WUSTL School of Arts and Sciences News

Apollo 17 astronaut visits WUSTL for week of events related to lunar exploration

2013-05-16 00:00:00

NASA

Schmitt, shown here in his official NASA photograph taken in 1971, will visit Washington University in St. Louis the week of May 20.

Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a geologist and Apollo 17 astronaut, will be visiting Washington University in St. Louis for a week of activities centered on lunar exploration.

On Monday, May 20, Schmitt will give a seminar titled “Field Geology on Another World: Perspectives From the Taurus-Littrow Valley, Moon.” The talk, which beings at 2 p.m. in Room 201 Crow Hall, is free and open to the public.

Schmitt was on board the last Apollo mission to the moon, Apollo 17, which left Earth Dec. 7, 1972, to land near the southeastern edge of Mare Serenitatis in the Valley of Taurus-Littrow.

Schmitt writes: “For 75 hours, Gene Cernan and I lived and worked in the valley, performing extensive geological studies of the volcanic rocks that partially fill the valley, the boulders that rolled into the valley from the surrounding mountains, and the meteor impact generated soils that cover the valley floor and walls.

“Successful exploration of Taurus-Littrow capped a six-mission investigation of the materials and history of the moon. At the conclusion of these studies, science had gained a first order understanding of the evolution of the moon as a planet.”

Exploration forum with students

After the seminar, Schmitt then will participate in an “exploration forum,” an informal gathering of students to discuss the future of human space exploration, especially what should or could be done differently next time there is a manned mission to the moon. Students from earth and planetary sciences and physics in Arts & Sciences will participate, as will the WUSTL RASC-AL team.

The RASC-AL team is a group of WUSTL undergraduate and graduate students who entered a NASA-sponsored competition called Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts-Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) this year. In this competition, students are asked to develop concepts that may provide solutions to design challenges human space exploration currently faces.

The WUSTL team proposed investigating potential landing sites for a lunar outpost at the moon’s South Pole, from which astronauts could test areas in permanent shadow for volatile compounds that would not have survived exposure to sunlight elsewhere on the moon. The evidence of these volatiles and the geological characterization of this unexplored moon region might answer longstanding questions about the moon and its origins.

The team has reached the competition’s second round and will travel to Cocoa Beach, Fla., in June to present its proposal to a panel of NASA, Boeing and other industry judges. The exploration forum will give the team a chance to rehearse aspects of the presentation it will later make at the RASC-AL forum.

An eclectic mix of students in engineering, business administration, earth and planetary science, environmental earth science and medicine, the RASC-AL team is advised by Ramesh Agarwal, PhD, the William Palm Professor of Engineering mechanical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Review meeting

Tuesday through Thursday, Schmitt will participate in a science team meeting for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Cameras (LROC), hosted by Brad Jolliff, PhD, the Scott Rudolph Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences.

NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, flying in a low orbit over the moon, has taken many images that show the traces of manned missions. This is the Apollo 17 landing site, where astronauts Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and Gene Cernan deployed the final Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP). The trails the astronauts took to either side are still visible, as is the final parking place of the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV).

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a spacecraft launched in 2009 that is currently orbiting the moon in a low orbit that passes over the poles. Its purpose is to prepare for future missions to the moon by making detailed maps of its surface that can be used to identify safe landing sites and potential resources and characterize the radiation environment.

The LRO camera’s principal investigator is Mark Robinson, PhD, professor of earth and space exploration at Arizona State University. The LROC team includes distinguished space scientists from U.S. universities, the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Münster in Germany.

At the meeting, the team will discuss spacecraft and camera operations, spacecraft observations (volcanic, tectonic and impact features), future operations, future targets and image processing.

Vote for students' project in NSF competition

2013-05-16 00:00:00

WUSTL’s Melanie Bauer, a graduate student in psychology, and Eric Hamilton, a graduate student in plant biology, both in Arts & Sciences, are competing in a National Science Foundation essay contest, the Innovation in Graduate Education Challenge.

Bauer and Hamilton propose a new required graduate course to teach students, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM fields, the skills to communicate their work and its relevance to the general public. The idea is to improve public discourse and to give students skills for alternative career paths.

The public can vote online through May 29. To support Bauer and Hamilton’s project for the Community Choice award, and to learn more about their idea, visit here.

Bauer and Hamilton worked together after meeting at Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U), held at WUSTL this spring. Both committed to working on projects dealing with science outreach and communication. To learn more about the students’ efforts and WUSTL’s leadership in key CGI U areas, visit here.

WUSTL alumna selected as a 2013 National Geographic Emerging Explorer

2013-05-15 00:00:00

Lance Hayashida/California Institute of Technology

Ehlmann

Bethany Ehlmann, who graduated from WUSTL in 2004 with a bachelor's degree in earth and planetary science, joins a roboticist, an astrobiologist, a glaciologist, an artist and an entrepreneur as one of 17 visionary, young trailblazers from around the world who have been selected as this year’s National Geographic Emerging Explorers.

National Geographic’s Emerging Explorers Program recognizes and supports uniquely gifted and inspiring adventurers, scientists and innovators who are at the forefront of discovery, adventure and global problem-solving while still early in their careers. Each Emerging Explorer receives a $10,000 award to assist with research and to aid further exploration.

The new Emerging Explorers are introduced in the June 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine, and comprehensive profiles can be found at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/emerging

“As National Geographic celebrates its 125th anniversary year and looks forward to embracing a new age of exploration, we look to our Emerging Explorers to be leaders in pushing the boundaries of discovery and innovation. They represent tomorrow’s Robert Ballards, Jacques Cousteaus and Jane Goodalls,” said Terry Garcia, National Geographic’s executive vice president for Mission Programs.

After earning her bachelor's at WUSTL, Elhmann continued her studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. She earned a PhD from Brown University in 2010. She now conducts research on how weathering processes have changed the surface of Mars and other terrestrial planets as a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and as an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, both in Pasadena, where Curiosity’s mission control is headquartered.

In her current role as a participating scientist with the Curiosity mission, Ehlmann is using the rover’s Chemistry and Camera instrument, known as “ChemCam,” to remotely fire a laser that will blow holes in rocks and create clouds of atoms that indicate the chemical composition of the rocks.

As Ehlmann told the The Chronicle of Higher Education in a recent news article, this is the first time anyone has zapped rocks with lasers on another planet. The laser, she says, will vaporize a patch of the Mars surface, creating a plasma. Light emitted from the plasma forms a “fingerprint” based on the particular atoms that make up the rock. By looking at the ratios of these elements, researchers may be able to determine whether the rocks were formed by upwelling groundwater or by settling sediments in a lake.

“"It would be a grand-slam home run." Ehlmann says,"if we find enhanced carbonates, particularly organic carbon, because that could tell us that Mars might even have been inhabited long, long ago. But there’s a lot of ifs to that, and we’re still a long way away from it.”

Recognizing excellence in teaching

2013-05-14 00:00:00

kevin Lowder

Richard J. Smith, PhD, dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the Ralph E. Morrow Distinguished University Professor, congratulates Margaret Anne G. Hinkle, a third-year PhD student in earth and planetary sciences, as she receives a Graduate School of Arts & Sciences’ Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Hinkle was one of 15 teaching assistants recognized for exemplary performance during an April 25 ceremony in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge. Departments and programs within Arts & Sciences nominate outstanding teaching assistants for the annual award, which includes a $1,500 cash prize and certificate of recognition. To see brief bios of the 2012-13 teaching award recipients and descriptions of their teaching, visit here.

I-CARES announces 2013 funded research projects

2013-05-14 00:00:00

The International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES) has announced the award winners for its 2013 Call for Proposals.

As part of its mission, I-CARES awards seed funding to WUSTL faculty undertaking innovative and collaborative research in the broad areas of renewable energy and sustainability through an annual call for proposals.

This year, special emphasis was placed on projects related to climate change.

I-CARES has awarded 12 projects with 25 Washington University faculty from five schools: Arts & Sciences, the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, the School of Engineering & Applied Science, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the School of Medicine.

For a full list of winning projects and the faculty members involved, visiticares.wustl.edu/research/Pages/Projects.aspx.

I-CARES supports a network of national and international researchers all with a focus on renewable energy, the environment and sustainability, extending beyond Washington University’s seven schools. With the addition of the 2013 research awardees, I-CARES now supports 99 individual researchers across 71 projects.

Three doctoral candidates named Bouchet Fellows

2013-05-15 00:00:00

Three doctoral candidates at Washington University in St. Louis were inducted into the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society at the annual Bouchet Conference on Diversity in Graduate Education April 19-20 at Yale University.

Inducted as the seventh class of WUSTL Bouchet Fellows are Stephanie N. Rodriguez, a doctoral candidate in the immunology program in the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences; Beverly A. Tsacoyianis, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History in Arts & Sciences; and Sha-Lai L. Williams, who will be conferred a PhD from the Brown School during the university’s May 17 Commencement.

The Bouchet Society, named for the first African American to earn a doctorate in the United States, recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement and promotes diversity and excellence in doctoral education and the professoriate.

The society seeks to develop a network of preeminent scholars who exemplify academic and personal excellence, and serve as examples of scholarship, leadership, character, service and advocacy for students who have been traditionally underrepresented in the academy.

Rafia Zafar, PhD, associate dean for diversity and inclusiveness in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, coordinates the WUSTL chapter of the Bouchet Society.

“Washington University’s graduate students are known to be among the best in America; our Bouchet honorees take their place among the ranks of the highest achieving doctoral candidates in the nation,” Zafar said.

Rodriguez

Rodriguez, who works in the laboratory of Paul M. Allen, PhD, the Robert L. Kroc Professor of Pathology and Immunology, studies the intricate mechanisms of T cell development and how these important immune cells mediate protection to pathogens.

Using a novel CD4 T cell system unique to Allen’s laboratory, her dissertation work investigates the dependence of CD4 T cells on self-molecules for their development into functionally mature and self-tolerant mediators of immune protection, and for continued survival in this mature state.

Her research will address longstanding questions in the field of CD4 T cell development, including the timing, number and duration of immature T cell interactions with cells presenting self-molecules, as well as directly assessing the controversial role of self-molecules in the maintenance of mature CD4 T cells.

The recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Rodriguez has co-authored an article in the Journal of Immunology.

She is director of WUSTL’s Young Scientist Program, which was created in 1991 by medical and graduate students to attract high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds into scientific careers through activities emphasizing hands-on research and interaction between young people and scientists.

She has been involved with the organization since 2009 when she joined as a mentor and tutor.

Rodriguez earned a bachelor’s degree in biology with honors in microbes and immunity from Stanford University in 2009.

Tsacoyianis

Tsacoyianis, a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow, is completing her dissertation, “Making Healthy Minds and Bodies in Syria, 1903-1961.”

She studies the social and medical history of mental illness in 20th-century Syria, arguing that psychiatrists in Syria presented mental health treatment to Syrians as more than a way to control or cure mental illness, but as a modernizing worldview to suppress and delegitimize spirit-based vernacular treatment.

Her work contributes to scholarly debates in the history of medicine, particularly in the role of religion and science in healing, and debates about the role of the state and various non-state actors in preserving health and shaping the bodies and minds of citizens.

Tsacoyianis has received numerous honors, including a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship and a P.E.O. Scholar award.

She is the book review editor for the Syrian Studies Association, an interdisciplinary, international organization, and speaks and reads multiple languages, including Spanish, French, Hebrew and Arabic.

Through the IIE Scholar Rescue Fund, she also has actively worked to secure safe academic positions for international scholars at risk for discrimination and/or political unrest in their home countries.

Tsacoyianis earned a bachelor’s degree in Near Eastern and Judaic studies with a minor in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies from Brandeis University in 2004. She will start a tenure-track position in Middle Eastern history at the University of Memphis this fall after earning a doctorate in August.

Williams

Williams earned a bachelor’s of social work in 1995 from North Carolina State University and a master’s of social work in 1996 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She was a licensed clinical social worker for more than 10 years and a supervisor to provisionally licensed clinical social workers in North Carolina for three years.

Her dissertation, “Mental Health Service Utilization Rates Among African-American Emerging Adults,” draws on her research in cultural competence among social work and helping professionals and racial/ethnic disparities in access to and use of quality mental health services.

A Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow, Williams also has received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health under the auspices of its training grant program.

She has co-authored articles in Perspectives on Social Work, Health Promotion Practice and Patient Education and Counseling.

Williams, an ordained evangelist, has volunteered as a youth and young adult counselor with the New Destiny Apostolic Church in Maplewood, Mo., since 2009.

She will join the School of Social Work at the University of Missouri-St Louis as a tenure-track assistant professor in the fall.

About the Bouchet Society

Yale and Howard universities established the Bouchet Society in 2005 to recognize the life and academic contributions of Edward Alexander Bouchet, the first African American to earn a doctorate from an American university.

Bouchet was the sixth person in the Western Hemisphere to be awarded the PhD in physics, which he earned from Yale in 1876. He also earned an undergraduate degree from Yale in 1874 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

WUSTL was invited to become a Bouchet chapter member in 2007, joining Georgetown and Cornell universities and the universities of Michigan and Washington, among other peer institutions.

A WUSTL committee selected the university’s latest class of Bouchet Fellows. Members of the committee are: Zafar; Adrienne D. Davis, JD, vice provost and the William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law; and Elaine P. Berland, PhD, associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and director of the Liberman Graduate Center.

Weidenbaum legacy honored with May 20 forum

Neil Schoenherr — 2013-05-13 00:00:00

Murray Weidenbaum shows some economic figures to President Ronald Reagan in 1981 at the White House. During Reagan's first administration, Weidenbaum became the first chairman of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers.

Renowned economists will gather Monday, May 20, at the university to pay tribute to Murray Weidenbaum, PhD, founder and honorary chairman of WUSTL’s Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis, in a forum highlighting his lifelong accomplishments.

The forum, from 1:30-5:15 p.m. in Simon Hall’s May Auditorium, will begin with a panel discussion on “Current Challenges in Regulation.” The second session will focus on “Today’s Challenges in Macroeconomic Policy.”

After both sessions, speakers and discussants will take questions from the audience.

A highly influential economist and policy adviser, Weidenbaum has a legacy in the academic and governmental realms that began in the early 1960s.

In all, Weidenbaum, the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of economics in Arts & Sciences, has served or advised five U.S. presidents, spending much of the time teaching, writing and conducting research. During the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, he served on the U.S. bureau of the budget staff.

After a stint in the business world as the company economist for The Boeing Co., he turned to academia via Stanford University, then Washington University, where he began as an associate professor of economics in 1964.

Two years later, he was named a full professor and chair of the department. During that time, Weidenbaum also directed the NASA Economics Research Program, the department’s largest research project.

He left for Washington, D.C., in 1969 to serve as the first assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy under President Nixon. In 1971, he was installed as the Mallinckrodt professor at WUSTL.

This straddling of two worlds would become a pattern throughout the 1980s.

During the first Reagan administration, Weidenbaum became the first chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. His dual role as teacher and government policy leader continued through the George H.W. Bush White House, when the president sent him on a special mission to Poland and as a member of the EPA’s Clean Air Advisory Committee.

Throughout his academic life, Weidenbaum continued his keen interest in the impact of government on business, serving on the boards of directors at a variety of companies. In 1975, he founded the Center for the Study of American Business at WUSTL.

In 2001, the center was renamed the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

For more information on the tribute forum, including a full list of participants, visit wc.wustl.edu/events/WeidenbaumTributeForum20130520.

Law professor Martin installed as Nagel Chair

2013-05-09 00:00:00

Jerry Naunheim

Andrew D. Martin, PhD, vice dean at Washington University School of Law, delivers his address, “Institutional Empiricism in the 21st Century,” during his installation as the Charles Nagel Chair of Constitutional Law and Political Science.

Andrew D. Martin, PhD, vice dean at Washington University School of Law, recently was installed as the Charles Nagel Chair of Constitutional Law and Political Science.

This professorship honors Martin’s work as both a professor of law and a professor of political science in Arts & Sciences. He also serves as the founding director of the Center for Empirical Research in the Law. Since 2000, when he joined the Washington University faculty, Martin has mentored nearly 20 doctoral students and received the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in 2011 from the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

In addition, he is a principal of Principia Empirica LLC, an analytics consultancy that provides empirically grounded recommendations to businesses, law firms, government agencies and nonprofits. With an expertise in the study of judicial decision making, and a special emphasis on the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower federal courts, Martin also works extensively in the field of political methodology and applied statistics.

“Andrew has become a giant among scholars and professors of constitutional law and political science,” said Kent Syverud, dean of the law school and the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor, during the installation ceremony. “His dozens of articles are careful, rigorous and insightful. They’ve come to define the standard for empirical studies of courts in the United States and in the world.”

