“It’s a puzzle,” says Ariel Gruenthal (’08, Anthropology). But the pieces she’s working with are decayed human remains and the picture she’s trying to build is a snapshot of the deceased’s life before they arrived in the Humboldt County Coroner’s Office.

Steven Smith, an HSU alumnus, has been named Dean of the College of Natural Resources and Sciences (CNRS).

In conjunction with Earth Week, Apr. 17-23, Humboldt State University will host “Encounters in the Open Sea: An evening with Rick Rosenthal,” at the John Van Duzer Theatre, Humboldt State University, Apr. 19, 7-8:30 p.m.

In the old “Yogi Bear” cartoons, you had to be “smarter than the average bear” to steal a camper’s food. But Kate McCurdy (M.S. NRPI, ’06), found that improperly stored food can attract even the average bear to a backpacker’s campsite.

Humboldt State University alum Kathleen Fairchild (’05), a graduate student in the Environment and Community Master of Social Science Program, has received the Community Leader Award from the Redwood Coast Tsunami Work Group for her master’s project to bolster the tsunami readiness of the Big Lagoon community and Big Lagoon Rancheria.

Luke Trout’s interest in archeology began early in life – with Easter eggs. As a child, Trout would ask his family to hide the colored eggs over and over again. When his father began to manage ranch land in Colorado, Trout’s interest in Easter eggs shifted to the arrowheads he discovered there. The rest, he says, is history.

For one HSU alum, a passion for beekeeping has grown not only into a successful academic career, but also recently earned her a $500,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.

This year, a number of campus projects will be funded through the Humboldt Loyalty Fund, a major way for alumni to contribute to the university.

Not every master’s thesis turns into an award-winning sustainability enterprise. But that’s just what happened for alum Alex Eaton (’09), who earned his master’s degree in Environmental Systems.