Artificial intelligence and religion may appear disparate, even contradictory, pursuits. After all, AI hubs like San Francisco and Seattle are Yet AI and religions share a central line of inquiry: What does it mean to be human?

In 2019, this question was top of mind for . They’d finished a seminary degree and were then a ����ԭ�� doctoral student in the Information School. So they developed the question into a special topics class on AI, robots and religion, which they’ve taught ever since and for which they received this year. In the class, King, now an assistant teaching professor, has students do things like analyze whether — a movement to use technology to transcend human limits — is a religion.��

This year, news events have brought King’s question back to the forefront, intertwining AI and religion. In May, Pope Leo XIV issued . Anthropic has met , and people . News stories began to explore whether AI companies are .��

To help make sense of this moment, UW News spoke with King about their class, the pope’s view of AI and finding hope.��

Lately, there’s been a lot of characterization of companies like Anthropic as either cults or techno-religions. Do you find it accurate? 

WEK: I don’t think these characterizations are far off. In the 1950s, Edward Fredkin was one of the early AI developers who said AI technologies are our only hope for salvation and for transcending our human limitations and our insanity. So this idea that we’re going to destroy ourselves was in the context of the Cold War. We were fearing annihilation, and that’s not gone just because we’re not in that era anymore. There are still wars and violence and destruction that permeate various aspects of our society. And there are still elements of doomsday cults in some parts of AI.��

I also agree that these are like techno-religions. Ideologies — such as transhumanism, or — motivate so many of these development communities. I met someone recently who’s a chief disciple of a religious community that’s organized around these technologies. These religious formations around them are emerging; it’s happening. But even small things — like these hashtags, “blessed by the algorithm” — really surface what we as a culture believe about our creations.��

How does that culture affect the technologies they’re making and how they’re presenting them to the world?

WEK: There’s something powerful about thinking that you might be developing something godlike, that might help us know things that we couldn’t otherwise know. That kind of faith in techno-power could lead to some really harmful effects — like treating AI as infallible and outsourcing our messiest moral dilemmas rather than confronting our complicity in systems of oppression and environmental crises. I’m concerned about these possibilities, and that’s one of the reasons I’m really interested in sticking with this research. How do we imagine a different future than the ones that these techno-powers are imagining for us?

What have you learned from teaching your class on AI, robots and religion?

WEK: There’s a common trope that religion and technology have nothing to do with each other, but these things are deeply connected. It feels like there’s currently a firehose of information about these connections and a firestorm of questions. With Enlightenment thinking, we’ve wanted to disconnect from our religious thought. We want to say that no, we can’t be superstitious, because religions are often categorized as this mystery. But through science and technology, we can prove things. And now we’re coming to find that maybe we can’t prove so many things, including solving the hard problem of measuring — and understanding — consciousness.

Is there an assignment that’s really stood out to you? 

WEK: I have students write a creation narrative. We read ancient Near East creation narratives — the , the Abrahamic tradition archived in Genesis — alongside narratives from Daoism and Buddhism. Then I ask them to “write a brief creation narrative an AI or community of AIs might write about their origins if AI were to achieve consciousness in the future.” The students’ responses are fascinating. One of my favorites, early on, was like, “Well, Siri and — IBM’s AI assistant —  gave rise to this baby…” and I thought, oh my gosh, the Adam and Eve narrative and the idea that heterosexuality is the default have clearly influenced students’ thinking. I see less of that now, which is really interesting, to see them turning away from some of these dominant narratives and imagining totally different things.

Leading AI labs are working to transcend human limitations with their AI models. This seems to clash with many religions’ values and beliefs. For instance, Pope Leo XIV wrote in his encyclical on AI that “humanity — in all its grandeur and woundedness — must never be replaced or surpassed.” How are you thinking about such contradictions?