In addition to Syverud, Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the faculty and Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, offered remarks during Martin’s installation as the Nagel Chair. Lee Epstein, PhD, Provost Professor of Law and Political Science and the Rader Family Trustee Chair in Law at the University of Southern California, introduced Martin after a welcome by Edward S. Macias, PhD, provost and the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences.

The Nagel Chair was established through a bequest from Daniel Noyes Kirby in 1945. It honors Charles Nagel, Kirby’s longtime friend, law partner and fellow lecturer at Washington University School of Law. Nagel was a member of the Missouri House of Representatives from 1881 to 1883, a member of the Republican National Committee from 1908 to 1912, and U.S. secretary of commerce and labor in the cabinet of President William Howard Taft from 1909 to 1913.

To read more and watch a video of the installation visit here.

JERRY NAUNHEIM

Martin is congratulated by his daughter, Olive.

Faulty memory finds a new culprit

Melanie Bauer — 2013-05-07 00:00:00

Grandpa's stories often begin with the phrase, “Have I ever told you about the time…?” What he doesn’t know is that, yes, he has told you about that time, and he has told you many times before.

Why is this situation so typical of our conversations with older adults? A recent study conducted at Washington University in St. Louis suggests it may be due to the changing way we perceive events in our lives as we age. The study finds that this perception is influenced by a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobes (MTL), which declines in functioning in old age.

But how does MTL actually help us remember?

Bailey

“The traditional view of MTL is that it helps us with episodic memory,” said Heather Bailey, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory who conducted the current study along with Jeffrey Zacks, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences, and colleagues.

Episodic memory is a type of long-term memory, specifically our memory for events such as our 21st birthday, what we ate for breakfast or our last conversation with a grandparent. However, a more recent view of MTL — one supported by the current study — suggests it is not just responsible for helping us remember the past.

Zacks

“More recent research suggests that MTL is important for helping us identify patterns in our experiences, and chunk and segment them into meaningful events while we’re experiencing them,” Bailey said.

“Chunk” and “segment” are lingo used in segmentation theory to describe the way in which our brains mentally chop up our days. For example, when thinking back on what you did yesterday, you might remember waking up, showering, getting dressed, drinking coffee, driving to work, and so on. Each of these activities is a “chunk” that your brain created and stored in memory.

Study participants viewed short movies of everyday tasks, such as a woman washing dishes, and "chunked" them into segments of activity. Afterward, they were asked to recall what happened.

“It’s not like you press a record button and your brain records your day and then, when you want to think back on it, you’re just hitting a play button and watching a continuous stream of 24 hours. Your brain is naturally chunking the events in your day into discrete parts,” Bailey said.

In their study, published online April 28 by the journal Psychological Science, Bailey, Zacks and colleagues investigated the connection between how people perceive and chunk everyday events and later remember those events.

In their study, older adults were shown short movies of people doing everyday tasks, such as a woman making breakfast or a man building a Lego ship. While watching the movie, they were instructed to press a button whenever they thought one part of the activity was ending and a new part was beginning (i.e., separate the movie into “chunks”). After the movie ended, they were asked to recall what happened.

In addition to assessing memory for the movies, the size of the older adults’ MTL was measured using structural MRI. The study's purpose was to examine the effects of a degraded (i.e., smaller) MTL on how well people can chunk and remember everyday events. The study included both healthy older adults and older adults with Alzheimer’s disease, some of whom had degradation of their MTL.

“Older adults in the study who showed atrophy in MTL showed decline in memory for these everyday activities, and also showed decline in segmenting and chunking these events as they were happening,” Bailey said. “MTL accounted for a huge portion of this relationship we saw between segmentation and memory.”

This means that what people are doing while they’re watching movies or going through their daily lives — how well they’re chunking their experiences into separate memories — has a strong influence on how well they will remember those experiences in the future. How well they are able to chunk and remember is partly due to how well their MTL is functioning, the study finds.

These findings may have relevance in a clinical setting for treating older adults with memory impairments.

“Alzheimer’s disease attacks MTL in the early stages of the disease,” said Bailey. “But even with MTL atrophy, you may be able to train people to chunk better, which might help them remember their everyday activities better, too.”

Forgetfulness is characteristic of the aging mind and conversations with our aging relatives. This Washington University study suggests that the problem may not just be with the process of recalling memories for events, but also with the process of viewing and chunking the events as they unfold.

So, memory improvement for older adults would come from working harder to form new memories better, rather than working harder to bring to mind older memories that already have formed. In this way, how we perceive the world is a strong predictor of how we’ll remember it in the future.

As part of their future research, Bailey and colleagues will design studies to actually combat memory impairment in older adults.

“We want to investigate further this link between event perception and memory. We want to see if we can intervene at an early point in perception, if it will affect memory,” Bailey said.

Chatterjee receives this year's Isserman Prize

By Kelly Wiese Niemeyer — 2013-05-07 00:00:00

Chatterjee

Arts & Sciences senior Nisha K. Chatterjee is this year’s winner of the Rabbi Ferdinand M. Isserman Prize.

The award, given annually, recognizes a student who has made a significant contribution in service and leadership to ecumenical or interfaith activities on the Washington University in St. Louis campus.

Chatterjee, a native of La Canada, Calif., has been active with the university's Bhakti Yoga Club as well as the Inter-Beliefs Council. She previously was treasurer and this year serves as president of Bhakti Yoga Club, which helps students experience spiritual culture from ancient India.

She represented Bhakti Yoga Club on the Interfaith Campus Ministries Association, a group composed mostly of clergy and religious organizations’ staff, and helped with joint outreach events. She also was part of a team that helped organize and run this year’s Pluralism Week, which promotes interfaith awareness and dialogue within the WUSTL community.

Chatterjee plans to graduate this month with a bachelor of arts degree, majoring in international and area studies and economics.

The prize was established to honor the late Ferdinand Isserman, a distinguished rabbi and author who was active in social and interfaith issues locally, nationally and internationally. Winners receive $500 and are honored at a luncheon.

Arts & Sciences recognizes six alumni at awards dinner

2013-05-08 00:00:00

Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis recognized the achievements of six alumni during the 16th Annual Arts & Sciences Distinguished Alumni Awards ceremony, held April 25 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Clayton.

Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor, and members of the Arts & Sciences National Council hosted the awards dinner.

The school presented four Distinguished Alumni Awards, one Early Career Achievement Award and one Dean’s Medal.

The 2013 Arts & Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award recipients are:

James Burmeister (AB '61, MBA '63, MA '67), whose time at WUSTL spans nearly six decades, from working part time in the psychology department at age 14; to earning degrees in political science, business and psychology; to serving as university registrar; then to serving in both alumni relations and public affairs; to his current role as Commencement director;

Ann Johanson, MD (AB '56), the first physician in endocrine clinical research at the California-based biotechnology firm Genentech and one of the first doctors to use a groundbreaking biosynthetic growth hormone to treat children with pituitary deficiency;

James Schiele (AB '52, MLA '85, MA '11, doctoral student), consultant and former chairman and chief executive officer of St. Louis Screw & Bolt Co.; and

Darrell Williams, PhD (MA '86, PhD '91), an economist and founder and publisher of TheLoop21.com, a website that offers news, resources and opinions on issues important to African Americans.

The Early Career Achievement Award recipient is Nicole Kaplan (AB '92), founding president of Telesto LLC, a Florida-based consulting company that provides financial advisory services to corporate entities.

The Dean's Medalist is Marie Oetting (AB '49), a stalwart volunteer for Arts & Sciences and a fixture on campus for more than 60 years, serving on countless planning and advisory committees as well as supporting student scholarships and other important initiatives.

During the awards ceremony, the honorees shared personal stories of their educational experience and the impact it had on their lives and accomplishments.

For biographies and videos on each of the awardees, visit here.

Three faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences

2013-05-06 00:00:00

Three Washington University in St. Louis scientists are among the 84 members and 21 foreign associates elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year. Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer.

The university's new academy members are:

Stephen M. Beverley, PhD, the Marvin A. Brennecke Professor of Molecular Microbiology and chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology in the School of Medicine;
Robert D. Schreiber, PhD, Alumni Endowed Professor of Pathology and Immunology and professor of molecular microbiology in the School of Medicine and co-leader of the Tumor Immunology Program at Siteman Cancer Center;
Joan E. Strassmann, PhD, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences.

“I’m still in shock,” said Beverley. “I got the news a few minutes before boarding a flight from London back to St. Louis, and I didn’t really need the plane.”

Beverley
Beverley studies the biology of the protozoan parasite Leishmania, including virulence factors, host response and basic metabolic functions of the parasite.

Leishmania infection, known as leishmaniasis, affects an estimated 12 million people worldwide. It is mainly spread by sand fly bites and is a major public health problem in the Mediterranean basin, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America. Symptoms include large skin lesions, fever, swelling of the spleen and liver, and, in more serious forms of the disease, disfigurement and death.

Beverley and his colleagues have probed many aspects of Leishmania biology through the development and application of advanced genetic tools.

Accomplishments in recent years have included the discovery that one group of Leishmania parasites uses a genetic regulatory system called RNA interference. This system normally is used to control mobile genetic elements that can disrupt the parasite's chromosomes. But scientists can now use the same system to turn genes on and off in the parasite, helping to identify which genes are most important for the infectious process.

Beverley is also active in the hunt for new drug treatments and vaccines for Leishmania.

Beverley earned a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and did postdoctoral research at Stanford University. In 1983, he moved to Harvard Medical School, where he eventually became the Hsien and Daisy Yen Wu Professor and interim chair of the Department of Biological Chemistry & Molecular Pharmacology. In 1997, he joined the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine as head of the Department of Molecular Microbiology.

Schreiber

Schreiber studies the intricate relationship between cancer and the immune system. With his colleagues, he has revived a century-old model of how the immune system interacts with tumors.

When Schreiber began his research, the accepted model of this relationship, called cancer immunosurveillance, suggested that if the immune system recognized a tumor, it would attack the tumor with the same weapons it uses to eliminate invading microorganisms, not stopping until the tumor was destroyed or the immune system’s resources were exhausted.

The model revived by Schreiber and his colleagues, known as cancer immunoediting, also asserts that the immune system can attack tumors. But they propose that three very different outcomes can result. The immune system can eliminate cancer, destroying it; the immune system can establish equilibrium with cancer, checking its growth but not eradicating it; or the cancer can escape from the immune system, likely becoming more malignant in the process.

The research has had far-reaching effects on clinical efforts to enlist the immune system’s help in the battle against cancer. Schreiber’s insight that the immune system can drive cancers into dormancy, for example, has suggested that immune therapy may one day allow cancer to become a chronic but controllable condition.

Schreiber and his colleagues recently demonstrated that some mutated genes in tumors can give rise to tumor-specific protein antigens. They showed that these antigens can be identified using next generation genomic sequencing and bioinformatic techniques, and their efforts now are focused on refining this approach to develop safe and effective personalized cancer immunotherapies.

Schreiber earned a doctorate from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973. After a stretch as a postdoctoral fellow and faculty member at the Research Institute of the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, Calif., he was recruited to Washington University in 1985. He received a Washington University Faculty Achievement Award in 2008.

Strassmann’s work focuses on cooperative alliances that have occurred at several important steps in the evolution of life that have proven evolutionarily and ecologically successful.

Strassmann

In collaboration with her husband and colleague, David C. Queller, PhD, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences, she has measured genetic relatedness within colonies of many wasp species, including Polistes exclamans, and showed that kin selection theory predicts the existence and outcome of within-family conflicts of interest. They also have pioneered the use of DNA microsatellites for relatedness estimation.

In 1998, they began working with the social amoebae Dictyostelium discoideum, a model organism for exploring the evolution of social interactions at the physiological, genetic and genomic levels. In a series of papers, they have demonstrated the power of social evolution theory in explaining multicellular organization, from developmental pathways to cell adhesion.

She earned a PhD in 1979 from the University of Texas at Austin. From 1980 to 2011, Strassmann was on the faculty of Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she was the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In 2011, she became a professor of biology at Washington University. That same year, she was elected president of the Animal Behavior Society.

Early responses coming in on Next Generation Science Standards

Diana Lutz — 2013-05-07 00:00:00

The 26 states in blue partnered with a nonprofit educational group to write the Next Generation Science Standards. (Missouri applied to be a partner state but its application was still pending when the process was closed.) Crucially, the partner states include both Republican and Democratic strongholds.

The Next Generation Science Standards have been out for a month now. How are they being received?

California and Massachusetts already have started the process of adopting the new standards. And judging by entries in a blog The New York Times set up to allow science teachers to comment on the standards, most teachers are on board as well.

Michael Wysession, PhD, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences, in Arts & Sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis, played a key role in writing the standards.

Wysession was on the leadership team for writing the standards, focusing on earth and space science. He said the team took great care to make sure state legislators and teachers would be comfortable with the new standards.

State control but national uniformity

The United States currently does not have national K-12 science education standards, Wysession said. Each state determines its own standards, reflecting the tradition of independent states’ rights.

“This is the first push at moving us out of a parochial, local view of education,” said Wysession. “We’re saying, ‘You know what? There are things about the practice of science everyone should know, and this is what they are.'”

But it was equally important that the standards not be imposed on the states from the federal level, as was the now widely disparaged No Child Left Behind Act.

The Next Generation Science Standards were written by a states-led team organized by Achieve, a bipartisan nonprofit education group founded by leading governors and business leaders in 1996. Achieve also led the writing of the math and English language arts Common Core, released in 2010.

No tax dollars were spent on the standards. Instead, private foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Noyce Foundation and the Cisco Foundation, provided financing.

Achieve hoped to enlist half a dozen states to participate in the standards-writing process, but so many states volunteered to be partners that Achieve had to limit participation.

“It’s a real mix of red and blue states,” Wysession said of the state partners. That’s important because state legislatures must adopt the standards.

But industry is pushing state legislatures to adopt the standards, Wysession said. Industrial leaders realize that to be competitive, they must have access to a workforce that can solve problems requiring scientific and technical knowledge.

What are the odds the new standards will be adopted by the majority of states? It’s too early to say, but one good omen for supporters is that 45 states have adopted the Common Core — despite concerns that they increase federal control of schools.

Shorter but deeper

The new standards replace overviews with a series of in-depth explorations and require that students understand how science and scientists actually work rather than merely memorize information.

“Information used to be hard to come by,” Wysession explained. “My school years were spent bicycling across town to the library to write my reports. Kids now have a universe of information at their fingertips, and there’s no need for students to memorize factoids. In fact, there is too much information available.”

As Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of the journal Science, put it in an editorial titled “Failure of Skin-Deep Learning,” the traditional approach “tends to promote a superficial ‘comprehensive coverage’ of a field. . . . We need to replace the current ‘comprehensive’ overviews of subjects with a series of in-depth explorations."

“We must teach our students to do something in science class, not memorize facts,” Alberts said in a second editorial.

Many teachers apparently agree. Writing in The New York Times blog for science teachers, one said, “Our system progressively smothers curiosity out of most kids by burdening them with dates, numbers, facts and equations that seem (to them) to have no relevance to their lives.”

Another teacher wrote, “Currently when I give them a test, they can provide canned answers to definitions, statements, etc. However, when they have to apply knowledge, they are mediocre.”

A third said, “ “Students must understand how we know what we think we know, how to think like a scientist, and how to engage in the scientific inquiry process. That type of learning is what’s embodied in [the new standards].”

Adding earth science and engineering

U.S. secondary school science curricula are largely based on recommendations made 120 years ago by a group called the Committee of Ten, said Wysession. The Committee of Ten suggested that “physical geography” be taught in middle school and that biology, physics and chemistry be taught in high school.

Things have changed since then, Wysession said. Many of the most important problems we face as a society involve earth systems, such as air pollution, water shortages and global warming. Yet roughly two-thirds of American students report not being taught about climate change, according to the National Center for Science Education.

In the new standards, at the high school level, the attention paid to earth and space sciences is roughly equal to that paid to chemistry and physics combined. In addition, the standards incorporate a new emphasis on engineering, technology and applications of science.

Wysession said the science standards include evolution and climate change as a matter of course. And, he said, “You can’t cherry-pick. You can’t leave out evolution or climate change and still say your curriculum adheres to the national science standards.”

It should be easy to motivate students to learn the earth sciences, he said, because they are directly relevant to students’ lives.

“Go through the front page of the The New York Times over a year and tally up science topics you see,” he said. “You’ll see earthquakes, oil spills, forest fires, tornadoes — all this stuff that’s in earth science. So I think people would love to teach it and students would love to learn about it."

A college teacher, writing on the The New York Times blog, agrees: “The best way perhaps to teach climate change is to integrate it with teaching of chemistry and physics — because it brings a certain reality to these otherwise sometimes abstract subjects."

