Posted on July 1, 2025
Congratulations to College of Built Environments (CBE) Ph.D candidate Judy Bowes on receiving the 2025 Husky Sustainability Award.
Judy Bowes has led a multi-phase, student-powered initiative to address bird-building collisions on the UW campus—an often-overlooked issue impacting over 100 bird species.Her work produced UW’s Bird Friendly Campus Design Standards and the Avian Impact app, the first of its kind to help other campuses collect and act on bird-collision data. Her project monitored 20 buildings over six quarters, identifying deadly architectural features and developing Bird Friendly Campus Design Standards, now adopted in UW’s Green Building Standards.
“Although the devastating impact of bird-window strikes has been widely publicized, Judy is one of the few scholars globally who is conducting systematic research on the topic.” said Professor Alex Anderson, her Ph.D. faculty adviser. “The Ph.D Program in the Built Environment has given her the unique opportunity to advance study of buildings and birds while involving many members of the UW community, including dozens of undergraduate students in multiple departments. Judy’s work, which has been supported by the Campus Sustainability Fund, demonstrates how rigorous student-led research can lead to significant changes in how we design buildings. Her project has become a model not just for UW but for other institutions that are adopting her research protocols.”
Judy’s leadership has made bird-safe design a campus priority while empowering the next generation of sustainability advocates.
Congratulations also to Polly Olsen (Yakima), Director of Diversity, Equity, Access, Inclusion & Decolonization at the Burke Museum, for her leadership in the Burke Meadow project. Since 2019, she has partnered with CBE students, faculty and staff to steward the meadow as a living exhibit rooted in Indigenous knowledge, advancing sustainability through camas protection, cultural burns, and habitat restoration.