WEK: In “,” David Noble shows that even the idea of transcending our human limitations is motivated by Christian theology. There’s a lot in the Christian tradition saying that we need to progress and become something different. Some people think about this as a holy-human hybrid, that the spirit of God animates us and allows us to become something different. So, with the influence of the Enlightenment, or the turn away from religion, those ideas were projected onto our technologies. This idea of transcending is also very much located in a Protestant worldview that humans are deeply flawed, born in sin, and so we have to transcend our imperfection through the use of technology.��

One of my biggest concerns with the Pope’s view that technology should not surpass humans is that it continues to center humans. I don’t know if we should think of humans as insurpassable, because that feels like a very dominating position, and the means of domination that we’ve experienced and continue to experience in our world harms so many non-dominant communities and our planet. And that’s only one interpretation of these religious texts, of the Abrahamic tradition. Feminist and queer theologians have interpreted these things differently, thinking about stewardship and symbiotic relationships, that the Earth as a whole is way more important than centering and focusing on humans as the most important thing.��

We shouldn’t be developing these technologies only for human flourishing. We should develop them for flourishing — period.

What did you think of the Pope’s encyclical overall?

WEK: I think he got a lot of things right. I like his analysis of problems with labor, problems with power — and he doesn’t outright critique capitalism, but I think there’s an embedded critique of capitalism and neoliberalism. I also think there are quite a few things he got wrong. One is centering humanity. Another is the view of what it means to be human within Catholic thought. It basically classifies queer and trans people as less than human, and if we base our morals and our ethics on a worldview that continues to assert dominance over a particular way of imagining what it means to be human — that our biology determines our existence — we’re going to continue to have problems with marginalization and domination and exclusion and exploitation.��

What do you want the public to know about the intersection of AI and religion? 

WEK: I think it’s important for us to recognize the connections between dominant religions and the development of technologies. Seeking moral guidance from dominant religious traditions — which helped shape the very inequities tech now replicates — is a dead end. Today’s tech practices reflect core beliefs in the power of capitalism and neoliberalism: that markets dictate morality, individualism outweighs collectivism, and the ultimate goal is expansion into a never-ending frontier that someone must dominate. It’s good Anthropic is meeting with religious leaders, but if tech leaders aren’t willing to acknowledge their existing beliefs and disrupt their own business models, no moral or religious tradition will save them or the AI models they are training.��

We need to pivot. The Pope ended the encyclical with some great thinking about privileging the marginalized, the oppressed, those who are being exploited, to imagine a different future.�� Voices within traditions and cultures that have been silenced — women, queer folks, Indigenous leaders, mystics,  the Global South — offer hope. As a queer person who has often felt less than human, who is oppressed and harmed by dominant religious traditions, I find hope in imagining a future where I can flourish along with all of the beautiful diversity of creation on this planet. I think those are the kinds of hopes and the kinds of people we need to be thinking with — those at the margins, not those who are already dominating our thinking and our worldviews.

For more information, contact King at mxwe@uw.edu.

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The U.S. House of Representatives this past summer that would make Daylight Saving Time (DST) permanent in the United States — meaning there would be no turning back the clocks each fall. Nineteen states, including Washington, . If the bill is ultimately signed into law, the change would go into effect in those states.

The bill is currently stalled in the U.S. Senate. are a central issue because permanent DST would lead to darker mornings from November to March. This would mean darker commutes for everyone, but how much would it affect children going to school? ����ԭ�� researchers did the math for 14 out of the 19 states that preapproved the change. Using school start times, enrollment data, and latitude and longitude measurements, the team calculated just how many days each child would be commuting to school in the dark and then added the trips together.

In Washington, there would be almost 35 million more trips to school in the dark under permanent DST compared to the current system of switching between DST and Standard Time twice a year. The other 13 states followed a similar trend, with Georgia having the highest deviation from the current system — 71 million more trips. When the researchers extrapolated these results for the rest of the country, it added at least 2 billion more dark commutes to school.

The team also analyzed traffic collision data from the U.S. and found that it was roughly twice as likely for a fatal crash involving a school-aged pedestrian to occur during dark mornings than after sunrise.

The researchers Oct. 29 in Current Biology.

“It’s called the ‘Sunshine Protection Act’ because you get an extra hour of light at the end of the day. But you will take that hour from the morning. You could call it the Sunshine Destruction Act,” said senior author , UW professor of biology. “These dark mornings will inequitably affect children who have to go to school at a certain time. It’s a very tangible metric that anybody from any state or socioeconomic background can relate to. Nobody wants their kids to go to school in the dark.”

