orientation and Leadership Experience (COLE) curriculum, the VLE emphasizes personal leadership and teamwork. Participants have come from as far away as China, Sweden, and South Africa. To expand its reach, VLE moved from WSU in 2012 and is now led by VLE alumni.
Dr. Bayly has been at WSU for more than 20 years and was named the first, four-year Robert B. McEachern Distinguished Professor in Equine Medicine in 1995. Named acting dean in 2000, one year later the position would become permanent.
The Animal Disease Biotechnology Facility (ADBF) houses offices for the Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences and research laboratories. The facility is unique among all USDA buildings and facilities projects because its focus is on the use of molecular biology to resolve diseases in agricultural animals with application where appropriate to human health. Program goals include ensuring a safe and abundant human food supply; improving the health and well-being of food animals produced in the US; and providing research training for the next generations of scientists.
In 1983 a $3 million multi-purpose animal holding and care facility is completed adjoining existing animal care facilities in the Veterinary Science Building. In 1984 the building is named for the dean emeritus, Leo K. Bustad.
The first contest between cross-state rivals Washington State and the University of Washington took place on a muddy field in Seattle in November 1900. The Washington Agricultural College “Farmers,” as the Cougs were known then, made the 290-mile trek from Pullman to Seattle to play the UW “Sun Dodgers” in the pouring rain. The match ended in a five-to-five tie. In 2007, WSU beats UW in the 100th Apple Cup. They score in the last minute to beat the Huskies, 42-35.
Jason Gesser broke several Cougar football records during his time at WSU. He was the only player to be selected as team captain three times, and the only quarterback to have back-to-back double-digit win seasons. The “winningest quarterback in WSU history” played briefly in the NFL, CFL, and AFL, then coached for the Idaho Vandals and the Wyoming Cowboys, and in 2014 returned to WSU as an analyst for the football radio broadcast team.
Catherine Matthews Friel is born in Colfax, Washington, in 1901 to Pullman attorney and one-time mayor John W. Matthews and his wife, Serena. Growing up in Pullman, she is dedicates much of her next 101 years to the institution, forming close connections to six presidents, starting with Enoch A. Bryan, and their families.
Friel enrolls at Washington State in 1919 and joins Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. She holds several house offices and is inducted into the Mortar Board and Phi Kappa Phi scholastic honoraries. She also serves as president of the Army ROTC Women’s Auxiliary or “Sponsors.” During her freshman year, she meets Jack Friel, future famed Cougar men’s basketball coach, who at the time aspires to be a teacher.
The Friels’ three eldest children are WSU graduates: Charlotte (’51 Speech), a former CBS administrator; Wallis (’53 Polit. Sci.), retired Whitman County Superior Court judge; and internationally known artist John (’62 Fine Arts). Catherine Friel receives numerous awards and honors during her lifetime, including the WSU Foundation’s 1999 Outstanding Service Award, and she is credited for saving Stevens Hall from demolition due to her personal activism. Stevens was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
The $39 million, 145,000 square-foot Health Science Building was the third building opened on the WSU Spokane campus and houses pharmacy, speech and hearing sciences, exercise science, health policy and administration, and food sciences and human nutrition. Other WSU programs inside include the Health Research and Education Center, Area Health Education Center, Washington Institute for Mental Illness Research and Training (WIMIRT), and the Institutional Review Board-Spokane.
Eastern Washington University programs in physical therapy, occupational therapy, and dental hygiene are also housed here. The Health Science Building adds to Spokane’s status as an important regional medical community, the largest between Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Minneapolis-St. Paul.
The Samuel H. Smith Center for Undergraduate Education (CUE), a $32 million, five-story, 94,000 square-foot building, opened in early 2002 as a hub for student-centered and active learning. The Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, the WSU Writing Program, General Education Program, and the Student Computing Services Lab are all housed in the building along with 20 classrooms of various sizes. The building was named for WSU’s eighth President, Samuel H. Smith, who served from 1989-2000.