One concern a few teachers voice is that climate science can be depressing. Students will be taught about the enormous impact of human activities on our planet, Wysession said, but the standards are also designed to teach them how to discover solutions to problems such as global warming.

A science curriculum specialist and middle-school science teacher takes a stronger view: “I believe there is a moral imperative to teach this generation of students about this topic since they are going to be the generation forced to face and, hopefully, solve the effects of climate change most directly.”

Assessment, professional development and money

The new standards are not curricula. They are intended instead to guide curriculum development. It may be years before the guidelines are fully translated into detailed curricula, teachers are trained and standardized assessments are adopted.

Wysession is acutely aware that most science assessments test memorized facts. New tests must be devised if students are to be assessed on what they can do instead of what they know. But, he said, there will be a report on how best to handle this challenge from the National Academy of Sciences in the next couple of months.

He also is aware that many teachers are unfamiliar with the fields of earth science and engineering, so adopting the standards will entail significant professional development.

One teacher raised this concern in The New York Times blog, “As a professor of pre-service teachers for the elementary grades, I am seeing a tremendous lack of content knowledge required to pass teacher licensing tests . . . It appears that the current crop of teachers are dreadfully unprepared to teach science in their classrooms.”

A science teacher and science director in the New York State public schools said that if you surveyed schools to see how many professional development days were devoted to science “your jaw would drop” and that funding for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math education) is a “blip on the radar” compared to funding for language arts.”

“Money will be important,” Wysession said. “A state can be all gung ho about adopting the standards, and then the economy tanks and they have no money for it.”

He has talked to groups of principals who told him pre-emptively that it would be difficult to make changes without new money.

Worries aside, however, it is apparent that most science teachers are enthusiastic about the Next Generation Science Standards and hopeful that they will go some distance to turning around the science illiteracy that long has plagued American students, giving them a better chance for success in college and in the international job market.

Elson elected fellow of arts and sciences academy

Julia Evangelou Strait — 2013-05-03 00:00:00

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis faculty member Elliot L. Elson, PhD, has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Elson, the Alumni Endowed Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, is one of 186 Americans elected as fellows this year by the academy, an organization formed in 1780 to cultivate the arts and sciences and to recognize leadership in scholarship, business, the arts and public affairs.

The academy has more than 4,500 members, including some 250 Nobel laureates and 60 Pulitzer Prize winners. Fellows are selected through a competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made prominent contributions to their disciplines and society.

“I am delighted that a member of our outstanding faculty has received this tremendous honor,” said Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. “Dr. Elson is a dedicated scientist, and this recognition is well-deserved. This achievement demonstrates the good fortune we have had at Washington University in attracting premier faculty.”

This year’s new fellows and foreign honorary members will be welcomed during an induction ceremony Oct. 12 at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Elson

Elson joined the faculty of Washington University as a professor in 1979. In addition to his appointment in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, he is also a professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science and an adjunct professor of physics in Arts & Sciences.

His research focuses on cellular motion, the movement and distribution of cell surface proteins and the forces that determine the shapes of cells. He and members of his lab also have studied artificial cardiovascular tissues, including their mechanical and electrical properties.

Elson and his lab members also are well-known for designing and building their own unique instruments to answer specialized questions. One such instrument evolved from a novel technique to measure molecular motion. Elson began developing the technique in the late 1960s, while a faculty member at Cornell University. Called fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), it has evolved into a sophisticated technology that has been widely adopted in labs around the world.

Elson, a St. Louis native, earned a doctoral degree in biochemistry from Stanford University in 1964 and went on to postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego. He joined the faculty of Cornell University in 1968.

In 2007, Elson received the Gregorio Weber Award for Excellence in Fluorescence Theory and Applications. The international award recognizes distinguished individuals who have made original and significant contributions to the field of fluorescence. Elson was honored with the Weber Award for his extensive research in fluorescence, including the development of FCS and his continuing work to refine and advance the technique.

Elson has authored more than 160 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He has served on the editorial boards of several of these journals, including The Journal of Cell Biology, Biopolymers and Biophysical Journal. He is a member of the Biophysical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Gelberman, Wertsch to receive 2013 faculty achievement awards

2013-05-02 00:00:00

Richard H. Gelberman, MD, a world-renowned expert in hand and wrist microsurgery, and James V. Wertsch, PhD, founding director of one of the most successful and innovative global scholarship programs in the world, will receive the university’s 2013 faculty achievement awards, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced.

Wertsch

Gelberman

Gelberman, the Fred C. Reynolds Professor and head of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, will receive the Carl and Gerty Cori Faculty Achievement Award. Wertsch, vice chancellor for international affairs, director of the McDonnell International Scholars Academy and the Marshall S. Snow Professor in Arts & Sciences, will receive the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award.

They will receive their awards and give presentations of their scholarly work during a Dec. 7 program.

“I am pleased that we are recognizing two of Washington University’s most distinguished scholars with the 2013 faculty achievement awards,” Wrighton said. “Both recipients have enjoyed rewarding, productive careers and both have contributed significantly to the university. I join with the faculty of Washington University in congratulating Dr. Gelberman and Dr. Wertsch on this impressive honor.”

Richard Gelberman

When Gelberman joined the School of Medicine faculty in 1995 as the first head of orthopaedic surgery, the department included 14 full-time faculty, had no NIH-funded research and was ranked 48 of 50 orthopaedic surgery departments included in U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Following years of a concerted effort to add top-tier clinicians and researchers, the department, under Gelberman’s leadership, now has 48 faculty members, is ranked in the U.S. News top 10 and, with more than $5 million in annual grant support, has more NIH funding than any other orthopaedic surgery department in the United States.

Gelberman, who is also orthopaedic surgeon-in-chief at Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, is a past president of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the American Society for Surgery of the Hand.

He studies connective tissue — the ligaments, tendons and muscles that allow us to move — and much of his NIH-funded research focuses on tendon healing. He also investigates fractures in the wrist, carpal tunnel syndrome and nerve injuries.

Born in New York, Gelberman grew up in Asheville, N.C. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned his medical degree from the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Memphis.

He did his residency in orthopaedic surgery at the University of Wisconsin and fellowships in hand and microvascular surgery at Duke University Medical Center and in pediatric orthopaedic surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital.

He is a graduate of the Executive Program at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and has an honorary master’s degree from Harvard Medical School.

Among his honors, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 2003 and he received the Distinguished Clinician Educator Award from the American Orthopaedic Association in 2008.

The author of more than 250 scientific papers and editor of three books and 25 book chapters, he also serves on the editorial boards of eight medical publications.

James Wertsch

Wertsch has led the McDonnell International Scholars Academy since its inception in 2005. The academy’s mission is to develop future global leaders by recruiting outstanding graduates of leading research partner institutions from around the world for PhD or professional degree programs at WUSTL.

Under Wertsch’s leadership, the McDonnell Academy has grown from having 15 leading Asian universities as partners to having 28 leading universities from around the world as partners.

In addition to his work with the McDonnell Academy, he holds faculty appointments in anthropology, education, international and area studies, and psychology, all in Arts & Sciences.

Since joining WUSTL’s faculty in 1995 as professor and chair of the Department of Education, he has played a major role in developing several areas of research and teaching in Arts & Sciences, including the International and Area Studies Program.

A fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Wertsch is an expert on collective memory and identity. He has particular interest in how these issues play out in Russia, Estonia and the Republic of Georgia.

He is working on several projects in the Republic of Georgia, including collaboration with colleagues on efforts to understand the emergence of civil society and democracy in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as in the United States.

After earning a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1975, Wertsch spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in Moscow, where he studied linguistics and neuropsychology. He then went on to hold faculty positions at Northwestern University, the University of California, San Diego, and Clark University.

Wertsch holds honorary degrees from Linköping University in Sweden and the University of Oslo, and he is an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Education.

He is a guest professor at the University of Oslo, Tsinghua University in Beijing and Fudan University in Shanghai.

Anthropology student Alena Wigodner receives NSF award

2013-05-01 00:00:00

Alena Wigodner, a junior anthropology major in Arts & Sciences, has been selected for a new National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program titled “Angel Mounds REU Site: Multidisciplinary Training for Students in Environmental and Social Sciences through Archaeological Research.”

Wigodner

The objective of this program, which is run through Indiana University and the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, is to advance multidisciplinary training for students in environmental and social sciences through archaeological research.

The eight-week program will include five weeks of fieldwork at the Angel Mounds State Historic Site in southwestern Indiana, a late Pre-Columbian town and National Historic Landmark site occupied during the Mississippian cultural period (A.D. 1050 to 1450) and highlighted by 11 earthen mounds and a series of palisades.

This will be followed by three weeks of laboratory training at IUPUI and IU-Bloomington, analyzing materials and data from the fieldwork.

The goal of this project is to foster a new generation of scholars that can work across disciplinary boundaries to craft cogent, meaningful and empirically sound interpretations.

An aerial view of Angel Mounds State Historic Site in Indiana.

Nationally recruited undergraduates from the environmental and social sciences and humanities, as well as other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines will be provided with field and laboratory training in archaeology, geophysics, geoarchaeology and geochemistry.

Over the program’s three years, REU participants will conduct original research on the Native American peoples that inhabited Angel Mounds through investigation of earthwork construction (Year 1), reconstruction of the paleoenvironment (Year 2), and exploration of the timing and relationship between fortification construction, settlement development and subsequent site abandonment (Year 3).

Participants in the Angel Mounds REU will receive a $500/week stipend ($4,000 for eight weeks). The program will also cover all housing and the requisite field and laboratory equipment in Evansville, Bloomington, and Indianapolis. In addition, a $300 allowance will be provided to participants for travel to the REU site from their institution or home. A $500 allowance has also been budgeted for student presentations of research findings at a regional archaeological conference in the fall subsequent to project participation.

For more information visit https://www.indiana.edu/~angelreu/cms/.

Michel Lauzière, the master of unusual comedy

2013-04-26 00:00:00

Michel Lauzière is the master of unusual comedy. Download hi-res image.

He’s dashing, debonair and fluent in at least six languages.

He has escaped the insides of balloons and rollerbladed on the Late Show with David Letterman. He’s honked out Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in a space suit of bicycle horns. Brandishing water pistols, he can coax household crockery into chiming Mozart and “Happy Birthday” alike.

He is Michel Lauzière, the master of unusual comedy.

And at 11 a.m. Saturday, May 4, he will bring his singularly inventive one-man-show to WUSTL’s Edison Theatre as part of the ovations for young people series.

The Master of Unusual Comedy

A combination of inventor, acrobat, comedian and musician, Lauzière began performing at the age of 15 and, within a few years, hit the international circuit as the straight-man in a popular comedy duo.

Lauzière began his solo career in 1989 and quickly earned rave reviews for his uncanny ability to transform virtually anything — dishes, empty bottles and even audience members — into musical instruments. A virtuoso one-man-band, he can pound out “We Will Rock You” and “I Love Rock ’n Roll” with guitar in hand and drum sticks strapped to his head.

To date, Lauzière has performed in more than 400 cities in 50 countries on five continents. He has appeared on more than 75 television variety shows across Asia, Europe and North and South America. In addition to Letterman, he has been featured on The Tonight Show and The Jerry Lewis Telethon, as well as on HBO, Showtime and Comedy Central.

“His inventions are marvels of simplicity, recycled everyday objects that transform form and function into an entertaining enterprise,”  notes the Los Angeles Times, while The Ottawa Sun calls Lauzière “delightful” and “an inventive, winningly relaxed performer.”

Tickets and sponsors

“Michel Lauzière, the Master of Unusual Comedy” will begin at 11 a.m. Saturday, May 4, in Edison Theatre. Tickets are $12.

Tickets are available at the Edison Box Office and through all MetroTix outlets. Edison Theatre is located in the Mallinckrodt Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd.

For more information, call (314) 935-6543, e-mail edison@wustl.edu or visit edison.wustl.edu.

Edison programs are made possible with support from the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; the Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis; and private contributors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EQW7FNL0sE

Women’s Society presents Switzer leadership awards, Danforth scholarship

Kelly Wiese Niemeyer — 2013-04-29 00:00:00

Three already accomplished young women received awards recently from the Women’s Society of Washington University (WSWU).

At the society’s annual membership meeting April 17, leaders announced the winners of the Harriet K. Switzer Leadership Award and the Elizabeth Gray Danforth Scholarship.

The Switzer award was presented to Jennifer Head and Melany Lopez; the Danforth scholarship was presented to Margarita Tisza.

The Switzer award is presented to graduating seniors who have made a significant contribution during their undergraduate careers at Washington University in St. Louis and demonstrate the potential for future leadership.

The Danforth scholarship is a full-tuition scholarship awarded annually to an outstanding community college transfer student.

Mary Butkus

Harriet Switzer, center, talks with the 2013 Harriet K. Switzer Leadership Award winners Jennifer Head, left, and Melany Lopez. The Women’s Society of Washington University bestowed the awards during its annual meeting April 17 in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

Head

Head is majoring in chemical engineering. She has been a top student and received several prestigious scholarships, in addition to her regular and varied involvement in community service.

Perhaps the project that made her stand out most, according to the leadership award committee, was her continued effort to improve conditions for children in Ethiopia.

Through Engineers without Borders, Head decided to work toward providing an adequate water supply for the Mekelle School for the Blind in North Ethiopia. After a campaign to raise awareness and funds, Head and other students along with faculty advisers traveled to the Mekelle School, ultimately repairing the water tower, installing a pump into a well and laying a water distribution network.

While working on this project, Head witnessed the devastating effects that vitamin A shortage has on Ethiopian children, causing blindness and increasing the mortality rate. She now plans to work to fortify local edible oils and flour with vitamin A. Head said she has won a Fulbright scholarship to pursue the vitamin A project and plans to spend nine months in Ethiopa next year doing so.

Head plans a career in global health and expects to pursue a master’s degree of public health in global environmental health at Emory University.

Lopez

Lopez, majoring in biology in Arts & Sciences, plans to become a doctor. During her undergraduate career, she has volunteered more than 2,500 hours with EST, the emergency medical technician student group on campus.

She has been an Annika Rodriguez scholar for four years and also has been a resident adviser.

She worked as a uSTAR (undergraduate student training in academic research) fellow in the cell biology and physiology lab of Associate Professor James Huettner, PhD, and they plan to submit their research results for publication soon.

Lopez was accepted in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Exceptional Research Opportunities Program and worked last summer with David Clapham, MD, PhD, at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.

Lopez also has been involved with Global Brigades, a student-run volunteer group that travels to developing countries to provide medical care and other services.

Mary Butkus

Florence Pullen, left, of the Women's Society of Washington University, and society president Tara Lewis visit with Margarita Tisza, this year's Elizabeth Gray Danforth Scholarship recipient. Tisza plans to pursue business degrees at WUSTL.

Tisza

Danforth scholarship recipient Margarita Tisza is completing her studies at St. Louis Community College-Meramec. She looks forward to pursuing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting and in business administration at WUSTL.

Tisza has been an accomplished student as well as a student leader. She also works part-time and volunteers as a health care assistant with Paraquad, a nonprofit organization that provides services and advocacy for people with disabilities.

Membership in the Women’s Society is open to women of all ages from all backgrounds; WSWU does not require women to be associated with the university to join its organization.

2013 Spector Prize goes to two students

2013-04-26 00:00:00

Each year, the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis awards a prize to a graduating senior in memory of Marion Smith Spector, a 1938 WUSTL graduate who studied zoology under the late Viktor Hamburger, PhD.

Hamburger was a professor of biology and a prominent developmental biologist who made many important contributions while a WUSTL faculty member.

The Spector Prize, first awarded in 1974, recognizes academic excellence and outstanding undergraduate achievement in research. Students are nominated by their research mentors for outstanding research that has made substantial contributions to a field.

This year the prize has been awarded to two students, Megan Kelly and Jennifer Stevens, both of whom are majoring in biology.

Kelly

Kelly worked in the lab of Audrey Odom, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics and of molecular microbiology in the School of Medicine.

Kelly

"I originally planned to complete the premed courses and then apply to medical school," Kelly said. But the summer before I started college, I spent seven weeks in a lab as part of the Summer Scholars for Biology and Biomedical Research program.

I enjoyed it so much, I joined Dr. Odom’s lab that fall. And she filled me with a passion for science, giving me an opportunity to see what it’s like to be the first to discover something, to learn and to solve problems with science."

Kelly worked on the chemicals released by the parasites that cause malaria. The parasites synchronize their life cycles so that, for example, they all emerge from red blood cells into the bloodstream at the same time. In addition, mosquitos are more attracted to people infected with malaria than those that are not. Both observations suggest the parasites may be communicating by means of chemical signals.

"The object of my research was to figure out what the chemicals might be," Kelly said. "I used a fairly new method called SPME to sample the gas above the parasites ,and I found a class of chemicals called terpenes that had been previously unidentified in the malaria parasite.