Dark mornings affect everyone. Exposure to bright light in the morning helps set our circadian clock, which helps regulate many facets of our lives, such as our mood, sleep and appetite. Without that morning light, our bodies struggle to regulate these key functions.

“When we send kids to school in the dark, we are depriving them from an opportunity to get that morning daylight,” said lead author , a UW postdoctoral scholar in biology. “We were asking what’s the cost for these children. We wanted actual numbers, a real number of kids based on the geographic location of each school.”

The study revealed the areas that would be the hardest hit by the switch: communities on the western edge of their time zones, such as Forks, Washington, and communities with early school start times. For example, Mississippi and Alabama schools have an average start time of earlier than 8 a.m. and both balloon from about 2 million dark trips for each state under the current system to more than 20 million dark trips for each state under permanent DST.

“Some districts probably never experience a dark commute under the current system, and, if this passes, suddenly they will wake up to this new reality that their kids are going to school in the dark,” Rodríguez Ferrante said. “Keep in mind that we used the actual start time listed for each school, and a lot of schools offer breakfast or other things before school, so the kids could be getting there even earlier.”

The researchers argue that permanent DST would also undo the benefits of having a delayed start time for high school students, which is intended to account for teenagers’ shifted circadian clock compared to kids and adults.

“I’ve heard the argument, ‘If we’re in permanent DST, we can just delay the school start time to address these issues,'” de la Iglesia said. “Well, if we do that, you will end up going to work later. And everything is going to get delayed. You will get out of work an hour later, and you will miss the opportunity to enjoy your evening light. And essentially, we’re just going to be realigning everybody to solar time. That, by definition, is Standard Time.”

Daniel Zhang, a high school student, and UW biology undergraduate students , , Jessie Lu, , Elena Kully-Rivera, , are also co-authors on this paper.

For more information, contact de la Iglesia at horaciod@uw.edu and Rodríguez Ferrante at guadarf@uw.edu.

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Claims of “smart” toys go back decades. See and . But generative artificial intelligence is increasing the capabilities of interactive toys. The company , for instance, markets itself as a “magical workshop where toys come to life.” Its plush toys like or one modeled on have onboard AI models that let them talk to kids, remember their conversations and personalize responses. But we know little about how such toys affect kids and even how kids play with them.��

Last summer, ����ԭ�� researchers gathered eight kids on campus to explore such questions. The 6-11 year olds played with three Curio toys and reflected on the experience with , a group of researchers who work with kids to collaboratively design technologies.��

The kids initially were curious, asking introductory questions, such as “What is your name?” and exploring how the toys work. Do they react when a kid tickles their toes? They do not, which proved a disappointment. Some features delighted the kids, like when a toy said its favorite number was seven. But the toys frequently couldn’t respond well to more complex questions. It “didn’t listen to me like 26 million times,” one participant said. So they turned to antagonizing the toys, calling them “ugly” and “evil” and joking about throwing them in the ocean.��

The team June 25 at the Interaction Design and Children conference in Brighton, United Kingdom.��

“The juxtaposition of this plushie toy that also had signs of intelligence was both interesting and disturbing for the kids,” said co-lead author , who completed this research as a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering and is currently a researcher at . “If parents are considering buying these toys for children, they need to be aware that while the toys can be fun and relational and dynamic, they also come with possible harms. They’ll give wrong answers, or flatter the kids excessively, or could manipulate the kids into attachment.” 

The eight kids came in for two sessions to play with the toys and then complete a “comicboarding” activity, where they filled in comic panels imagining what might happen next if they kept playing with the toys.��

The study builds on KidsTeam’s long-running vein of research looking at how kids respond to tech — exploring what makes a technology “creepy” and how smart kids actually think AI is.��

“For as long as children have played with toys, they’ve imparted their imagination to the toy to make it move and talk,” said co-author , a UW associate professor in the Information School and director of KidsTeam UW. “Now the script has been flipped and the toy has this imitation of imagination. We’ve never lived through that before, and we don’t know what questions children will ask or how long they’ll even want to play with these toys. So it’s really important to give them opportunities to discuss these technologies we’re handing down to them.”