Herbert Eastlick, a devoted mentor and self-described “taskmaster and autocrat in the classroom” who taught at WSU for 33 years, passed from complications to Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 94. Eastlick came to then-WSC in 1940 as an assistant professor in zoology from the University of Chicago where he earlier became acquaintances with President Holland. He was chairman of the Department of Zoology from 1947 to 1964 and chaired the Faculty Executive Committee in 1955-56.
He also helped create WSU’s nationally ranked Honors Program and presented the University’s eighth Faculty Invited Address on his research in 1961. In 1979 the new Eastlick Biological Sciences Building was dedicated in honor of the Herbert and his wife Margaret Eastlick.
The WSU boxing program, started by coach Issac “Ike” Deeter in 1932, ended after the 1959-1960 school year. The NCAA closed all college programs in 1961 following a death at an NCAA tournament a year earlier. A shortage of opponents in the west coast also spelled doom for the boxing program as transportation costs continued to rise.
Deeter, a 1929 WSC alumnus, coached for 24 years, directing the Cougars to eight Pacific Coast Conference (PCC) titles, produced 53 PCC champions, and his fighters won 15 individual NCAA titles. Deeter continued to teach physical education classes at WSU until his retirement in 1967.
Dietz arrives on campus to take over the reins of a football program that hasn’t compiled a winning record in five seasons. He transforms the squad into a juggernaut that finishes 7-0 and holds opponents to a total of 10 points for the season. The historic year culminates with a WSC blanking of Brown, 14-0, in the 1916 Rose Bowl.
Dietz comes west after attending and then serving as assistant coach at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was a teammate of the immortal Jim Thorpe and was coached by Glenn “Pop” Warner, considered one of the game’s greatest coaches and innovators.
Dietz guides WSC’s gridiron fortunes for 3 years. His teams post a 17-2-1 record with 15 shutouts. After leaving Pullman, Dietz goes on to a successful coaching career at Mare Island, Purdue, Louisiana Tech, Wyoming, Stanford, Haskell, the NFL’s Boston Redskins, Temple, and Albright College. Also an accomplished artist, he contributes sketches for the Walt Disney film Bambi.
The National Football Foundation selects Dietz for the College Football Hall of Fame in 2012.
Gary P. Brinson (69′, MBA), a nationally recognized leader in investment management renowned for his intellectual contributions to the financial investing world, is the 41st Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus Award honoree.
Faculty members Thomas Besser, School for Global Animal Health; Don Dillman, Department of Sociology and Community and Rural Sociology; and B.W. Poovaiah, Department of Horticulture are elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences.
WSU ranks among the nation’s top 15 percent of colleges, universities, and trade schools providing the most opportunities and support to American veterans pursuing their education, according to G.I. Jobs magazine.
The Paul G. Allen School for Global Animal Health breaks ground on its new headquarters and research facilities. The new facility, dedicated in 2012, provides a place for the program to continue building on it’s strengths in discovery, development, and implementation of life-saving protocols at the human-animal interface.
Coach Donnie Marbut leads WSU’s baseball to a third place finish in the Pac-10 Conference. Of 37 season wins, three happen in a NCAA Regional playoff in Fayetteville, Ark. At the NCAA Rowing Championships in Gold River, Calif., WSU Rowing places eighth in the second varsity and 13th as a team. Jane LaRiviere coaches.
With a 15-5 victory over second-ranked Norwich, followed by a 37-0 win over top-ranked Temple, the WSU Women’s Rugby team wins the USA Rugby Division II Women’s national championship in Palo Alto, Calif. They would win another title in 2013 before moving to Division I in 2014.
During the spring, Bill Moos joins Cougar Athletics as director. A 1973 WSU graduate in history, former Cougar football player, and WSU Athletics administrator, Moos returned to WSU after serving as director at the universities of Oregon and Montana.
Ralph Yount, a distinguished chemist and Regents Professor Emeritus, receives first WSU Eminent Faculty Award, granted for distinguished lifetime service at WSU. His research was funded through National Institutes of Health without interruption for 40 years, one of the longest continually funded projects at NIH.