"We think they may be responsible for some of these behaviors; we have already been able to show that mosquitoes can smell the terpenes," she said.

"Because of my experience working in Dr. Odom's lab, I realized I wanted to do science as well as medicine," she said.

Kelly plans to continue her work in Odom’s lab in the coming year, and then to begin a dual MD/PhD degree program in 2014.

Stevens

Stevens conducted her thesis research in the lab of Bruce Carlson, PhD, assistant professor of biology.

Stevens

“When I came to Wash U,” Stevens said, “I intended to go to medical school to become a physician. My first work-study assignment, however, was fish care in the Carlson lab.

"I had never really thought about research before, but as I attended lab meetings and interacted with others in lab, I began to realize how much fun research is. With Dr. Carlson’s unending encouragement, I started my own research project as a sophomore and became increasingly involved, until I ultimately decided to apply to dual-degree MD/PhD graduate programs last year."

Stevens studied the evolution of weakly electric fish in Carlson’s lab, concluding that fish species invested in either complex electrosensory systems or large eyes with good visual acuity, but not both.

This trade-off implies that species generally cannot specialize in multiple sensory systems simultaneously, she said. That might explain, for example, why bats that rely on echolocation for hunting tend to have poor eyesight and why people who lose their sight sometimes develop more acute hearing.

She plans to start the Medical Scientist Training (MD/PhD) Program at Washington University School of Medicine in June and intends to conduct her graduate work in neuroscience.

Kelly and Stevens presented their research at the Spector Prize seminar April 29 in Rebstock Hall.

As part of the Department of Biology’s recognition of their outstanding work, Kelly and Stevens will be recognized at the Biology Honors and Research Emphasis Reception, at 3:30 p.m. May 15 in McDonnell Hall, Room 162.

Hatchery course helps fuel student start-up companies

Neil Schoenherr — 2012-04-26 00:00:00

St. Louis is becoming widely recognized as a hub for entrepreneurship. Students at Washington University in St. Louis are taking advantage of the close proximity to great resources by starting their own business ventures, with the help of a variety of on-campus clubs, competitions and a groundbreaking class.

Mary Butkus

Abby Cohen and Andrew Brimer, co-founders of Sparo Labs, pose with the Olin Cup after winning the top prize in this year's entrepreneurship competition.

The Hatchery, offered by Olin Business School but open to all students, both undergraduate and graduate, is one of the university’s capstone entrepreneurship courses.

It was one of the first business courses in the country to use multidisciplinary team collaboration, mentoring and coaching to support students as they launch enterprises while in college.

Enrolled students can work on their own social or commercial venture ideas or partner with community entrepreneurs to develop theirs.

“The Hatchery is fortunate to have the support of the St. Louis entrepreneurship community for the benefit of the students,” says Clifford Holekamp, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship and one of the course teachers.

“Students are connected with business consultants, subject matter experts and industry leaders to help develop their plans, and a judging panel of entrepreneurs and early-stage investors help evaluate the final results.”

The course is proving quite successful.

“Typically, more than 50 percent of student-initiated ideas are actually launched, an unusually high statistic that speaks to how extraordinarily entrepreneurial Washington University students are,” Holekamp says.

“The course is great because it is structured in a way that provides you with enough guidance that you don’t feel like you’re completely on your own, but enough freedom that you truly learn through experience,” says sophomore Arts & Sciences student Jolijt Tamanaha.

Tamanaha and a team of fellow undergraduates founded Farmplicity, which provides a path for local farm producers to sell fresh goods directly to St. Louis restaurants.

“Ken Harrington (managing director of the university’s Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and course instructor has put us in contact with so many amazing people, including many chefs and restaurateurs in St. Louis, who helped us flush out our concept,” Tamanaha says.

“At Washington University, our main goal is to have students experience the uncertainty that surrounds entrepreneurial activity,” Harrington says. “The Hatchery is one of several capstone courses where they learn to take action and have impact. Once this happens, they become ‘entrepreneurial’ for life.”

“I think the Hatchery is a fantastic course for those interested in entrepreneurship,” says senior Andrew Brimer, studying mechanical engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Brimer and Abby Cohen, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering, used the Hatchery to help hone their business, Sparo Labs. Their award-winning team, which includes students from Olin Business School, is developing a low-cost spirometer, a device that measures lung function. While most of these devices cost between $1,000 and $2,000, Sparo Labs is developing a model that will cost around $8.

“The course forces you to understand all the facets of a business venture and you never stop learning,” Brimer says. “The university is doing a great job promoting and encouraging entrepreneurship on all levels, from the ‘back of a napkin ideas’ that can be pitched at an IdeaBounce, to the Olin Cup or Discovery Competition that help foster more developed or mature projects into real companies with serious funding.”

“The Hatchery really helped us find mentors,” says senior Farmplicity team member Lauren Ortwein, majoring in marketing and operations and supply chain management at Olin Business School. “When you have a whole organization like the Skandarlaris Center helping connect you with local entrepreneurs, opportunity after opportunity presents itself to you when you put in the hard work.”

WUSTL Opera Workshop April 30 and May 2

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:49:56 CST

The cover of the first installment to Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, published in 1870. More than a century later, Dickens' unfinished novel would inspire a Tony Award-winning musical, excerpts from which will be performed Tuesday and Thursday, April 30 and May 2.

The “Pina Colada Song” guy wrote a musical?

Yes, he did, and a good one, too. In 1986, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Rupert Holmes — perhaps known for chart-topping story-songs like “Escape” and “Him” — was nominated for 11 Tony Awards. It won five, including the “triple crown” of best musical, best book and best score.

Next week, the Washington University Opera Workshop will present excerpts from Drood and five other works as part of Spring Scene Studies, its semester-end performance.

The event is free and open to the public and will take place at 8 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, April 30 and May 2, in the Ballroom Theater of the 560 Music Center.

The performance, which is presented in the round, will begin with excerpts from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) and Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1893). The latter will feature additional singers from the WUSTL Chamber Chorus.

Next will be scenes from Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello (1887) and two songs from The Fantasticks (1960) by Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones.

Concluding the program will be excerpts from Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave (1970) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which Holmes adapted from Charles Dickens’ final, uncompleted novel of the same title.

Musical direction is by senior lecturer Christine Armistead, with stage direction by lecturer Tim Ocel. Pianist will be Sandra Geary, teacher of applied music.

The performance is sponsored by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences. The 560 Music Center is located in University City at 560 Trinity Ave.

For more information, call (314) 935-5566 or email daniels@wustl.edu.

Graduate students recognize faculty mentors

2013-04-23 00:00:00

kevin lowder

The Graduate Student Senate at Washington University in St. Louis recognized eight faculty with Outstanding Faculty Mentor Awards during its 14th annual awards ceremony, held April 10 in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge. Five of the 2012-13 recipients are (from left) John M. Doris, PhD, professor of philosophy in Arts & Sciences; David Wang, PhD, associate professor of molecular microbiology and of pathology and immunology at the School of Medicine; David Balota, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences; Wendy Auslander, PhD, the Barbara A. Bailey Professor of Social Work at the Brown School; and Lynne Tatlock, PhD, the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences. Not pictured are Gammon Earhart, PhD, associate professor of physical therapy; Nathan M. Jensen, PhD, associate professor of political science in Arts & Sciences; and Erik Trinkaus, PhD, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor in Arts & Sciences. The awards are based on nominations by graduate students and designed to honor faculty members whose dedication to mentoring PhD students and commitment to excellence in graduate training have made a significant contribution to the quality of life and professional development of students in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Special recognition for excellence in mentoring went to six other faculty members at the ceremony. To see the list of faculty award winners, visit here.

Book idea gets boost from awards, faculty fellowship

Julie Kennedy — 2013-04-25 00:00:00

Messbarger

Rebecca Messbarger, PhD, has a great start to her next book. Not only did she win two awards for an article summarizing her book idea, but next fall she will have more time and resources to devote to writing, thanks to a faculty fellowship in the Center for the Humanities.

Messbarger, professor of Italian in Arts & Sciences, said winning the two awards was “a complete surprise” and she is grateful for the validation the prizes give her book project.

The article, “The Re-Birth of Venus in Florence’s Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History,” appeared in the Journal of the History of Collections in 2012. It won the James L. Clifford Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Percy G. Adams Prize, awarded by the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Messbarger also is grateful for the resources afforded her as a faculty fellow. She will be freed from teaching and administrative duties and provided an office in the Center for the Humanities.

“As a faculty fellow, among the most important resources I will have is the time to research and write,” said Messbarger, who is also a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies, in Arts & Sciences. “Having the mental space to think has always marked the difference for me between a scholarly project that is competent and one that moves vivaciously in new directions.”

She also looks forward to collaborating with other faculty fellows.

“I will have a community, a precious thing to me,” she said. “I am not a scholar who relishes solitary study or alone time with my computer. I need colleagues with whom I can discuss my work and hear about theirs.

“This collaborative exchange among fellows and graduate students is a central part of the program and an aspect of my semester there about which I am particularly excited.”

Messbarger’s major research interests center on Italian Enlightenment culture, in particular the place and purpose of women in civic, academic and social life, and the intersection of art and science in the production of anatomical wax models during the age.

Her new book will focus on the real and symbolic links and ruptures between a wax, life-size Anatomical Venus created in Enlightenment-era Florence and the Venus de Medici of the Renaissance. The wax Venus was on display in the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History, founded by Archduke of Tuscany Peter Leopold in 1775 “as a means to overthrow the regressive cultural authority of the Medici dynasty and launch a new era of Enlightenment.”

Messbarger was chosen to be a Center for the Humanities faculty fellow because her book project “is a fascinating and well-conceived project with wide-ranging appeal,” said Erin McGlothlin, PhD, interim director of the Center for the Humanities and associate professor of German in Arts & Sciences.

McGlothlin said the faculty fellows program provides research support for humanities scholars, who typically have fewer external opportunities for such support than their colleagues in nonhumanities fields.

“The goal of the program is to generate greater innovation in scholarship and teaching across disciplines in the humanities by providing fellowship for projects that involve interdisciplinary sharing and exchange,” she said.

McGlothlin can speak firsthand about the benefits of the fellowship. She was a member of the first class of Center for the Humanities faculty fellows in spring 2006.

“Not only did my faculty fellowship give me the time and resources critical for developing my research,” she said, “it also allowed me the opportunity to journey outside the confines of my home discipline and enter into a larger dialogue about the role of the humanities at Washington University in particular and in our contemporary culture more generally.”

To learn more about Messbarger’s research and previous publications, visit here.

Wǒmen (我们): Contemporary Chinese Art on display

2013-04-22 00:00:00

Hung Liu, Bonsai, 1992. Photolithograph from two plates on Rives BFK paper, 22 1/2 x 30". Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Gift of Island Press (formerly the Washington University School of Art Collaborative Print Workshop), 1993.

In 1978, the reformist politician Deng Xiaoping helped launch a series of new economic policies that together marked the beginning of China’s modern “Reform Era.”

And just as this period has witnessed the emergence of China as a major international power, so too has it seen the arrival of contemporary Chinese art on the global stage.

Such is the backdrop for Wǒmen (我们): Contemporary Chinese Art, now on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Curated by a trio of undergraduate students — Samantha Allen, Elizabeth Korb and Danielle Wu — the exhibition collects more than a dozen works by contemporary Chinese women artists, all created during this ongoing period of modernization and variously reflecting its hopes, illusions and realities.

The curators note that, though several artists engage with issues relating to gender politics, they generally resist the application of artistic labels, seeing themselves less as feminist artists than as individual practitioners who happen to be women.

This approach is encapsulated in the exhibition title: The Chinese character “wǒmen” (我们) can be read as “women” in English, but it literally translates more broadly to “us” in Chinese.

And indeed, the works on view span a wide variety of thematic territory, shedding light on issues that affect not only individuals but also the Chinese population as a whole. Topics range from the effects of rapid urbanization and the role of Chinese identity in a globalized society to the impact of sociocultural reforms on the fabric of everyday life.

http://youtu.be/RQEz_kQqSWk

Wǒmen (我们): Contemporary Chinese Art represents the inaugural exhibition of the Arthur Greenberg Curatorial Fellowship, a competitive program jointly sponsored by the Kemper Art Museum, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences. It remains on view through May 26 in the museum’s Teaching Gallery.

The Kemper Art Museum is located near the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards. Regular hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays; and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. The museum is closed Tuesdays.

For more information about the exhibition, call (314) 935-4523 or visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.

‘Be a sponge’ and other advice to help students succeed at summer internships

Steve Givens — 2013-04-23 00:00:00

As students begin to leave campus for the summer, many will head off to internships, hoping to add to their classroom experiences and enhance their future opportunities by immersing themselves in the real world of work.

It’s a great way to spend the summer, said Mark Smith, Washington University in St. Louis’ associate vice chancellor for students and director of the Career Center, but to get the most out of the experience, it’s imperative that students have a clear plan.

“An internship can be the start of a great career, a way to make some money, a way to find out what you really like — and don't like — a way to confirm and fulfill your passions,” Smith said. “But you need to have a plan and the people you work with and for need to know about it.”

Essentially, Smith said, it comes down to these questions: What do you want to know about yourself, the industry in which you are working, and the function you are performing? And what can you can learn by the end of the summer and incorporate into your career planning and course choices when you return?

Smith offers four tips that will help make a summer internship more meaningful and productive.

1. It’s essential to communicate upfront to your supervisors what kinds of experiences you want to have before the end of the internship.

“Don't assume that the people you are working with will automatically know what you want,” Smith said. “You need to communicate the learning experiences and exposure you'd like to get in this very short time frame. Don't let past interns determine your summer. Your needs and goals are unique to you. Be professional, be clear, and don't give up. Most everyone at your firm is inclined to want to see you have a positive experience. Let them know what that experience looks like from your perspective.”

2. Find informal ways to meet others within the organization.

“Grab some coffee with folks you don't work directly with,” Smith said. “Set up lunches every week with people who are interesting to you, outside of your area. People love to talk about their work and careers — their achievements, their challenges, where they want to go next, and what they would recommend to you. By doing these things you will stand out, build a network of associates, and most importantly, learn what you need to know about where you want to direct your career passions when you return to school.”

3. Set high expectations and make the most of the experience, especially in the first four weeks.

“Be a sponge,” Smith said. “Do more than expected. Contribute in ways outside of the scope of the role they gave you. It will open opportunities that they, and you, hadn't considered at the beginning of your program. If you don't do this at the start, and you wait for the internship to evolve, you won't optimize your learning experience.”

4. Keep a journal and ask yourself questions such as:

• Do I really like working for this size of an organization?
• Is this type of organization the best way to start off my career?
• Would I want to spend eight hours a day working with people who do this kind of work?
• Would I be happy starting my career in a rigid culture that pays well, but which doesn't offer me the personal independence I am used to?
• Is it critical to get a graduate degree to be promoted in this industry?
• Where do those around me get their personal and professional satisfaction?
• How do professionals in this organization keep up with all the new developments?
• How do you get promoted in this industry?
• Which are the best organizations in this industry? Why are they the best?

Smith emphasizes that upfront planning and hard work are the keys to a successful internship.

“Every summer thousands of interns realize, too late, what they could have experienced, if they only communicated at the beginning what they wanted, and given 110 percent from Day One,” he said.

Grains of sand from ancient supernova found in meteorites

2013-04-19 00:00:00

NASA/JPL-Caltech/O. Krause (Steward Observatory)

In 2007, NASA's Spitzer space telescope found the infrared signature of silica (sand) in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. The light from this exploding star first reached Earth in the 1600s. The greenish-blue dot just off center is all that remains of the star that exploded.

It’s a bit like learning the secrets of the family that lived in your house in the 1800s by examining dust particles they left behind in cracks in the floorboards.

By looking at specks of dust carried to Earth in meteorites, scientists are able to study stars that winked out of existence long before our solar system formed.

This technique for studying the stars – sometimes called astronomy in the lab — gives scientists information that cannot be obtained by the traditional techniques of astronomy, such as telescope observations or computer modeling.

Now scientists working at Washington University in St. Louis, with support from its McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences, have discovered two tiny grains of silica (SiO₂, the most common constituent of sand) in primitive meteorites. This discovery is surprising because silica is not one of the minerals expected to condense in stellar atmospheres — in fact, it has been called "a mythical condensate."

Five silica grains were found earlier, but, because of their isotopic compositions, they are thought to originate from AGB stars, red giants that puff up to enormous sizes at the end of their lives and are stripped of most of their mass by powerful stellar winds.

These two grains are thought to have come instead from a core-collapse supernova, a massive star that exploded at the end of its life.

Because the grains, which were found in meteorites from two different bodies of origin, have spookily similar isotopic compositions, the scientists speculate in the May 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, that they may have come from a single supernova, perhaps even the one whose explosion is thought to have triggered the formation of the solar system.