Co-authors include , a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering; , a UW doctoral student in the Information School; of Rutgers University, who completed this research as a UW doctoral student; , a UW professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; and , UW professor and chair of human centered design and engineering.��

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.��

For more information, contact Dangol at aayushi@foundry10.org and Yip at jcyip@uw.edu.

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Recently, students in the ����ԭ��’s noticed a trend on social media: People were using generative artificial intelligence to make short science videos. The trouble was that these people weren’t scientists, which, given AI’s proclivity to be convincingly wrong, could accelerate the spread of misinformation. So the lab wondered how to enable scientists and other researchers to better adapt to platforms like TikTok.��

“The alternative is that science is being talked about without scientists,” said co-lead author , a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering.

Those discussions led the team to build , an AI tool that helps users turn research papers into 45-second videos. A researcher uploads a paper to the tool, which uses Google Gemini to write a short script explaining the paper. The researcher can then iteratively edit the transcript and resulting video clip.

The team April 17 at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Barcelona.

“For several reasons, most people don’t read research papers,” said senior author , a UW professor in human centered design and engineering. “I still have challenges reading papers in fields I’m not familiar with. So we wanted to find a way to quickly turn papers into a format that laypeople would want to engage with, and we wanted to study how they engaged with it.”

Currently, PaperTok is only accessible to users with a paid Google Gemini subscription. Those users can go to the and upload a research paper. The system then presents four options to use as a hook in the video. For instance, a PaperTok video on PaperTok itself begins, “Ever get overwhelmed reading a dense academic paper?”

“To start, we interviewed eight science communicators and content producers about how to make engaging, credible videos,” said co-lead author , a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering. “We found that hooks are integral to shortform videos. Because you’re competing with other videos online, you have only a few seconds to grab someone’s attention.”  

After picking a hook, PaperTok generates a script, which users can edit. In the storyboarding phase, the script is broken into scenes — much like a movie storyboard. Users can keep refining their scripts and video clips. When they’re happy with the result, they can add a byline, which appears at the end along with the paper’s authors.��

The team asked 100 online participants and 18 academic participants to compare video from PaperTok with videos from two other PDF-to-video generators. They found PaperTok easy to use and its videos more engaging than those from the other systems. But some had concerns that it was “too AI-ish” — because of AI signs like nonsense text — to want to share publicly, because that may diminish their scholarship’s credibility.��

The team plans to keep working on ways to customize the AI-generated video, such as allowing users to draw on specific parts of a scene so that elements change based on their intent.��

“The main motivation behind PaperTok was, ‘How can we enable researchers to create engaging short-form videos?’” Cristobal said. “Because with generative AI tools, anyone can generate a video from a PDF in minutes, and that presents all sorts of problems — misinformation, AI slop. So we wanted to build a tool that keeps humans, ideally experts, involved. If anything, we hope that PaperTok highlights how important people are in science communication.”

Co-authors include, a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering; of Boson AI, who contributed to this research as a UW master’s student;, a UW doctoral candidate in human centered design and engineering;, a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering; and, a UW student in computer science. This research was supported by Microsoft AI and the New Future of Work Award, the Google PaliGemma Academic Program GCP Credit Award, and the National Science Foundation CISE Graduate Fellowships.

For more information, contact Hsieh at garyhs@uw.edu, Shin at dhoon@uw.edu and Cristobal at meziah@uw.edu.

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President Robert J. Jones, Provost Tricia Serio and more than two dozen new ����ԭ�� faculty toured Washington state last week on the annual Faculty Field Tour.

The five-day bus tour departed from the Burke Museum in Seattle on June 15 and made stops at historic sites, the state capitol, health clinics, vineyards, farms, cities and towns throughout the state.

Jones met the group in Richland to participate in a fireside chat. The following day, the UW president joined them at Schoesler Farms, the Ritzville wheat farm owned by Sen. Mark Schoesler, a Republican, and his family. Jones, an agronomist, was delighted to spend time with new faculty, meet Schoesler and get a hands-on tour of the wheat farm.

“We are a state university. We have an obligation on both sides of the mountains,” Jones said. “We have breadth that runs the entire state. And on this tour, these relatively new faculty members have a chance to experience that.”

