Since the Renaissance, patrons have always held influence on the running of museums and exhibition choices. Increasingly, donors define museums standards, practices, and polices. In many cases, they even define their architectural designs. In this research, I examine all aspects of philanthropic activities, bringing in current debates and controversies associated with Museum finance. In particular, I look at trustees and board members who use their art world cachet to further their business investments and bolster their charismatic personas. In this examination, I consider the funding structure of museums and look at national scandals, such as former vice-chairman Warren B. Kanders at the Whitney in New York. Recently, the vice-chairman was asked to step down after it was reported to the public that Kander’s Company manufactured the tear gas that was used against migrants at the Mexican border. Though protest escalated to the extent of posting personal information on social media, only after artists withdrew their work did Kanders finally step down. I compare this with my own personal experience at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner. Obviously, solutions needed to amend this systemic problem, such as better vetting of donors, will requires a major cultural shift that potentially threatens future contributions coming forward. Nonetheless, in this research I highlight how the current system increasingly undermines the public's faith in our cultural institutions. Without any safeguards the current system will most likely lead to further corruption and abuse. Can we afford to have donors associated with public museums and, if not, can art museums continue to exist?

The recent rise of environmentalism encourages more people to learn about the science of climate change, which also extends very specifically to artists and journalists-- myself included. In the past two years at Western Washington University, I have worked with The Planet, an environmental magazine, as well as Klipsun, another Western publication, photographing images around ecological issues. I have also published articles on this topic for The Western Front newspaper. Firsthand, I have experienced the importance of art for the environmental movement, and that has led me to research artists at the forefront of these exciting developments. For example, Isabella Kirkland and Brandon Ballengee stand out with their drive to inform the public on human-induced climate change. For this project, I will analyze Kirkland’s Descendant (from her “Taxa Series”), a painting commemorating animals and plants whose populations are rapidly declining or assumed extinct. Kirkland is also a practicing scientist who extensively researches the subjects of her paintings, before presenting her anatomically-sized works. Concerned with themes regarding the Anthropocene, she creates odes to those biological life forms lost due to climate change. I will also discuss Ballengee’s The Frameworks of Absence, where he collected historical images and carefully cut-out extinct animals from those representations. According to Ballengee, this work is meant to represent the continual decline of biodiversity. Kirkland and Ballengee show their concern for the natural world through their creations. They share the intention to emotionally affect the viewer. In this paper, I am presenting my research on Kirkland and Ballengee’s methods: how they contribute to the growth of environmentalism and how their scientific methods produce startling works of art that compel the viewer to engage with climate change.

 Carpets are keystones in the study of Middle Eastern and Islamic arts. In Eastern display practices, carpets are experienced alongside other culturally specific objects in a rich contextual web of artifacts. Moreover, Eastern cultural sites display carpets on the floor. Yet, when these objects are brought into Western museums, they are hung on barren walls. This presentation draws on global scholarship of Islamic aesthetics to discuss Western practices of exhibiting Islamic carpets. When these textiles are displayed on Western walls rather than on floors, cross-cultural politics come into play and museum norms become suspect. In this presentation, I compare the carpet halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to several other carpet installations. The MET’s carpet display, with its vaulted ceilings and accompanying historical text, are a valuable case study in standard museum display techniques. Admittedly, these strategies provide important historical information and supplementary content, but extensive wall text in the museum discourages engagement. Unlike the MET, some institutions utilize period rooms to display their Islamic carpets. An interconnected web of related relics more effectively sparks wonder and facilitates intuitive understanding of other cultures. In this presentation, I argue that Islamic arts deserve to be displayed in a way that simultaneously provides cultural context and promotes cross-cultural understanding. Through comparison of the shows, I demonstrate that museums need immersive, haptic installations that fully transport the viewer and value physical and experiential engagement over mere textual explanations. Carpets must be thoughtfully installed if they are to enable a meaningful degree of knowledge and understanding. Islamic arts are distinctly underrepresented in current art history scholarship, collegiate-level instruction, and institutional exhibitions. In order to produce successful exhibitions of Islamic arts, curators and academics must examine historical failings and pursue innovative display techniques. This presentation attempts to expand that process of critical examination.

We are studying the effects of Nuclear Fermi Beta Decay. Beta decay occurs when a proton in the nucleus of an atom decays to a neutron or a neutron decays to a proton. Protons and neutrons are in the class of particles known as “baryons”, as they each consist of three quarks, one of the most fundamental types of particles in our universe. They are both made of two types of quarks, “up” quarks, and “down” quarks. Neutrons consist of two down quarks and one up quark, while protons consist of one down quark and two up quarks. Beta decay specifically takes place when an up quark in a proton decays to a down quark, turning a proton into a neutron, or a down quark in a neutron decays to an up quark, turning a neutron into a proton. Our project studies the radial wave function overlap of these two particles. Particles have wave functions associated with them that describe the probability of measuring them in any given state. The overlap that we study is between the wave functions of the proton and neutron in the nucleus of the atom, as this overlap describes how Beta decay occurs. Particles have an intrinsic quantity known as isospin, which is very often conserved in particle interactions, but is not an exact symmetry. We analytically calculate how isospin symmetry breaking influences beta decay. Studying beta decay is useful for understanding solar radiation and energy, as the sun’s fusion reaction causes protons to decay into a shower of particles which are detectable from Earth. However, we are more interested in beta decay for its applications to testing the validity of assumptions of the standard model of particle physics.

Just as the Schrodinger equation is the pivotal theoretical tool for analyzing atomic systems, the application of light front dynamics to derive light front wave functions provides a powerful point of leverage for analyzing the structure of hadrons. The governing theory for hadronic systems (systems composed of quarks and gluons) is Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), and the expression of this theory in light front variables presents a mathematically-convenient format. In this project we construct a light front Hamiltonian for a 2-parton hadronic system and solve the resulting differential equation to derive a basis of light front wave functions (LFWFs) representing the corresponding bound states. We subsequently modify the Hamiltonian to include terms characterizing effects such as momentum transfer, and attempt to solve the resulting system non-perturbatively. The ultimate goal is to apply our LFWFs to analyze structures in problems important to nuclear physics, such as deep inelastic scattering.

Joubert syndrome (JS) is a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder that affects ~1 in 100,000 live births. JS is diagnosed by a distinctive hindbrain malformation that manifests as the “molar tooth sign” on axial brain imaging. Remarkably, >40 genes have been associated with JS, making it one of the most genetically heterogeneous Mendelian conditions. The clinical and brain imaging features of people with JS display a broad range of severity. In fact, we have identified a substantial number of individuals without the molar tooth sign but that have imaging features suggestive of JS. It is not known whether these “JS-like” patients represent the mild end of the phenotypic spectrum associated with variants in JS genes or a different set of genetic disorders. It is also not known whether these JS-like patients are at risk for the progressive retinal, kidney and liver disease seen in some JS patients. To answer these questions, I performed targeted DNA sequencing of the JS genes in JS-like patients, and I used an in-house bioinformatics pipeline to identify predicted-pathogenic variants. We hypothesize that a large subset of JS-like patients will have genetic causes in JS genes. If this hypothesis is supported, we will expand the phenotypic spectrum associated with variants in JS genes and improve the medical care of JS-like patients by supporting monitoring of JS-associated progressive features and sequencing of JS genes in these patients. This will also be proof of concept for evaluating mild clinical presentations of other conditions to determine if they share the same genetic causes.