A summary of the paper also will appear in the Editors’ Choice compilation in the May 3 issue of Science magazine.

The first presolar grains are discovered
Until the 1960s, most scientists believed the early solar system got so hot that presolar material could not have survived.

But in 1987, scientists at the University of Chicago discovered miniscule diamonds in a primitive meteorite (ones that had not been heated and reworked). Since then, they’ve found grains of more than 10 other minerals in primitive meteorites.

Many of these discoveries were made at Washington University, home to Ernst Zinner, PhD, research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, who helped develop the instruments and techniques needed to study presolar grains (and the last author on the paper).

illustration Adapted from one by the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network

How small is small? Presolar silicates typically run 250 nanometers in diameter, slightly larger than a virus — and nowhere near visible. For a larger version of this diagram, click here.

The scientists can tell these grains came from ancient stars because they have highly unusual isotopic signatures. (Isotopes are different atoms of the same chemical element that have a slightly different mass.)

Different stars produce different proportions of isotopes. But the material from which our solar system was fashioned was mixed and homogenized before the solar system formed. So all of the planets and the sun have pretty much the same isotopic composition, known simply as “solar.”

Meteorites, most of which are pieces of asteroids, have the solar composition as well, but trapped deep within the primitive ones are pure samples of stars. The isotopic compositions of these presolar grains provide clues to the complex nuclear and convective processes operating within stars, which are poorly understood.

Even our nearby sun is still a mystery to us, much less more exotic stars that are incomprehensibly far away.

Some models of stellar evolution predict that silica could condense in the cooler outer atmospheres of stars, but others predict silicon would be completely consumed by the formation of magnesium- or iron-rich silicates, leaving none to form silica.

But in the absence of any evidence, few modelers even bothered to discuss the condensation of silica in stellar atmospheres. “We didn’t know which model was right and which was not, because the models had so many parameters,” said Pierre Haenecour, a graduate student in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, the first author on the paper.

The first silica grains are discovered
In 2009, Christine Floss, PhD, research professor of physics, and Frank Stadermann, PhD, since deceased, found the first silica grain in a meteorite. Their find was followed within the next few years by the discovery of four more grains.

All of these grains were enriched in oxygen-17 relative to solar. “This meant they had probably come from red giant or AGB stars,” Floss said.

When Haenecour began his graduate study with Floss, she had him look at a primitive meteorite that had been picked up in Antarctica by a U.S. team. Antarctica is prime meteorite-hunting territory because the dark rocks show up clearly against the white snow and ice.

MANAVI JADHAV

Haenecour with the NanoSIMS 50 ion microprobe he used to look for presolar grains in a primitive meteorite. The silica grain he found is too small to be seen with the unaided eye, but the microprobe can magnify it 20,000 times, to about the size of a chocolate chip.

Haenecour found 138 presolar grains in the meteorite slice he examined and, to his delight, one of them was a silica grain. But this one was enriched in oxygen-18, which meant it came from a core-collapse supernova, not a red giant.

He knew that another graduate student in the lab had found a silica grain rich in oxygen-18. Xuchao Zhao, now a scientist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing, found his grain in a meteorite picked up in Antarctica by the Chinese Antarctic Research Expedition.

With two specks to go on, Haenecour tackled the difficult problem of calculating how a supernova might have produced silica grains. Before it explodes, a supernova is like a giant onion, made up of concentric layers dominated by different elements.

Wikimedia Commons

A massive star that will explode at the end of its life, a core-collapse supernova has a layered structure rather like that of an onion.

Some theoretical models predicted that silica might be produced in massive oxygen-rich layers near the core of the supernova. But if silica grains could condense there, Haenecour and his colleagues thought, they should be enriched in oxygen-16, not oxygen-18.

They found they could reproduce the oxygen-18 enrichment of the two grains by mixing small amounts of material from the oxygen-rich inner zones and the oxygen-18-rich helium/carbon zone with large amounts of material from the hydrogen envelope of the supernova.

In fact, Haenecour said, the mixing needed to produce the composition of the two grains was so similar that the grains might well come from the same supernova. Could it have been the supernova whose explosion is thought to have kick-started the collapse of the molecular cloud out of which the planets of the solar system formed?

How strange to think that two tiny grains of sand could be the humble bearers of such momentous tidings from so long ago and so far away.

Newly established McLeod Writing Prize awarded to first freshmen

Kelly Wiese Niemeyer — 2013-04-22 00:00:00

The first Dean James E. McLeod Freshman Writing Prize has been awarded, and the inaugural winners are Senit Kidane and Claudia Vaughan.

McLeod was a longtime leader at Washington University in St. Louis, serving as vice chancellor for students and dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, the university’s largest undergraduate program, when he died in 2011 after a two-year battle with cancer.

The Center for the Humanities provided funding for the contest in McLeod’s honor, and any freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences could submit work for consideration. Original research papers exploring an aspect of race, gender or identity and created for a freshman course were eligible.

Kevin Lowder

Clara McLeod, left, widow of Dean McLeod and an earth and planetary sciences librarian, visits with Senit Kidane, a winner of the Dean James E. McLeod Freshman Writing Prize. The Center for the Humanities and the College of Arts & Sciences held a ceremony April 9, during which leaders announced the first winners of the writing prize.

The winning entries were:

1) “Not Your Ordinary Schoolyard Hustle: Black Women in the Underground Economies of the 1920s,” by Kidane, for her class “African-American Women’s History: Sexuality, Violence and the Love of Hip-Hop.” The paper explores black women’s roles in the aftermath of World War I and their involvement in the complex illegal economies of the time, being active, and sometimes leaders, in prostitution and bootlegging operations, for example. Kidane is majoring in anthropology and in African and African-American studies.

Kevin Lowder

Claudia Vaughan, left, the other winner of this year's McLeod Freshman Writing Prize, shows her certificate to Erin McGlothlin, PhD, interim director of the Center for the Humanities and associate professor of German.

2) “Call Me You Need Me,” by Vaughan, a film and media studies major, for her Writing 1 class. The paper is a memoir of Vaughan’s Chinese immigrant grandfather’s journey to and experience in the United States.

Sowande’ Mustakeem, PhD, assistant professor in history and in the African and African-American Studies program, both in Arts & Sciences, created the writing contest. The center provides prize money and the College of Arts & Sciences offers administrative support, an example of the creative initiatives that are possible when faculty and administrators work in collaboration to support students.

Mustakeem, academic coordinator of the writing prize, said she had planned to approach McLeod about creating a writing contest exclusively for freshmen because in other competitions on campus, their work often was compared to juniors and seniors more versed in the research and writing process. After McLeod died, it became a logical way to honor his life and his concern for students and the value of an education, she said.

“It’s helping to extend Dean McLeod’s legacy,” she said. “This is an opportunity for freshmen to see themselves as scholars in the making.”

A committee reviewed and narrowed the entries — 23 in all were submitted in the contest’s first year — and selected finalists for the inaugural awards. The two winners learned of their success at a ceremony in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge April 9. They received $250, a framed certificate and the opportunity to have their work published through the Center for the Humanities.

Upon McLeod’s death, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton remembered the man as one of WUSTL’s “greatest citizens and leaders.” McLeod first joined the university in 1974 as an assistant professor of German and held several administrative positions throughout the years.

Provost Edward S. Macias, PhD, and several others made remarks at the writing prize ceremony.

The long-term goal of the writing prize is to encourage students to begin conducting research early in their undergraduate careers. It likewise will help faculty identify and nurture incoming students who show the potential to become strong researchers in the humanities and social sciences.

“It’s so exciting. Dean McLeod would be proud,” Mustakeem said. “Here’s an opportunity to say to students, ‘You matter. And look how you’re contributing to intellectual knowledge.’”

Steinberg wins 2013 Sowden Prize

2013-04-18 00:00:00

Steinberg

Lindsey Steinberg has been selected to receive the 2013 Sowden Prize, given each year by the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences.

The Sowden Prize is the highest honor the department bestows on a graduating senior chemistry major.

The prize is named in honor of the late John C. Sowden, a professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences. A carbohydrate chemist, Sowden collaborated with the nuclear chemists and radiochemists at Washington University in St. Louis to create radio-labeled carbohydrates that helped to reveal the mechanisms of carbohydrate reactions.

Sowden was a WUSTL faculty member for 16 years and chair of the chemistry department from 1956 to 1963, helping the university earn a reputation as one of the world’s leaders in research excellence.

The award memorial fund was established by his family, friends and colleagues after his death in 1963.

Richard A. Loomis, Steinberg’s adviser and an associate professor of chemistry, first met her in a physical sciences pre-freshman orientation program. “From day one, she was clearly driven to succeed in a career in science,” he said.

Loomis said that Steinberg, as a sophomore, took on a complicated set of experiments to optimize the properties of semiconductor quantum wires. He said she made great strides in less than a year and that her research findings will be part of at least three academic publications.

Steinberg, a Merit Scholar, who is minoring in physics and has a 3.99 GPA, plans to pursue an academic career to “contribute both to innovative research and the education of others.”

Among her extracurricular activities, Steinberg has worked as a Peer-Led Team Learning leader for general chemistry students since her sophomore year. This semester, she will receive an Outstanding Peer Leader award.

She also has been a teaching assistant for organic chemistry and for physical chemistry, and a volunteer with Catalysts for Change, a program to introduce female high school students to opportunities available in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

Last year, she won a $10,000 Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, a foundation established in 1984 by surviving members of America’s original Mercury Seven astronauts to provide scholarships for college students who exhibit motivation, imagination and exceptional performance in the science or engineering field of their major.

The Astronaut Scholarship is the largest monetary award given in the United States to STEM undergraduate college students based solely on merit.

After graduation, Steinberg plans to attend the Washington University Medical Scientist Training Program in pursuit of an MD/PhD.

Encouraging literacy: Education students donate more than 350 books to local grade school

2013-04-19 00:00:00

For the fifth year in a row, the Washington University in St. Louis members of Kappa Delta Pi (KDP), the international honor society in education, led a service project that focuses on literacy and benefits local grade-schoolers.

Pre-K through sixth-grade students and their teachers at Cool Valley Elementary School in the Ferguson-Florissant School District were the lucky recipients of more than 350 books donated by KDP members.

The eleven KDP members, both undergraduate and graduate students in WUSTL’s Department of Education in Arts & Sciences, held fundraisers and wrote successful grants to the Women’s Society of Washington University and the education department to help pay for the books, which they delivered to the school April 12.

Each Cool Valley student received a book, which they selected in advance, along with a personalized bookmark. Each of the school’s 18 teachers received a basket of five books for their classrooms.

“This project is such a wonderful opportunity to boost literacy in the homes of our students,” said Suzette Simms, Cool Valley principal. “For the Washington University students to choose our school for this service project and to choose books that our students are interested in reading is awesome.”

all photos by Sid Hastings

Allison Laird, an Arts & Sciences junior majoring in education and president of KDP, reads “Leah's Pony” to third-graders at Cool Valley Elementary. In addition to delivering books to the school, the WUSTL education students also delivered a lesson as part of their service project, titled “On the Move: Encouraging Literacy.”

Eileen Lai, a senior majoring in education, watches as kindergartners balance bean bags on their heads as part of Lai’s lesson on the timeless classic “Caps for Sale” about a cap salesman who wears his entire stock of caps on his head.

Laird receives appreciative hugs from third-graders at Cool Valley Elementary School after she and her fellow KDP honor society members hand-delivered books to the students. WUSTL's KDP chapter members have purchased and donated close to 2,000 books to area school children in the past five years.

Symposium: Finding humanity in advanced dementia, April 27

2013-04-17 00:00:00

Rebecca L. BarNard

A Polaroid self-portrait hand-reworked by Rebecca L. Barnard, an artist, eerily foreshadows her oncoming illness, diagnosed 14 years later.

The Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program of Washington University in St Louis will host a symposium “Finding Humanity in Advanced Dementia” Saturday, April 27.

In this symposium, experts in the fields of patient care, psychology, philosophy, medicine, neuroscience, and a family caregiver discuss the effect of severe cognitive loss on people with dementia and those who care for them and seek to discover ways to honor the dignity of individuals coping with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

Greg ruffing/redux

In December 2007, Richard Rubin and his wife, Beck (pictured above), already diagnosed with early-onset dementia, attended a lecture on “Cognitive Loss and Ethics” in Baltimore.

The young speaker asked whether a woman, faithful to her husband all her life, who started an affair in her nursing home, should be stopped. “Should you honor the wishes of a person in the early stages of dementia after she ceases to be a person,” the speaker asked.

Beck whispered to Richard, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” and left the room.

A year later, Richard was struggling to keep Beck at home despite progressing dementia. In a moment of desperation, he tried to force her to take anti-psychotic medication. She backed away from him and slammed her head into the wall phone, which crashed to floor. Holding her head, she wailed, “Oh, Sweetie. Oh, Sweetie, I'm just a person! I'm just a person.”  

Richard Rubin will be the first speaker in the symposium “Finding Humanity in Advanced Dementia.”

The symposium will begin with a personal perspective presented by Richard M. Rubin, PhD, a lecturer in philosophy in University College (see sidebar).

Peggy Szwabo, PhD, a mental health consultant, then will discuss dementia caregiving from a clinical perspective.

She will be followed by Jason Karlawish, MD, professor of medicine, medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and by Agnieszka Jaworska, PhD, associate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Riverside.

John C. Morris, MD, the Harvey A. and Dorismae Hacker Friedman Distinguished Professor of Neurology and director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, and Marcus E. Raichle, MD, professor of radiology, neurology, neurobiology and biomedical engineering, both at Washington University in St. Louis, will discuss biological aspects of dementia, and Raichle will present a case history from his own family.

All of the speakers, together with Rebecca Dresser, JD, the Daniel Noyes Professor of Law and professor of ethics in medicine at WUSTL, will take part in a panel discussion, and Carl Craver, PhD, professor of philosophy in Arts & Sciences at WUSTL, will deliver concluding remarks.

The symposium, which runs from 1 to 7:30 p.m. in Wilson Hall, Room 214, on the university’s Danforth Campus, is free and open to the public. Seating is limited, so pre-registration is enouraged. To register, email: wustldementiasymposium@gmail.com.

Futher details and additional resources for people struggling with dementia can be found at: https://pages.wustl.edu/dementiasymposium.

Summer Writers Institute now even more convenient for working professionals

Julie Kennedy — 2013-04-19 00:00:00

The 18th annual Summer Writers Institute will be held in July at Washington University in St. Louis, giving writers of varying experience levels the opportunity to join a diverse and energetic writing community.

Working in one of four literary genres, institute participants will produce and refine their own work in small workshops, enjoy readings and craft talks, and receive personalized guidance and feedback from professional, published writers.

Last year, the Summer Writers Institute changed its format from intensive daytime sessions to an evening and weekend schedule. The format has been tweaked again this year to make it even more convenient for working professionals.

The changes were made because participants asked for a “little more breathing room” in the schedule, said Pat Matthews, associate dean of University College in Arts & Sciences and director of Summer School.

Evening sessions this year will meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday instead of Monday through Friday. Also, the weekend sessions will be afternoons only instead of daylong seminars. The institute begins July 12 and runs through July 26.

“I had not been able to participate in the institute until last year, when the evening and weekend format better fit my schedule,” said Colleen Corbett, programs manager in Student Technology Services. “What is especially valuable about the institute is that by the end of the program, most of us writers had at least one polished piece that held high potential for publication.”

Corbett took the creative nonfiction workshop last year, which is offered again this year along with poetry, fiction and flash fiction.

“I had a wonderful experience and have recommended the institute to friends and colleagues,” said Nancy Berg, PhD, professor of modern Hebrew language and literature and of comparative literature, both in Arts & Sciences. “I continue to benefit from the workshop in both my writing and teaching.”

The focused format sparks an intense creative experience for the participants.

“One thing I like about this condensed two-week format is the pressure it applies to the experience,” said David Schuman, one of the institute’s instructors. “Pressure isn’t always considered such a great motivator, but in this case you’ve got a group of people, all hungry for experience, with a feast in front of them — readings, lectures, panels and workshops. There’s a sense of urgency that often influences rapid growth. I’ve seen students take leaps I wouldn’t have expected. Synapses are rapid-firing, pens are flying, words are filling the air. Everything a growing writer needs.

“What excites me about the institute is the close-knit group of writers that blooms during the short span of the session,” said Schuman, a lecturer in the Department of English, in Arts & Sciences. “It’s almost like watching a photograph develop — things are fuzzy at first, you’re interested in what’s going to happen, and then at the end an image has crystallized.”