UW’s Faculty Field Tour began more than 30 years ago to foster connection between new faculty and communities statewide. While making a counterclockwise loop around Washington, the participants learn about Washington’s varied economies, diverse geography and the places where their students grew up. The tour typically stops in Tacoma, Olympia, Mt. St. Helens, Vancouver, Toppenish, Tri-Cities, Ritzville, Spokane, Grand Coulee and Leavenworth before returning to Seattle.

Held the week following Commencement, the tour is open to faculty from all three UW campuses. This year’s cohort included an oceanographer from the College of the Environment, a writing studies professor from UW Tacoma, an economist from the College of Arts & Sciences, and UW Bothell’s executive vice provost for academic affairs, among others.

“Our students come from all over the state, right? Certainly not just Seattle,” said , a UW assistant professor in the Information School who was on the tour. “If you want to be an effective educator, you need to understand where your students come from and what their communities are like.”

The 2027 Faculty Field Tour is scheduled for the week of June 14.

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����ԭ�� President Robert J. Jones presided at the UW’s 151st Commencement ceremony on Alaska Airlines Field at Husky Stadium on Saturday, June 13.

Graduates have profound potential and have capacity to combine purpose, skill and cooperation in ways that will change the world,  Jones said.��

“They are innovators, scientists, artists, educators, healers, entrepreneurs and storytellers who have made their mark on the UW and are poised to do the same in the world beyond,” he said. “Because of that, I feel not just hope — but confidence — that the future is in their capable hands.”

About 7,500 UW graduates of the Class of 2026 participated in Saturday’s ceremony. Officials said about 50,000 family members and friends cheered the graduates from the Husky Stadium grandstands. Families from 42 countries from every continent except Antarctica joined the ceremony virtually.

, Class of ’83, who shared the, was the featured speaker.�� 

“Leave yourself open to opportunities when they arise. Be willing to take a risk and to say yes to the unknown,” Brunkow told the crowds in Husky Stadium. “You chose UW — and succeeded here — because it is a place of discovery, collaboration and optimism. Carry those values with you out into the world. We can’t wait to see what you make of them.”

By Sunday evening, President Jones will have presented nearly 18,462 degrees to the Class of 2026 across all three UW campuses’ ceremonies. Members of the UW Board of Regents, deans and other representatives of the University’s 24 colleges and schools across all three campuses also participated in the ceremonies.��

The following data, drawn from preliminary information broken down by campus and prepared by the Office of the University Registrar, will be presented at the Board of Regents’ June 11 meeting: 

• For work completed at the Seattle campus, about 14,932 degrees will be conferred, specifically: 9,066 bachelor’s degrees, 4,372 master’s degrees, 615 professional degrees, 16 Educational Specialist degrees, and 863 doctoral degrees.��
• ������UW Bothell, about 1,886 degrees will be conferred, including 1,619 bachelor’s degrees and 267 master’s degrees.��
• And at UW Tacoma, students will receive about 1,644 degrees, including 1,321 bachelor’s degrees, 304 master’s degrees, 10 Educational Specialist degrees and nine doctoral degrees.��

Degrees are awarded to those who have completed academic requirements during the 2025-2026 academic year. Many colleges and schools also hold separate graduation programs and investiture ceremonies.��

UW Tacoma will hold its commencement June 12 at the Tacoma Dome. UW Bothell’s graduation ceremonies are scheduled for June 14 at Alaska Airlines Arena at Hec Edmundson Pavilion.

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Discovery Days returns!

On April 30 and May 1, thousands of elementary and middle school students from across Washington state will arrive on the ����ԭ��’s Seattle campus to explore more than . Hosted by the UW College of Engineering, Discovery Days gives students a chance to experience science and engineering concepts for themselves by building batteries, designing videogames, firing air vortex cannons and controlling plasma with their fingertips.��

This year, more than 9,000 students from 109 schools registered to attend.

For more information, contact William Poor at wpoor@uw.edu.