WSU electrical engineering and computer science professor Diane Cook and psychology professor Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe receive a National Institutes of Health grant funding for smart adaptive technology research. The smart adaptive technology helps people with memory loss manage everyday tasks, allowing them to live independently in their homes for as long as possible.
President Elson S. Floyd announces WSU will hold “town hall” meetings in each of Washington state’s 39 counties starting in March to hear from stakeholders and discuss initiatives.
In the aftermath of a devastating January earthquake in Haiti, WSU students raise funds in a variety of ways to support the people impacted during the natural disaster.
Chris Bruce, the director for Washington State University’s museum of art, travels to Seattle in late February to help sort out the disposition of the one of the most significant art donations in Washington State history – that of Safeco Insurance’s gift of more than 800 artworks.
The Princeton Review’s Guide to 286 Green Colleges recognizes reduced water consumption on the WSU campus and water conservation efforts. In another announcement, WSU is ranked 10th among national universities for its development in clean technology by CleanTech.com, a prominent sustainability organization.
Dwight Damon (’62, Zoology), an orthodontic dentistry innovator, is the 40th Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus Award honoree.
Former White House Bureau Chief Helen Thomas and CBS News Chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer receive the Edward R. Murrow Awards for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism and in Broadcast Journalism, respectively, during the WSU Edward R. Murrow Symposium.
Michael D. Griswold, Regents Professor in the School of Molecular Biosciences and dean of the College of Sciences, is the ninth recipient of the WSU Eminent Faculty Award.
Robert Nilan, WSU professor emeritus and former College of Sciences dean, received the WSU President’s Award for Distinguished Lifetime Service. Nilan is a leading international authority on barley genetics who came to WSU in 1951 as an agronomist and geneticist. While at WSU he served as chair of genetics, and his worldwide recognition as a plant geneticist earned him an appointment to the Danish Academy of Science. He trained more than 75 graduate students during his career at WSU and, as dean, he oversaw development of programs in statistics, environmental science and plant physiology; laboratories in bio-analysis and biotechnology; and centers of electron microscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance.
Nilan and his wife Winona have given generously to the arts and sciences at WSU. Attracting students to WSU’s Department of Genetics and Cell Biology was at the center of their decision to create the Robert A. and Winona P. Nilan Graduate Fellowship in Genetics.
The School of Music holds the 20th Annual Festival of Contemporary Art Music. Charles Argersinger, WSU music faculty member and the Festival of Contemporary Art Music’s founding director, was the guest composer at the event.
WSU received nearly $156 million in new research grant awards during the 2007-08 fiscal year, up about 16 percent from the previous year.
Named for WSU graduate Edward R. Murrow, the University’s Murrow School of Communication became the Murrow College of Communication on July 1. It had been part of the College of Liberal Arts.
Anjan Bose, Regents Professor in electrical engineering and computer science, was honored as the eighth recipient of the WSU Eminent Faculty Award.
LeRoy Ashby, the Claudius O. and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor of History and a Regents professor, receives the WSU President’s Award for Lifetime Service.
Pop music icon Elton John performs two WSU Mom’s Weekend concerts at Beasley Performing Arts Coliseum.
Roger O. McClellan, DVM, an expert in toxicology and human health risk analysis, was honored as the 39th recipient of the Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus Award.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grants WSU $25 million to help construct the $35 million building that will become the centerpiece in the WSU School for Global Animal Health. This is the largest grant in the history of WSU.
Scientific American named WSU reproductive biologist Patricia A. Hunt to their “SciAm 50” list, identifying her as one of the top 50 researchers in the world. Her research showed a potential threat to human health posed by bisphenol A (BPA), a component of the polycarbonate plastics used to make food and beverage containers.
In December, Paul Wulff, WSU graduate and former Cougar football player, is named WSU football coach following eight years as head coach at Eastern Washington University. He succeeds Bill Doba who was at WSU for 19 years, the last five as head coach. In late November, Doba’s coaching career concluded in Seattle in the 100th Apple Cup football game where WSU defeated the University of Washington Huskies, 42-35.