UW-Bothell becomes first university in Wash. to create School of STEM

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A recent survey showed that an estimated 30,000 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) jobs in Washington will go unfilled in the next five years due to a lack of qualified candidates. The University of Washington Bothell campus is helping to fix that. The UW Board of Regents officially approved the School of Science, Technology, Engineering and… Read More…

Startup vet, aeronautical expert to lead University of Washington’s college of engineering

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The University of Washington continues to undergo a radical transformation under the direction of president Michael Young. And today the university took a big step in one of its critical departments, naming Michael Bragg as dean of the College of Engineering. Bragg — an aeronautical engineer who specializes in the effects of ice on aircraft… Read More…

Valve ‘hacker extraordinaire’ builds hybrid rocket engine

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Ben Krasnow has created X-rays with a vacuum tube, combined avocados and high pressure nitrous oxide, and cooked up homemade astronaut ice cream all in the last year. His newest YouTube demonstration, though, might be even more impressive — it’s literally rocket science. The “Hacker Extraordinaire,” whose day job is at video-game company Valve, built a small hybrid… Read More…

Olympic fever grips Synapse: Beer relays, synchro wall climbs and flying monkey toss

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It’s just nine days until some of the best athletes in the world converge on London for the opening of the summer Olympics. But a different type of athlete, one might say more of the “mathlete” variety, will be competing this August in Seattle and San Francisco.  Synapse, an engineering firm which has designed everything… Read More…

Twitter opens doors on new Seattle engineering office

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We’ve certainly been intrigued with all of the Silicon Valley tech giants that have opened offices in the Seattle area in recent months, from eBay to Facebook to Jawbone to Zynga. Now, Twitter is officially fluttering into Seattle with its very own engineering office near Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market, not too far from Facebook’s… Read More…

Mayor McGinn convenes startup roundtable: Could these 5 ideas transform Seattle’s startup community?

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Can the City of Seattle do more to support startups? That was the question raised Tuesday night by Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, as he brought together more than a dozen tech and startup leaders to share thoughts on what’s missing from the tech community. From tech incubators to private universities to startup job advertisements at… Read More…

Check out these 14 ‘entrepreneur’ grants for STEM education

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Washington STEM, a nonprofit that supports science, technology, engineering, and math education across the state, has awarded 14 grants to educators in Washington. The one-year investments are used to encourage teachers to pilot new ideas that could be used to bolster STEM education. “My female students use to think that building robots was just for boys,” said, Dave… Read More…

Rewind: UW’s Ed Lazowska on the engineering talent crunch

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Our guest this past week on the GeekWire Podcast was Ed Lazowska, the longtime computer science professor who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. We talked about tons of stuff, including the early days of the Internet, the latest projects at the UW, and… Read More…