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Even on a campus like the ����ԭ��’s — home to particle accelerators, wave tanks and countless other bespoke pieces of equipment — the machinery in the stands out. Take the dilution fridge, a large, white, cylindrical device that can cool a small chamber to one hundredth of a kelvin above absolute zero — the coldest possible temperature in the universe.��

“This is the coldest fridge money can buy,” said , a UW assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and the former director of the lab, which goes by the nickname QT3. “When it’s running, the chamber inside this device is about 100 times colder than outer space. At that temperature, it’s much easier to study and manipulate a material’s quantum properties.”

The lab also houses a photon qubit tabletop lab: a nondescript set of boxes, lasers and lenses that can demonstrate the “spooky” — a term scientists actually use — phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, where two particles appear to communicate instantaneously with each other despite being physically apart.

Or there’s the lab’s latest acquisition, the scanning tunneling microscope, which can image individual atoms within a solid material, allowing researchers to study the structure of materials at the smallest scales.

An interdisciplinary group of researchers has been marshalling resources and expertise to create QT3 for three years, and now, the lab is opening its doors as a unique one-stop shop resource for quantum researchers and educators at the UW.

“The idea of this lab is to improve access to quantum hardware,” Parsons said. “It’s rather hard to acquire equipment like this. And there are a lot of researchers that may have good ideas that they want to test, but don’t have the resources yet for their own equipment. So we’re inviting researchers, initially from across campus, but also from other universities and from industry, to come in and test their ideas. This can be a hub for quantum experts to share their ideas and collaborate.”

The lab also boasts hardware that can demonstrate known quantum principles and techniques, making it useful for students in quantum fields. In addition to the entanglement device, Parsons’ students developed a machine that can suspend charged particles — in this case, tiny grains of pollen — in midair using electric fields. Researchers use the same technique to trap single atoms and manipulate their quantum properties, making the lab’s ion-trapping machine good practice for more complex work.

Some students even work at the lab through an undergraduate staffing program, and have helped install instrumentation, write code to power equipment and build parts for custom microscopes. The program provides yet another avenue for students to get hands-on experience with unusual machinery and techniques.��

“Quantum mechanics is inherently counterintuitive, and that makes it a powerful teaching tool,” Parsons said. “In the QT3 lab, students will encounter systems where their everyday intuition breaks down, and they must rely on careful reasoning and experimentation instead. They learn how to debug when results don’t match expectations, how to test simple cases and how to build understanding about hardware step by step.”

The cosmically cold dilution fridge remains something of a centerpiece, even as the lab fills up with specialized equipment. The extreme environment within the device strips heat, light and other stray energy away from materials, allowing researchers to observe the peculiar quantum properties that remain. One such property is superposition, or the ability of a particle like an electron to maintain multiple mutually exclusive properties at the same time. Scientists use superposition to create a powerful, tiny piece of technology: a quantum bit, or qubit.��

“Traditional computers use bits, which can only be one or zero. A qubit, on the other hand, we can make one plus zero,” Parsons said. “It’s both at the same time, and only when we measure it do we find out which one it is. We can use this unusual property to build a new class of computers that excel at tasks like communications and encryption.”

QT3 is part of a collaborative effort to solidify UW as a leader in quantum research and applications. Most of the lab hardware was funded by a congressional earmark championed by Senator Maria Cantwell’s office. Departmental funding from across the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences helped rehab the lab space. The National Science Foundation provided seed funding for the instructional lab equipment.

The UW has also spent the past decade investing heavily in faculty with quantum expertise.

“Very few places have expertise across the full quantum stack, from materials up to algorithms,” said , a UW professor of physics and founder of QT3. “The UW has quantum faculty in electrical and mechanical engineering, physics, computer science, materials science and chemistry. Our faculty work on superconducting qubits, spin defects, photons, trapped ions, neutral atoms and topological qubits. Our advantage is the breadth of our investment.”

The lab is now available to researchers and students across the UW, and private companies are encouraged to reach out about partnering. Parsons has already used the lab to teach a graduate-level class in electrical and computer engineering for students who included employees from Boeing, Microsoft and quantum computing company IonQ. The lab is hiring for a full-time manager to maintain the equipment and help users make the most of the facility.��

“Here in academia, we can improve the building blocks for applied technologies like quantum computing, and then transfer those learnings to industry for further scaling,” Parsons said.

For more information, contact Parsons at mfpars@uw.edu.

