Jeff Hazboun (Physics) + artist Brian House

Jeffrey Hazboun is a gravitational astrophysicist investigating supermassive black holes using pulsar timing arrays (PTAs). By leveraging millisecond pulsars as precise cosmic clocks, he discerns subtle spacetime distortions caused by gravitational waves. PTAs offer a glimpse further back in time than the cosmic microwave background radiation, aiding in surveying the population of supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs) as a stochastic gravitational wave background. Hazboun employs advanced data analysis techniques to customize noise models for individual pulsar data sets, enhancing sensitivity as PTAs transition into the detection era. As the significance of the cosmic symphony of the stochastic gravitational wave background grows, fine-tuning PTAs becomes essential for optimizing the resolution of individual SMBBHs amidst galactic-scale detectors.

Brian House is an artist and composer who investigates the rhythms of human and nonhuman systems. Through sound, subversive technology, and multidisciplinary research, he makes our interdependencies audible in order to imagine new political realities. Past work has taken such varied forms as resonating sculptures, sensor-driven radio broadcasts, eavesdropping lightbulbs, distributed concerts, telegraph-bots, and audible bioreactors. Trained in computer music, he collaborates widely and gravitates to nontraditional settings such as site-specific installations and everyday interventions.

Erin Petit (CEOAS) + artist Luciana Abait

Erin Pettit explores glaciers and glaciated landscapes to better understand and predict changing climate and rising seas. As a Professor at Oregon State University, she has led research expeditions to uncover the secrets behind the melting and fracturing of ice shelves of Antarctica, the complex soundscapes of glacier fjords, and the role of bubbles in amplifying the rate of ice melting. Much of her work connects small scale physics of ice to large scale questions about how glaciers grow, shrink, flow, and fracture under different environmental conditions. Currently she is focusing on the Thwaites Ice Shelf in Antarctica and Xeitl Sít' and other tidewater glaciers in Alaska. 

Chris Still (Forestry) + artist Julia Oldham

Chris Still. Research in the Still lab at focuses on the physiological responses of forests and grasslands to seasonal and interannual weather variation and ongoing climate change, along with resulting impacts of those changes on carbon and water cycling. This research is conducted at different space scales, from trees and grasses to ecosystems, and combines measurements with remote sensing and process modeling. A major effort of Still’s research group is running the AmeriFlux core site cluster in the Metolius area of central Oregon. These sites span a range of forest ages and sizes as well as disturbance history from fire and logging and are located along on one of the steepest precipitation gradients in North America from the Cascade crest eastward to the Oregon high desert. Research at these sites includes eddy covariance-based measurement of carbon, water, and energy exchanges, as well as monitoring tree and soil carbon and water fluxes. Still’s group also conducts research at the HJ Andrews Experimental forest near Blue River, OR. This research explores within-canopy microclimate and physiological dynamics of very large old-growth Douglas fir and western hemlock trees and their responses to climate change. 

Working in a range of digital media, Julia Oldham visualizes the uneasy collision of nature and technology in a world on the edge of environmental collapse. She documents extant environments such as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine and swaths of derelict wilderness in New York City, and she also builds fictional worlds through drawing and animation. With tenderness and humor, Oldham explores her own conflicting feelings about human progress through her narrative works, envisioning speculative futures and alternate realities. The final works take the form of short films, graphic stories and print projects.

Peter Ruggiero (CEOAS) + artist Doug Ross

Peter Ruggiero is a Professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University whose primary research interests include coastal geomorphology, coastal hazards, and climate change adaptation. Ruggiero has over two decades of experience in assessing the impacts of storms and climate change to beaches, dunes, coastal ecosystems, and coastal communities. Ruggiero’s research group is developing probabilistic approaches for assessing vulnerability to coastal hazards in light of a changing and variable climate and he currently leads several transdisciplinary projects that are assessing coastal resilience and ecomorphodynamics in the US Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. In particular, Ruggiero is the Principal Investigator and co-Director of  The Cascadia Coastlines and Peoples Hazards Research Hub, a multi-institutional NSF-funded center focused on increasing resiliency among coastal communities in the Pacific Northwest. While the work that Ruggiero is presently involved in is already transdisciplinary and convergent, working with an artist like Douglas Ross via this PRAx Fellowship will provide him and his research group opportunities to explore and reflect on a more fundamental understanding of environmental processes, and more importantly, their representation. Ruggiero and Ross will collectively explore our understanding of climate change and the impacts on coastal ecosystems and communities and, ultimately, will move forward our thinking on adaptation pathways in the face of coastal hazards and our ways of communicating them.

Douglas Ross. First-person statements place the artist at the center of the work when really, I’d rather you be there. My art hasn’t vociferously challenged forms of centrality so much as it throws them into relief through procedures of framing, claiming, depicting, documenting, harmonization, and displacement. Centrality involves both a body or observer and a field or territory. My captivation with territory, including the exhibition situation, comes from its ideological magnitude and representational possibilities. We can’t help but inhabit and become inscribed within a superimposition of territories that are deterministic and contingent. Using numerous mediums such as photographic objects, moving images, sculpture, drawing, textiles, and various machines, my works develop through our diverse attachments to place, time, historicity, and event, or the ways anthropocentrism works.

Dee Denver (Biology) + artist Jovencio De La Paz

Dee Denver is a Professor of Integrative Biology at Oregon State University. He was a Visiting Research Professor of Tibetan Buddhism at Maitripa College in 2011-12, and has engaged with and learned from many Buddhist communities around the world. Dee's transdisciplinary research investigates the intersections of scientific and Buddhist thought, ethics, and ways of being. Along with trainees and collaborators, Dee studies a variety of living systems that range from microscopic worms to medicinal mushrooms to sacred trees to slugs and snails. Dee investigates these diverse species from a variety of genetic, ecological, Buddhist, and other perspectives. After years of producing many biological research articles, Dee published his first book in 2022, "The Dharma in DNA: Insights into the Intersections of Biology and Buddhism."

Jovencio de la Paz. My work and research is situated within the unfolding relationship between ancient weaving technology (the loom) and modern computers. I approach this intersection as a traditionally trained weaver, but also as a digital native. Sharing the same language of binary code, I see this relationship as both fraught and fruitful. Using the digital TC2 (Thread Controller 2) Jacquard loom, I manipulate, hack, confound, and fracture design software to explore and test the boundaries of how cloth is typically conceived. I push design software to the point of rupture or failure, capturing the physicality of these behaviors as the warp and weft of hand-woven textiles.

Rebecca Hutchinson (Engineering) + artist Grisha Coleman

Dr. Rebecca Hutchinson is the lead PI of the ML QuESt Lab at Oregon State University. She is jointly appointed across the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences. Her research team’s mission is to develop and apply machine learning methodology in service of ecology and conservation. They tackle questions like: How can we leverage data from citizen science biodiversity monitoring questions to improve models of where species live? And, what are the best ways to evaluate the quality of these models if we want to use them to make predictions in spaces where we do not have any data? Dr. Hutchinson and her team have enjoyed collaborating across scientific disciplines and look forward to engaging with the arts through the LL Stewart Fellowship.

Grisha Coleman works as a time-based artist in areas of choreography and performance, experiential technology, and sound composition. Her practice and research explore relationships across physiological, technological, and ecological systems; human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. Her echo::system project is a springboard for re-imagining the environment and environmental justice through participatory installation, chorography and composition in live performance, media and computation. Her current project, The Movement Undercommons: Technology as Resistance | Future Archives, creates a repository of vernacular movement data, imagining alexicon centered around identity and embodied cultural narrative.