The four genres:

Fiction, taught by Colin Bassett, lecturer in the Department of English. This workshop discusses the writing process and ways to make a story detailed and vivid while also keeping it moving forward. Close attention will be paid to the rhythm and texture of language. Bassett’s story "This Is So We Don't Start Fighting" was listed as a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories. His writing has been awarded the Carrie S. Galt Prize in Fiction and received an honorable mention from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Intro Journals Project.

Flash Fiction, taught by Schuman. Borrowing strategies from the novel, short stories, prose poems, haiku and other short forms (fables, folktales, pop songs), students boil stories down to their essence. Schuman won a Pushcart Prize in 2007, and his story "Stay" was listed as one of 100 distinguished stories in The Best American Short Stories.

Creative Nonfiction: Personal Narrative, taught by Kathleen Finneran, writer in residence in the Department of English and author of the memoir The Tender Land: A Family Love Story. This workshop focuses on creating works of literature using personal life as subject matter. Finneran is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Poetry, taught by Kent Shaw, assistant professor of English at West Virginia State University. Writers will focus on each other’s poetry to refine the voice and imagery. Shaw’s first book, Calenture, was published in 2008. His poems have appeared in The Believer, Boston Review and many other publications.

All courses are offered through University College. Tuition is $1,830. Each workshop is worth 3 units; no application is required.

For more information and to register, visit here.

Gerald Early gets star on St. Louis Walk of Fame

2013-04-16 00:00:00

Washington University Professor Gerald L. Early, PhD, an internationally renowned essayist and American culture critic, was recognized with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame during an April 11 induction ceremony in front of the Moonrise Hotel on Delmar Boulevard in The Loop.

The St. Louis Walk of Fame consists of more than 130 sets of brass stars and bronze plaques honoring individuals from the St. Louis area who have made major national contributions to America’s cultural heritage.

Joe Edwards, founder of the St. Louis Walk of Fame and owner of numerous Loop businesses, including the Moonrise and Blueberry Hill, noted that Early was joining other WUSTL literary luminaries on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

“It’s nothing short of phenomenal how many people in the St. Louis Walk of Fame have some connection to Washington University,” he said. “Either they attended, they taught or have done research there.”

All Photos by Whitney Curtis

Gerald L. Early, PhD (left), receives a plaque from Joe Edwards marking Early’s induction into the St. Louis Walk of Fame during an April 11 ceremony in front of the Moonrise Hotel on Delmar Boulevard in The Loop.

In his induction speech, Early talked about lessons he learned while growing up in a tight, working-class neighborhood in South Philadelphia. Among the people he thanked was his mother, who was in the audience. “My mother, a widow during my childhood and adolescence, provided me with a wonderful childhood and gave me a set of tough, realistic values by which to measure and criticize life.” To read his talk from the ceremony, visit here.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton, who spoke during the ceremony, congratulates Early. In his remarks, Wrighton said that he normally does not celebrate failure, but noted one time early in his career that he was thankful for not succeeding. That was when Wrighton was provost at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he tried wooing Early from WUSTL to MIT.

Colleagues, friends and family — including his mother, sister and cousin from Philadelphia and in-laws from Dallas — attended Gerald Early's St. Louis Walk of Fame induction ceremony. Early, a professor of English, of African and African-American studies, and of American culture studies, all in Arts & Sciences, recently stepped down as director of the Center for the Humanities after more than 11 years in that position. The center and African and African-American studies hosted a reception for Early later in the day in the Women's Building Lounge.

Jacoby wins Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to experimental psychology

2013-04-16 00:00:00

The Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP) has awarded its 2013 Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award to Larry L. Jacoby, PhD, an internationally recognized scholar of human memory and a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Jacoby

Citing “ his imaginative investigations of unconscious influences on memory, the nature of memory attributions and the effects of cognitive aging on memory,” the society presented Jacoby with the award at its annual banquet March 30 at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

Founded in 1904, the society is an honorary elected group of about 200 psychologists. The Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award is given to senior individuals with outstanding records of sustained contribution to experimental psychology.

“Dr. Jacoby is hugely deserving of receiving this honor,” said SEP secretary-treasurer Robert Nosofsky. “For decades, he has made extraordinarily creative, insightful and significant contributions to the study of memory and to the distinction between consciously controlled and automatic cognitive processes.

“Among his numerous major contributions involves his insight that individual cognitive tasks do not provide pure measures of single processes. Through ingenious experimental and modeling techniques, Jacoby has enormously advanced our ability to measure the joint roles of consciously controlled and automatic processes in varieties of task performance. The applications of his ideas are extremely far reaching, allowing researchers to better understand age-related differences in memory, fundamental issues in the domain of social psychology, and a variety of intriguing memory illusions.”

Jacoby earned his doctoral degree in psychology from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 1970 and took his first faculty job at Iowa State University. In 1975, he moved to McMaster University in Canada, where he would remain for much of the next 25 years. He joined Washington University as a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences in 2000.

In a career spanning four decades, he has made numerous influential contributions to both cognitive and social psychology, especially in the areas of human memory and cognitive aging.

In the 1970s, Jacoby worked on topics of transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory and on the levels of processing approach to memory. Both these topics were at the cutting edge of research in the 1970s, and he made significant contributions to them. In the 1980s, he turned his attention to an emerging field that came to be called implicit or indirect measures of memory.

One of the main starting points of this revolution in the study of memory came from a 1981 paper that Jacoby co-published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, which showed, for the first time, that variables that have huge effects on standard explicit measures of memory such as recognition have either no effect or an opposite effect on implicit measures of memory – in this case, a word identification test.

Jacoby and colleagues published many other impressive investigations on this topic, including pioneering studies of “memory attributions” that examined the influences of implicit forms of memory and how they could occasionally intrude into conscious decisions, and vice versa. For example, his work on the false fame effect or “becoming famous overnight” showed that when people are exposed repeatedly to a nonfamous name, such as Sebastian Weisdorf, and then time passes so that they no longer explicitly recollect having seen the name, they would later judge the name as being famous.

In 1991, Jacoby made one of his most important contributions when he published a paper on the ingenious process dissociation procedure, which permits separate estimates of the contributions of controlled and automatic processes in a variety of tasks, and has had a huge influence on research in several fields of psychology. The paper has been cited more than 2,500 times.

Around this time, Jacoby also initiated his studies of cognitive aging, which during the past two decades have used a number of novel techniques he developed to illuminate the interplay between conscious and nonconscious memory processes in older adults, including demonstrating that older adults are particularly susceptible to false fame effects as well as other memory errors and illusions.

At Washington University, Jacoby directs the Aging, Memory and Cognitive Control Lab in the Department of Psychology. Research in the lab focuses on questions related to cognitive control and to subjective experience, especially the distinction between consciously controlled and automatic processes. Other research investigates age-related differences in memory and perception, memory illusions and cognitive factors influencing learning and education.

Gerald Early's St. Louis Walk of Fame induction ceremony talk

2013-04-16 00:00:00

Gerald L. Early, PhD, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, delivered the following address during his induction ceremony into the St. Louis Walk of Fame April 11 on Delmar Boulevard in The Loop.

Also speaking during the ceremony was Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and Joe Edwards, founder of the St. Louis Walk of Fame and owner of numerous Loop businesses, including Blueberry Hill and the Moonrise Hotel, where the ceremony took place.

St. Louis Walk of Fame induction ceremony talk by Gerald Early

It is difficult to give an appropriate response to receiving an honor like this. To say that you don’t deserve it assails the judgment of the people who chose you for it. To say that you deserve it is an admission that you don’t know how to judge yourself objectively. So, as with any gift, it is best simply to accept it with gratitude.

I wish to thank Joe Edwards for establishing the Walk of Fame and for his kindness. Of course, I thank all the people who voted for me to have this plaque. It would not have been possible for me to have won this award without the support of Washington University, which has been so central to my career. I am indebted to the leadership there, Chancellors Danforth and Wrighton and to the various deans of Arts and Sciences who helped me.

I am exceedingly grateful to various colleagues and friends in the English department, in African and African-American Studies, at the Center for the Humanities, and in other departments and schools around the university for what they have done for me. I have the pleasure of working with many fine, very smart, and honorable people. I’ve learned a great deal from my peers.

I regret that the late Jim McLeod is not here today. He was very important to my development during his years as director of the African and African-American Studies Program. He would have been pleased to see me get this sort of recognition. He always believed in my possibilities.

I serve on the boards of several nonprofits in St. Louis and I am grateful to them for permitting me the opportunity to work with them in fulfilling their missions. To do such work is a privilege.

In particular, I wish to thank Bob Archibald, former president of the Missouri History Museum, for permitting me to do two major projects: the Miles Davis exhibit and the Seeking St. Louis writers project, which resulted in two of my most important books, Miles Davis and American Culture and Ain’t But A Place: African American Writings about St. Louis. I am proud of these books and humbled that Bob thought I had the skill to do them.

I owe much to my family, my daughters Rosalind and Linnet, who have grown up to be such mature, responsible adults, my son-in-law, Stan, a good father, husband, and scholar, and my grandsons William and Stanley.

If anyone deserves a plaque like this, it is my wife, Ida, for all her civic work, for her path- breaking leadership of the Junior League, for all the difference that she has made at Washington University, and for her devotion to St. Louis’s nonprofit world. She has always been my model citizen. I wish I had half her zeal and commitment, half her moral clarity and common sense sympathy.

I am so very glad that my mother, my sister, and my cousin are here from Philadelphia for this occasion. My mother, a widow during my childhood and adolescence, provided me with a wonderful childhood and gave me a set of tough, realistic values by which to measure and criticize life. My sister introduced me to books and music. I was the only kid in my neighborhood who had a sister who read to him stories by Charles Dickens and played for him records by Nina Simone, Phil Ochs, Miriam Makeba, and Odetta. And my cousin was with me when I first became a published writer while I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania.

I am pleased as well that my in-laws from Dallas, Texas, are here: My mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my niece-in-law. They are all such good and generous people who have been so supportive of me over the years. I am honored that they took the time to be here today.

It is clear that many can make a claim to a small piece of this plaque. No one does anything solely through his or her own efforts. No one is his or her own invention. We are rather cobbled together piecemeal by a network of unexpected influences. These influences do not even sort themselves out in the end as good or bad but rather as those we need, those we like, those we think we understand, and those we crave to exorcise but can’t.

I grew up in what today might be called an inner-city neighborhood in South Philadelphia that was made up of African Americans and Italian Americans almost in equal number. The adults were all working class and, no matter their race, they were all conservative people.

Mine was the generation of the Baby Boomers and our parents went through their childhood and teen years during the Depression and World War II. It was those years that formulated their conservative views, their belief in the power of the Christian church, in the necessity of school, the sanctity of marriage, the shame of teen pregnancy, the need for a man to earn enough to support a wife and children, the need for a woman to be a good mother and housewife and to keep an eye on the neighborhood during the day, the wonders of home ownership.

They believed that too much egalitarianism was a form of decadence, and harbored great suspicions of a new trend afoot called credit cards. I was taught it was horrible to borrow money but lots of adults then were buying on the “e-z” installment plan and borrowing from credit unions. Nearly everyone smoked including many of us kids. Everyone was on the lookout for a buck and a little luck, so everyone, black and white, played the illegal lottery. And nearly everyone, black and white, went to the nearby Catholic elementary school every week to play bingo.

Several of the black women in the neighborhood cleaned the homes of some of the white women; and many black teens worked in the small shops owned by the Italians and the Jews. Many of the blacks in the neighborhood lived in housing projects; none of the whites did. There was an overt racial hierarchy and we had our share of racial conflict. But surprisingly people got on with one another reasonably well.

Everyone in the neighborhood believed in unions and voted for Democratic Party every election because everyone could count on Democrat politicians like Rep. Bill Barrett to do favors for you like getting your kid out of jail without paying bail if he had been arrested on a misdemeanor or getting your driver’s license back after it had been suspended for drunk driving, or helping your kid get out of the army without being dishonorably discharged or helping your kid get into the police academy or something like that.

Our politics was the ideology of patronage. This working class conservatism had severe shortcomings as it was partly built on intolerance, superstition, political corruption, and prideful ignorance but there was much about this community’s conservatism that made my childhood stable and warm and rich in the gifts of ordinary life, even if it was narrow in its exposure and unenlightened about the wider world. I am what this neighborhood made me.

A few years ago I took my daughter Rosalind on a walking tour of this neighborhood. She was surprised by how modest it was, despite a few touches of gentrification. She was even more surprised when we ran into people, black and white, who knew me, had grown up with me, and remembered me despite the fact that I had not lived there for over 35 years and had not seen these people in years.

She was surprised as well that I was held in such esteem by them. “I was lucky. The people in this neighborhood always believed in my possibilities,” I said to her.

When we arrived at an old ball field, I told her a story of how I used to play baseball for my elementary school team, how bad I was as a player then, and how the kids and the gym teacher made me a catcher, a position nobody wanted to play. I was afraid of the ball, afraid of being hit by the bat when I was catching, afraid of striking out when I was batting, which I always did. The opposition called me the automatic out, the clown, hole in the glove, and the weakling.

One day I was really struggling, making errors and striking out, and I was getting razed by both the opposing team and my own teammates who yelled at me “Why the hell can’t you hit anything?” So, finally, I simply sat down on the bench, started to cry, and refused to play anymore. I was tired of being humiliated.

The gym teacher was furious with me and told me I wouldn’t amount to much of a man if I couldn’t take adversity, if I couldn’t take some hazing. Look at what Jackie Robinson had to take, he said. That odd appeal to racial pride might have worked but I was only 10 years old and was convinced in my child’s mind that Jackie Robinson could not have suffered nearly as much as I had.

The opposition really gave it to me and called me a sissy, a crybaby, and the like. But my teammates did not raze me or even get mad, they came over and earnestly talked me back into playing. They told me not to let them down and we had to stick together as a team. As bad as I was, they still wanted me.

My best friend, Benny, handed me the catcher’s mask and mitt and said, “God hates a coward.” He grew up to become a preacher and was always a devout kid. So I went back into the game. In the last inning of that game, we were ahead by one run. The opposition had a runner on first with two outs and the batter hits a ball into the gap. The kid on first was tearing around the bases. Amazingly, we made absolutely perfect relays and I got the ball just as this husky kid came barreling toward the plate and he ran right over me, flattened me completely. I actually saw stars. That’s how hard he hit me.

Rosalind thought the story had a sad ending. She thought the opposition won.

Oh no, I told her. The kid was out. I tagged him and held on to the ball. It didn’t matter that he knocked me into the middle of next week. We won the game and I was a hero.

I told her that I learned everything from that game. First, I learned that while I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be, I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was. And that I didn’t need to be better than everyone else. I only needed to be the best at the crucial moment when it counted most.

Second, the only way to stop being embarrassed and humiliated was to get better. There is a certain kernel of cruelty in all learning. Third, from time to time, you need someone who believes in your possibilities to tell you to trust your stuff, as they say in baseball, because God does indeed hate a coward.

Rosalind thought it was a good story. She understood the neighborhood was more than she thought it was, it had more to offer than was apparent on its surface.

I also learned one other thing, I told her. Long before Tom Hanks said it in a movie, I learned that there is no crying in baseball.

Prestigious recognition from French government

2013-04-12 00:00:00

KeVin Lowder

Alumna Anna DiPalma Amelung, PhD, a facilitator at the Lifelong Learning Institute (LLI) at Washington University in St. Louis, was inducted as a Chevalier dans L'Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Knight in the Order of Academic Palms) for outstanding contributions to the development of French culture and language. Jean-Francois Rochard, the attache cultural adjoint consulate general of France in Chicago, presented Amelung with a medallion on behalf of the French government during a March 22 ceremony and reception at the West Campus Conference Center. Amelung, who has facilitated 16 courses at the Lifelong Learning Institute over the past three years, gave a lecture titled "In Praise of Franco-American Friendship: Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas" during the event. Amelung earned a PhD in French from WUSTL in 1980. The Ordre des Palmes Académiques is the oldest non-military decoration in France, founded by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1808 to honor educators. LLI is a community outreach education program sponsored by University College in Arts & Sciences that offers a variety of non-credit academic courses for senior adults. A teacher of French and Latin for 45 years in Europe and the United States, Amelung refers to LLI students as "the most exciting and rewarding student body one can only dream of."

Moore installed as John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics

2013-04-12 00:00:00

Mary butkus

Penelope and John Biggs visit with Timothy J. Moore, PhD, right, at a ceremony celebrating Moore's installation as the inaugural John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics in Arts & Sciences.

Timothy J. Moore, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Classics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was installed as the inaugural John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics.

The professorship was established in 2002 with generous gifts from distinguished Washington University alumni John and Penelope Biggs. The Biggses were among the special guests who attended the ceremony last November where Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton presented Moore with a university medallion to celebrate the occasion.