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Plants, like people, have a circadian clock and they sense seasonal changes to light and temperature. Plants that bloom in the spring use the longer days and warmer temperatures as seasonal cues that it’s time to bloom.

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[April 6] UPDATE: Flower petals are falling on the Quad as the trees lose their blossoms. The waning bloom is still quite a site but it’ll be a while before the trees are back on full display.

[March 23] UPDATE: The cherry trees are officially in peak bloom! Visit campus anytime in the next week or so to see the blossoms in all their glory.

[March 18] UPDATE: Recent temperature swings have slowed bud development for the Quad cherries. About half of the trees are still in peduncle elongation stage while half have moved on to the “puffy white” stage that precedes full bloom. Cool temperatures in the coming days may delay peak bloom as trees gradually blossom. Warm weather could produce a sudden transition. Check the live cams for updates.

[March 13] UPDATE: It’s snowing but the blossoms are still growing! The Quad cherries are now in the “peduncle elongation” stage, where the flower-bearing stalk extends from the bud. Some have also begun to flower.

Each spring, large crowds gather on the ����ԭ�� Quad to admire 29 puffy pink cherry trees making their seasonal debut. The trees begin to wake up as the weather warms, and this year, estimates suggest that they will reach “peak bloom” on March 20.

The UW’s iconic cherry trees achieve peak bloom when 70% of the blossoms have opened, but the week before and after still offer visitors an optimal viewing experience.

The cherry blossom visitors’ website provides updates on bloom status as well as details on transportation, activities and amenities. The cherry blossoms also have live video feeds for virtual viewing and their own social media accounts on and .

The cherry trees are both beautiful and ecologically significant. Tracking when the buds burst each year helps researchers predict peak bloom and determine how climate warming is impacting the trees, which were planted in the Washington Park Arboretum in 1936 and then relocated to UW in 1962.

This year, many plants began to emerge early as a mild winter gave way to spring. Recent UW research described how plants rely on both temperature and light cues to time their flowering. Temperature is particularly important to cherry trees, which estimate the arrival of spring based on how cold it has been. They accrue “chilling units” as winter progresses and “heating units” as it yields to spring.

“The buds need to accumulate a specific amount of chilling units before they can start accumulating the heating units. When it is not as cold, the chilling units accumulate much slower, so it takes them longer to wake up from dormancy, which is very counterintuitive,” said , a UW doctoral student of environmental and forest sciences.

Theil is now overseeing data collection on campus, with the help of approximately 20 undergraduate students. The researchers make observations as the trees begin to wake up and feed the data into a computer model that incorporates weather forecasts to predict peak bloom.

Historically, the onset of peak bloom has fallen between March 12 and April 3, with an average date of March 23. While the weather impacts peak bloom year to year, climate change drives longer term trends over multiple decades.

Research shows that bloom time has shifted approximately two days earlier each decade since the 1960s. Researchers began monitoring the trees in 2012 and referenced newspaper archives to estimate peak bloom dates for the preceding years.

“With the climate warming more rapidly in the spring, I expected to see the flowers blooming earlier,” said lead author , a recent doctoral graduate from the UW school of environmental and forest sciences. “But as we dove into the literature and examined the data, we saw a delay in bloom, as a result of winter warming in Seattle.”

The study focused on the Somei-yoshino, or Yoshino, cherry tree cultivar. These trees, sometimes called the Japanese flowering cherry, are found throughout Japan. They also line the National Mall in Washington D.C. and paint many Seattle neighborhoods pink in the springtime.

The bloom delay Maust observed applies only to Yoshino cherry trees in Seattle. In colder climates, such as Washington D.C., the trees have ample time to accrue chilling units. Still, the two populations are quite similar, genetically.

Propagation, or breeding more trees, occurs by grafting one tree onto another. This process limits genetic variability in favor of consistency. Because all Yoshino cherry trees are sterile clones of one another, they do not produce fruits or seeds, but they do reliably bloom in beautiful pink hues each spring.

For more information on bloom time, contact Theil at mtheil@uw.edu or Maust at  amaust@uw.edu. For information about the Yoshino Genome Project, contact Steinbrenner at astein10@uw.edu.

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