“Our students and the Washington University community will benefit tremendously from John and Penelope’s steadfast support of the classics. I am extraordinarily grateful to them for establishing this distinguished professorship,” Wrighton said. “Endowed professorships constitute a direct investment in academic excellence as exemplified by the inaugural holder of the Biggs Distinguished Professorship, Professor Timothy J. Moore.”

Moore joined Washington University in July 2012 from the University of Texas at Austin, where he had served as a professor of classics since 1991 and chair of the Department of Classics from 2002-04. From 1986-1991, he was an assistant professor at Texas A&M University and then spent a year as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard University.

He earned a doctoral degree in classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1986 and a bachelor’s degree in Latin and history, summa cum laude, from Millersville University in 1981.

Moore’s work focuses on classical antiquity, including the comic theater of Greece and Rome, Greek and Roman music and Roman historiography.

His current projects include articles on the music in two plays of the Roman comic playwright Terence and a long-range project on the influence on the modern world of the Roman historian Livy. His interests also include the history of theater, especially American musical theater and Japanese Kyogen comedy. In the fall, he plans to teach a course on ancient Greek and Roman music – a first for WUSTL.

Moore’s speech at the installation ceremony, “Building Bridges in Classical Studies,” touched on a theme dear to him: bringing together different skills and academic disciplines to study classics.

One of Moore’s goals is to create a doctoral degree in classics, working with other departments like history, performing arts and philosophy, for example.

Moore said it’s important to study classic Greek and Roman culture because they have a strong influence on the modern world, in everything from the calendar we use to the design of buildings.

“Studying ancient Greeks and Romans is in some ways like studying ourselves,” he said. But at the same time, he said, such study also allows for an appreciation of diversity because elements of that world were much different from our own.

Cambridge University Press published his most recent book, Music in Roman Comedy, in 2012. Moore’s other books are Roman Theatre (also from Cambridge University Press, 2012); The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience (University of Texas Press, 1998); and Artistry and Ideology: Livy’s Vocabulary of Virtue (Athenäum Press, 1989).

He also has written numerous articles and book chapters and received various awards, including a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Fellowship in 2011, a Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome and a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship.

Moore, who has organized various scholarly events, most recently served as co-director of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College Teachers: “Roman Comedy in Performance” in 2012.

George Pepe, PhD, former department chair and also a professor of classics, said Moore brings the right skills and is a welcome addition.

“We were extremely fortunate to lure Tim away from University of Texas. He’s a very distinguished scholar in Latin literature and a first-rate teacher,” Pepe said. “He brings with him the right blend of scholarship and administrative experience to lead the department successfully.”

About John and Penelope Biggs

Both John and Penelope Biggs are longtime friends of the university, alumni of Arts & Sciences with a dedication to keeping the classics alive.

For more than 20 years, WUSTL has benefited from a residency in the classics department created by the Biggses, whereby a prominent scholar in Greek or Latin studies visits the university for a week to teach and promote an area of the classics. In 2002, the couple made a commitment to establish the John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professorship in Classics. They also have established a distinguished professorship in economics.

Native St. Louisan John Biggs is an eminent economist with a lifelong interest in advancing education. He earned a bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard, and his first job was with General American Life Insurance Co., where he ascended through the ranks. He also served as vice chancellor for finance and administration at WUSTL from 1977-1985, when he became president and chief executive officer of Centerre Trust Inc.

During his tenure at Washington University, he earned a doctorate in economics and taught classes in the department.

He later served as chief executive officer of investment company TIAA-CREF, and led the company until retiring in 2002.

Since his retirement, Biggs has remained active in corporate, community and professional associations.

Penelope Biggs graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in classics from Radcliffe College, where she first met John while he was a student at Harvard.

She earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in comparative literature from Washington University in 1968 and 1974, respectively. She joined the faculty of Lindenwood College (now University) as an assistant professor of literature.

Later, she taught Latin at the high school now known as Mary Institute Country Day School. Her writings on classical and post-classical literature have been published in scholarly journals.

John and Penelope Biggs are members of Washington University’s Danforth Circle Chancellor’s Level and life members of the Danforth Circle Dean’s Level. Together, they received the Robert S. Brookings Award in 2009.

John Biggs is an emeritus trustee of the university and received the Arts & Sciences Dean’s Medal in 2005. He also received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree in 2011 and a New York Regional Award in 2006 for outstanding professional achievements and service to Washington University. John currently serves on the Arts & Sciences National Council, as a volunteer for Leading Together: The Campaign for Washington University, and as an honorary member of the New York City Regional Cabinet.

Next Generation Science Standards released

2013-04-10 00:00:00

The Next Generation Science Standards have been released, and Washington University in St. Louis members are playing significant roles.

Michael Wysession, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences, was among the 41-member team that helped write the standards. And WUSTL's Institute for School Partnership (ISP) is poised to help K-12 schools implement them in the St. Louis region.

"This is revolutionary in many respects," Wysession said. "First of all, it is incredible to have most states in the country adopting a single standard. Having each state do its own thing has been really detrimental to the science and engineering education of this country and this is a tremendous step forward.

"The move away from learning long lists of facts and toward assessing students on what they can do and not what they know is incredibly important in training the workforce for tomorrow and in giving all Americans a greater appreciation of science," Wysession said. "The greater emphasis on societally relevant topics, in particular the high emphasis on earth science and climate, is a very important step forward in making science exciting and relevant to people’s lives."

“It’s a whole new vision of what it means to be scientifically literate,” said Victoria L. May, assistant dean of Arts & Sciences and executive director of the ISP. “We’re moving from standards that were very fact-based — telling students ‘here’s all the information you need to know’ — to a much more conceptual approach because of the information age."

Twenty-six states and their broad-based teams worked together for two years with a 41-member writing team and partners to develop the standards, which identify science and engineering practices and content that all K-12 students should master to be fully prepared for college, careers and citizenship.

"The standards really are much more focused on 'what does it mean to do science and the process of engineering," May said. "It’s how to ask the questions, how to pose the problems, how to think things through. That’s what the ISP has been about all along.”

The ISP is the university’s signature effort to strategically improve teaching and learning within the K-12 education community. Among the programs and services it offers are customized teacher professional development; classroom-ready science materials, with special emphasis on STEM (science, technology engineering and math) education; and K-12 Connections, a program that connects WUSTL students, staff and faculty with volunteer opportunities in urban school districts.

“Kids learn science by doing science — not just reading about it in a textbook and then looking at vocabulary terms,” May said. “We provide materials and supplies that enable students to explore concepts and make sense of them.”

And now that the new standards are in place, the services the ISP provides to the St. Louis region are going to be more important than ever.

“It’s going to be much easier to collaborate with common standards,” May said. “With every state having its own testing system, you really weren’t able to compare and learn from the data. This is going to make it much easier to leverage each work between states.”

To learn more about Wysession's involvement in the process, read here.

To learn more about the ISP, visit www.schoolpartnership.com.

Media Advisory: St. Louis Walk of Fame induction ceremony for Gerald Early today

2013-04-11 00:00:00

WHO: Washington University’s Gerald L. Early, PhD, a noted essayist and American culture critic, and Joe Edwards, founder of the St. Louis Walk of Fame and owner of numerous Loop businesses, including Blueberry Hill and the Moonrise Hotel

WHAT: A ceremony marking Early’s induction into the St. Louis Walk of Fame

WHERE: In front of the Moonrise Hotel, 6177 Delmar Blvd.

WHEN: 11:30 a.m. Thursday, April 11

WHY: Gerald L. Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, will join other WUSTL literary luminaries on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

A native of Philadelphia, Early has been on the WUSTL faculty since 1982.

He is a professor of English, of African and African-American studies, and of American culture studies, all in Arts & Sciences. He recently stepped down as director of Arts & Sciences’ Center for the Humanities after more than 11 years in that position.

A prolific writer, Early is author and editor of more than a dozen books and winner of prestigious literary prizes.

“It’s amazing to me the number of literary greats on the walk who have connections to Washington University, from such faculty members as William Gass, Howard Nemerov and Stanley Elkin to alumni A. E. Hotchner and Tennessee Williams,” said Edwards. “Gerald Early is most deserving of his place alongside these acclaimed writers.”

NOTE: Early’s star, which will be at the ceremony, will be embedded at a later time near the corner of Delmar and Eastgate Avenue after construction is completed on the first phase of Washington University’s Loop Student Living Initiative.

The St. Louis Walk of Fame consists of more than 130 sets of brass stars and bronze plaques honoring individuals from the St. Louis area who made major national contributions to America’s cultural heritage.

For more on Early and the induction ceremony, visit here.

Music and friendship with the Eliot Trio

2013-04-10 00:00:00

The Eliot Trio will perform works by Mozart, Brahms and Wieck-Schumann at 8 p.m. Friday, April 12. From left to right: Seth Carlin, professor of music; David Halen, concertmaster for the St. Louis Symphony, and Bjorn Ranheim, also with the St. Louis Symphony.

Born in 1819, Clara Wieck was a celebrated piano prodigy who toured Europe and composed her first works before entering her teens.

Even after marriage—in 1837, to her tutor, Robert Schumann—Clara enjoyed great success as a concert pianist, performing works by her husband and other Romantic composer while also raising the couple’s eight children.

Portrait of Clara Wieck-Schumann (1840) by Johann Heinrich Schramm.

Yet recent years have brought renewed attention to Wieck-Schumann’s own compositions. At 8 p.m. Friday, April 12, Washington University’s Eliot Trio will perform one of her best-known works, the Piano Trio opus 17 in G minor, as part of its annual concert.

The program will open with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Trio (Sonata) in G major. Completed in 1786, the piece is second among the composer’s six piano trios, and the longest. It was likely written for Franziska von Jacquin, one of Mozart’s most talented students, and the daughter of his friend Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin.

Next will be Wieck-Schumann’s Piano Trio. Written in 1846, when the composer was pregnant with her fourth child (and thus unable to tour), the Piano Trio is among Wieck-Schumann’s most fully realized works. Divided into four movements—Allegro moderato, Scherzo: Tempo di Menuetto, Andante and Allegretto—the piece is notable for its lyrical expression, flowing melody and deft use of counterpoint.

Concluding the program will be Trio opus 8 in B major by Johannes Brahms. A close friend to both Schumanns, Brahms began the Trio in early 1854 and completed it shortly after spending a week in their company.

But in 1889, Brahms elected to revisit the work, announcing in a letter to Clara that, “I have rewritten my B major Trio.... It will not be as wild as before - but will it be better?" It is this version that the April 12 program will feature.

Eliot Trio

Named for university founder William Greenleaf Eliot, the Eliot Trio consists of Seth Carlin, professor of music and director of the piano program in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences; violinist David Halen, concertmaster for the St. Louis Symphony; and cellist Bjorn Ranheim, also with the St. Louis Symphony.

Tickets are $25, or $15 for seniors and Washington University faculty and staff, and $5 for students. The performance will take place in Holmes Lounge, located in Ridgley Hall, on the far side of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Hoyt and Brookings drives.

Tickets are available through the Edison Theater Box Office, (314) 935-6543, and all Metrotix outlets. For more information, call (314) 935-5566 or email daniels@wustl.edu.

In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)

Liam Otten — 2013-04-09 00:00:00

Sophomore Kiki Milner as Mrs. Catherine Givings. Photo by Rob Morgan. Download hi-res image.

The light bulb. The phonograph. The sewing machine.

On this noble roster of pioneering electrical inventions belongs a plain wooden box, decorated with a few twisting knobs and attached to a bulbous device that, to modern eyes, vaguely suggests a hair dryer or a hand-held mixer.

“It looks like a farming instrument,” observes Mrs. Catherine Givings, wife of the Victorian gynecologist Dr. Givings.

But this is no farming instrument. This is science. This is medicine.

This is Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), one of the most critically acclaimed comedies of recent years.

This month, Washington University in St. Louis’ Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will present an all-new staging of Ruhl’s Pulitzer- and Tony-nominated work as its spring Mainstage production. Performances run April 19-28 in Edison Theatre.

“In the Next Room is a perfect university play,” says director Henry Schvey, professor of drama. “It interweaves thoughts and ideas from across the arts and sciences. It’s as much about psychology, medicine and the history of technology as it is gender studies.

“And of course, it’s also very, very funny.”

* Listen to an interview with Schvey here.

The cast of In the Next Room. Photo by Rob Morgan. Download h-ires image.

‘A couple of their time’

Set in upstate New York in the 1880s, In the Next Room opens with Catherine tending to her infant daughter, Letitia, while Dr. Givings prepares to meet a new patient.

Mrs. Daldry is frail and nervous and painfully sensitive to light and cold — afflictions that render her incapable of playing the piano or otherwise entertaining her husband.

“You have no idea what a source of anguish my wife’s illness has been to me,” complains Mr. Daldry. “And to her, of course.”

Givings diagnoses hysteria, likely due to a congestion of the womb. And so, with a hat-tip to Thomas Edison — “that great American” — the benevolent doctor prescribes a new electrical instrument capable of inducing paroxysms of release. “We shall be done in a matter of minutes,” he assures the nervous woman.

“Givings is an enthusiast, a man of science,” Schvey explains. “From a contemporary perspective, a diagnosis of hysteria is pure poppycock. But we don’t have the sense that he’s subliminally acting out his own desires. He’s basically an innocent. Women were not supposed to be sexual creatures.”

Schvey notes that the walls between the doctor’s office and his living room, where Catherine chats amiably with Mr. Daldry, make a neat allegory for the period’s gender divide.

“Dr. and Mrs. Givings are a couple of their time,” Schvey says. “They treat one another with a tremendous amount of formality, and Mrs. Givings knows nothing about what's going on in the next room. But she has all this suppressed energy, and she becomes increasingly curious — and concerned.

“I think Ruhl raises very serious questions about technology,” Schvey adds. “Electricity is the means to a kind of liberation, but there’s also an implication that something is lost — an idea that I think has real resonance in an era of computers and cellphones.”

Still, at root, Schvey sees a love story.

“It’s like a Shakespearean comedy,” he concludes. “The vibrator becomes like the magical flower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It causes people to fall in love, and dissolves the walls between the sexes.

“In the end, it's a celebration.”

Senior Gaby Schneider as the midwife Annie. Photo by Rob Morgan. Download hi-res image.

Cast and crew

Leading the cast of seven are senior Pete Winfrey and sophomore Kiki Milner as Dr. and Mrs. Givings.

Senior Gaby Schneider is the midwife Annie. Senior Phoebe Richards is Mrs. Daldry, with St. Louis actor Jack Dryden as her husband.

Freshman Dana Robertson is Elizabeth, Letitia’s wet-nurse. Ricki Pettinato is Leo, an artist hoping to revive his flagging creativity.

Scenic and costume design are by Rob Morgan, senior lecturer in drama, and Bonnie Kruger, professor of the practice in drama. Sean Savoie is lighting designer and production manager. Props are by Emily Frei, and junior Simeng Zhu handles sound design.

Senior Melissa Freilich is assistant director. Freshman Alexander Booth is stage manager.

Medical exhibition

In conjunction with the play, the Becker Medical Library at the WUSTL School of Medicine will present In the Next Room: Medical Treatment of Women With ‘Hysteria.’ The exhibit examines the various ways this peculiar disorder was viewed in both a medical and a social context from the 16th to the late 19th centuries.

Included are five antique vibrators, dating from the early 1900s to the 1920s, on loan from the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco.

Tickets

Performances of In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) will begin at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, April 19 and 20, in Edison Theatre. In addition, there will be a special "midnight matinee" at midnight Saturday, April 20. Performances will continue the following weekend, at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, April 26 and 27; and at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 28.

Edison Theatre is located in the Mallinckrodt Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd. Tickets are $15, or $10 for students, seniors and WUSTL faculty and staff. Tickets are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office, (314) 935-6543, and through all MetroTix outlets.

For more information, call (314) 935-6543 or visit padarts.wustl.edu.

Obituary: Marilyn Krukowski, professor emerita of biology, 80

2013-04-09 00:00:00

Krukowski

Marilyn Krukowski, PhD, professor emerita of biology in Arts & Sciences, died Sunday, April 7, 2013, in St. Louis from complications of multiple sclerosis. She was 80.

She joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in 1969, became a professor in 1987 and retired as professor emerita in 2002.

Krukowski taught vertebrate structure (anatomy) in the Department of Biology for more than 30 years. Her students raved about the quality of her teaching and often cited the course as the best they ever took at Washington University.

One of her students, Allen Saxon, who graduated in 1971 and later became a surgeon, offered the following tribute to Krukowski in the “Lasting Lessons” section of Washington University in St. Louis Magazine in 2000.

"The value of her teaching was emphasized to me a year later when I was in the first year of medical school at Tulane. The workload of the second semester included two tests a week. It was a challenge just to finish the reading assignments, let alone to fully digest the material.

"The night before a test in renal physiology we had 450 pages of reading, which I hadn't completed. Making it worse, the class lectures had been disjointed and hard to follow. Exasperated, I called a friend in the junior class who was also a WUSTL alum.

"When I explained my dilemma, he said, 'You took comparative anatomy, didn't you?' I then reviewed Krukowski's presentation on renal physiology. Those two or three lectures substituted for the 450 pages of physiology reading.

"I aced the test!" Saxon said.

Krukowski worked closely with fellow biologist Florence Moog on educational activities. Krukowski played a major role in establishing and overseeing the Florence Moog Scholarship program at Washington University.

Krukowski began her academic career as assistant professor of physiology and pharmacology at New York Medical College. After she came to Washington University, she worked variously for the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences, the now-closed School of Dental Medicine and the Division of Bone and Mineral Diseases in the School of Medicine.

Philip Osdoby, PhD, a professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, and Julie Glowacki, PhD, a professor of orthopedic surgery and of oral and maxillofacial surgery at Harvard University, both remember Krukowski as a kind friend and generous collaborator.

“She was absorbed by questions concerning skeletal regulation of the fetal skeleton and the impact of maternal metabolism and disease on the skeletal health of the progeny. Much of her work concerned the development of osteoclasts, the cells that are responsible for bone resorption,” said Osdoby.

“She developed methods to determine that the precursors of the bone resorbing cells are in the circulation well before the development of bone itself. She and her collaborators discovered that bone matrix signals are responsible for the differentiation of precursor cells into osteoclasts,” said Glowacki.

“These studies led to the discovery that tissue response to an implant was based upon the implant’s surface charge and led to the development of charged implant materials to foster bone growth and skin wound repair. Two patents on hard and soft tissue repair were obtained for that innovative work,” said Osdoby.

Krukowski earned a bachelor of arts degree from Brooklyn College in New York in 1954 and a PhD from New York University in 1962.

She is survived by her husband, Lucian, her daughter, Samantha, and her granddaughter, Zoë.

Katims to receive 2013 Stalker Award

2013-04-08 00:00:00

Katims

Andrew Katims has been selected to receive the 2013 Harrison D. Stalker Award, given each year by the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences.

The prize is named in honor of the late Harrison D. Stalker, PhD, who was professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, a leading evolutionary biologist, geneticist and inspired teacher, and a true enthusiast of the fine arts.

The award is given to the graduating senior in biology whose undergraduate career is marked by outstanding scientific scholarship as well as contributions to the university in the areas of artistic expression, community service or both.

Katims will graduate this May with a major in biology and a minor in writing, both in Arts & Sciences. Katims’ academic achievements and community involvement exemplify the spirit of the Stalker Award.

As an undergraduate researcher, he worked in the Haswell Lab on an exploratory project focused on understanding the role of a mechanosensitive ion channel in pollen development. His experiments led to new insights on how this protein is involved in an important question in plant biology — how pollen cells germinate and find the egg cells during fertilization in the flower.

He also served as a teaching assistant in the “Introduction to Ecology” course in the biology department and as an intern with the Institute for School Partnership, where he worked on STEM education models and helping teachers to implement new learning approaches in the classroom.

The quality of his writing was recognized by membership in the English Honorary Society, and he is also an artist, sketching and painting in his free time.

Together with Shivani Rangwala, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science and neuroscience in Arts & Sciences, he founded the Washington University chapter of Timmy Global Health and served as its president.

As a leader in this program, which seeks to expand access to healthcare globally, he spearheaded fundraising and organization of a group of students and physicians for a trip to rural Ecuador through which 500 people received medical care.

Following graduation, Katims will be joining the MD/MPH program at the University of Miami.

Stardust in the laboratory the topic of 2013 McDonnell Distinguished Lecture

2013-04-05 00:00:00

NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) and NOAO/AURA/NSF

Image by Michelangelo or by Hubble? A tiny fraction of the dust like that which makes such stunning patterns in the Carina Nebula was carried to Earth in meteorites and recovered in laboratories for analysis.

Thomas J. Bernatowicz, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, will deliver the McDonnell Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 10, in Room 105, Steinberg Hall, at Washington University in St. Louis.

The St. Louis community is cordially invited to the lecture, which is sponsored by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.

Bernatowicz will discuss what cosmic dust carried to Earth by meteorites has revealed about the creation of the elements by stars and supernovae.

“About 4.6 billion years ago the solar system condensed from an interstellar cloud infused with dust and gas from winds emanating from dying stars,” Bernatowicz said. “In the very hot and harsh environment that prevailed during the early epochs of the condensation, most of these dust grains were destroyed, but some survived and were preserved in the matrix of primitive meteorites, which occasionally fall to the Earth.”

“In this presentation I will show how stardust grains in meteorites can be identified in the laboratory, and how the results of such studies lead to important new insights about the creation of the elements by stars and supernovae."

Bernatowicz

Bernatowicz, who received his undergraduate degree from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and his PhD from Washington University in 1980, is passionately devoted to quality undergraduate education in physics, particularly at the introductory level.

In 2004, he introduced a calculus-based physics sequence, based on the innovative textbook Six Ideas that Shaped Physics and the active learning methods of Thomas A. Moore of Pomona College that train students to think and address problems the way physicists do.

Bernatowicz won the inaugural David Hadas Teaching Award in 2009, in recognition of "his commitment and excellence in teaching first-year undergraduate students."

His research has addressed a wide variety of problems in planetary geochemistry and geophysics, surface physics, and experimental nuclear physics, isotope geochemistry and astrophysics.

Bernatowicz also will deliver a colloquium, titled “Constraints on Grain Formation Around Carbon Stars From Laboratory Studies of Presolar Graphite,” as part of the lecture series, at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, April 11, in Room 201, Crow Hall. The colloquium is also free and open to the public.

The McDonnell Center, which was established in 1975 through a gift from the aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell, is a consortium of WUSTL faculty, research staff and students coming primarily from the departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Physics, both in Arts & Sciences, who are working on the cutting edge of space sciences research.

For more information on the talks, contact Trecia Stumbaugh at trecia@wustl.edu or (314) 935-5332.

Mapping lava tubes in the Galàpagos

Diana Lutz — 2013-04-05 00:00:00

Aaron Addison

A lava tube once filled with red-hot magma flowing down a volcano dwarfs the cavers exploring it. The keyhole profile of this lava tube, on the volcanic island of Santa Cruz, suggests the floor of an upper tube may have collapsed into a lower tube from an earlier eruption. The "rope" hanging down into the tube is actually a tree root. The islands have no fresh water, and the plants in the jungle canopy seek water everywhere — or just enough humidity to make it through the dry season.

Whatever you did for spring break, Washington University in St. Louis’ Aaron Addison and Bob Osburn have you beat. They spent spring break mapping lava tubes — giant tubes through which red-hot rock once flowed — within a volcano on the island of Santa Cruz in the Galàpagos.

Despite the fame of the Galàpagos, many of its lava tubes, home to dark-adapted species unknown to science, never have been explored.

This year, during spring break, Addison, Osburn and a team of nine cavers were racing to map as many tubes as possible on Santa Cruz, which will be the venue for the 16th International Volcanospeleology Conference to be held March 15-22, 2014.

Totally tubular
Addison and Osburn saw their first Galàpagos lava tube during an Earth and Planetary Sciences field trip to the islands in the spring of 2006. Addison, director of Geographical Information Systems and Data Services, and Osburn, a laboratory administrator for the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences — both of whom are speleologists — made a little side trip to a lava tube called Cueva de Gallardo, just to see what a lava tube looked like.

One look and they knew they would have to come back to the islands.

But getting permits to work in the Galàpagos, 97 percent of which is a conservation park, is notoriously difficult. Fortunately, they made a well-connected friend on the same trip: Theofilos Toulkeridis, a faculty member at the Escuela Politécnica del Ejército who does geological research in the Galàpagos.

With Toukeridis’ help, they were able to arrange trips in 2009, 2011 and this year.

Toulkeridis will host the international conference and co-chair it with Addison.

Into the magma chamber

Peter Sprouse

Osburn in a drained magma chamber on the southern flank of Sierra Negra, the largest volcano in the Galàpagos. On the island of Isabela, Sierra Negra last erupted in October 2005. Osburn says the startling colors are due to oxidation of the iron in the lava, most likely by gases streaming from the magma below. The color palette is bit wider than normal, he says, perhaps because conditions were more varied and harsher than usual.

The Galàpagos is a hotspot volcanic chain formed by a mantle plume, or upwelling of abnormally hot rock, in the Pacific Ocean near the equator. As a tectonic plate drifts over the hot spot, magma ascending from below melts, segregates from the rock and erupts to form a volcano.

Wikimedia Commons

The WUSTL expeditions have been to the southern flank of Sierra Negra on Isabela and to Cerro Crocker on Santa Cruz. Most of the people in the Galàpagos live on Santa Cruz and San Cristobal islands. Access to all of the islands is carefully controlled, but especially to Fernandina both because it is an active volcano — it last erupted April 2009 — and because it is the only island still without invasive species.

A chain of volcanoes is formed as the crustal plate creeps over the hot spot. In a typical hot-spot volcanic chain, such as the Hawaiian Islands, the islands at one end of the chain are older and dormant and those at the other end are younger and still active.

The theory doesn’t quite work for the Galàpagos, however. The Galàpagos hot spot lies close to the Galàpagos spreading center, a mid-ocean ridge where the ocean crust is pulling apart, generating huge volumes of lava that probably are contaminating the hot-spot lava. The chemistry of the lavas suggests at least four reservoirs of magma are feeding the hot spot.

“Most volcanoes do not produce lava tubes,” Osburn said. "To get a tube the lava has to be fluid (basaltic rather than rhyolitic) and fairly hot. The eruption has to be fairly voluminous so that the flow continues long enough to channelize and for the channel to roof over. Volcanoes that erupt fluid basaltic lavas tend to form shield volcanoes with flat profiles and gentle slopes, which also favor the formation of long-lasting lava tubes.”

“Lava tubes form because cooling lava is a fantastic insulator,” Addison said. “As the lava begins to race down the slopes of the volcano, its outside cools much faster than the core, but because the cooled lava is such a good thermal insulator, the core remains superheated and can flow long distances, in some cases tens of kilometers.”

Mapping the tubes

Aaron Addison

Team members Rick Haley of the Cave Research Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to the exploration and conservation of caves, and (far ahead) Toulkeridis in a lava tube on Santa Cruz. The benches, or ridges, at the sides of the tube form when lava flows at the same level for some time. On the ceiling is a blister, a pocket that somehow filled with air while the lava was cooling.

During this spring’s expedition, Addison kept a blog of the team’s adventures, called “Galàpagos Cave Exploration — 2013”
that is full of astonishing images of the tubes (and a gorgeous photo of a fever of manta rays swimming off the pier at Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz).

“Despite its romantic associations, the Galàpagos is a very hostile place to do research,” Addison said. “The equator runs through the northern part of the archipelago, so it’s very hot and the days are very long. In the highlands, it rains almost every day. It wears you down.”

They stayed in a hotel that cost $14 a night, with only a fan for cooling, and not even that during the three total-island blackouts when the diesel generators broke down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9XWu0qHmNA

While the team was mapping the caves, there was a torrential downpour unlike anything the locals ever had seen, and water came flooding into the tubes they were exploring.

They located tubes by talking to local ranch owners, who often were able to lead them to openings to “tunnels” on their land. Once they found a tube, they took a GPS fix at its opening. Then, as they walked the tube, they charted the heading, elevation and distance between selected “stations,” and used those measurements to draw plan and profile maps of the tube.

Aaron Addison

Addison’s field notebook. For a bigger image click here. To the upper left are station numbers. From station 13 to 14, the distance was 15.87 meters, the heading was 210.5 degrees and the elevation was -2.5 degrees. These measurements were used to make the plan view of the tube. The small ovals to the side of the plan view are cross sections of the tube. The keyhole cross section and ladder to the upper right was formed when the upper tube collapsed into a lower one. The dotted circle beneath an ellipsoidal cross section downstream of that point indicates that here the two tubes run in parallel.

They’ll be back to do it again for the international symposium — or sooner if they can organize the funds.

In the meantime, we all may be able to participate as well, if only vicariously. In 2012, Addison made the trip to the Galàpagos as a consultant for Colossus Productions, a production company shooting an IMAX movie of the Galàpagos starring David Attenborough. The film, called Galàpagos 3D, has been screened in the United Kingdom but has yet to be released in the United States. It features appearances both by Aaron Addison and his fellow WUSTL-affiliated Galàpagos enthusiast, Stephen Blake, PhD, who studies the migration habits of the giant tortoise.

The real gladiators: Kathleen Coleman discusses Christians in the Roman arena for Assembly Series

Barbara Rea — 2013-04-05 00:00:00

The overwhelming popularity of the 2000 Oscar-winning film Gladiator is a recent example of the hold of the Roman spectacle on our collective conscience. Many of these images first take shape from Biblical stories of Christian martyrdom.

Ancient Rome was a brutal place, but did Hollywood get it right? Are the images we carry around with us the way it really was?

The answer is so much more fascinating and complex than these simplistic depictions, according to Harvard classicist Kathleen Coleman, DPhil, who served as consultant to Gladiator filmmaker DreamWorks. Unfortunately, her script suggestions were ignored. (See Lubbock Avalanche-Journal article: Gladiator leaves historical accuracy of Rome in ruins.)

At 4 p.m. Thursday, April 11, Coleman will give an Assembly Series talk that paints a real picture of the Roman arena spectacle, explaining Roman penal theory and practice regarding Christian martyrdom in the context of the expectations and attitudes of both the Roman authorities and audiences.

Coleman’s talk, the annual John and Penelope Biggs Lecture in the Classics, will be held in Steinberg Hall Auditorium on Washington University’s Danforth Campus; it is free and open to the public.

Coleman is the James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. She joined the faculty at Harvard in 1996 after teaching Latin at Trinity College, Dublin, for several years.

Prior to that, Coleman was a lecturer in the Department of Classics at the University of Cape Town, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Latin in 1973. Two years later, she was awarded a bachelor’s degree in classics from the University of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); in 1979, she earned a doctoral degree from the University of Oxford.

For information on upcoming Assembly Series programs, visit assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call (314) 935-4620.

A meteorite mystery

Diana Lutz — 2013-04-05 00:00:00

Stefan Ralew

One of 35 meteorites of mysterious origin found in the Moroccan desert. This piece weighs 100 grams. The alphabet block to the right is a centimeter on a side.

Early in 2012, someone in Southern Morocco picked up 35 greenish stones, including the one shown above. Purchased by a dealer in Erfoud, Morocco, it was then resold to Stefan Ralew, a meteorite collector from Berlin.

The dealer was demanding a high price, and Ralew may have hesitated. But the wrinkled glassy coating on one face of the rock was clearly a fusion crust, a kind of glaze that forms when a meteorite is heated as it passes through the atmosphere.

Looking at other faces he would have recognized it as a type of meteorite called an achondrite, says Randy Korotev, WUSTL’s meteorite expert. That meant it was an exceptional stone.

Most meteorites are stony, he explains, and of the stony meteorites, almost all (90 percent) are what are called ordinary chondrites. These are pieces of small, unmelted asteroids that are uniform in composition throughout.

The achondrites, on the other hand are pieces of large asteroids or planets, ones at least 200 kilometers in diameter. These produced enough internal heat early in their history to partially melt and segregate into a metal core surrounded by a rocky exterior. Achondrites, which come from the crust or mantle of these differentiated bodies make up only 5 percent of the stony meteorites that have been found.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCAL/MPS/DLR/IDA

The large asteroid 4 Vesta is the parent body for roughly half the achondrite meteorites, but it doesn’t have the right chemistry to be the parent of the mystery meteorite.

So already this find was looking very interesting. Where might it be from? About half of the achondrites come from the large asteroid 4 Vesta. Others come from Mars, the moon, or other asteroids.

To answer the question of origin, the stone’s chemistry had to be analyzed. Ralew shipped it to Tony Irving at the University of Washington. “Tony is where all the serious collectors go when they find strange meteorites,” says Korotev, to whom Irving sends the “lunars” (possible lunar meteorites), which is what Korotev mainly studies.

Both the iron/manganese ratio of an asteroid and the ratios of its oxygen isotopes (variants of the oxygen atom) are thought to serve as “fingerprints” of its body of origin.

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

This colorful view of Mercury was produced from images made by the Messenger space probe. The colors map the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up Mercury's surface.

At the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March, Irving said that the stone, now officially designated Northwest Africa 7325 (NWA 7325), had highly unusual chemistry. What’s more, he said, the chemistry was suspiciously similar to that measured by NASA’s Messenger probe, which is currently surveying the surface of Mercury from orbit.

“It is high in magnesium and very low in iron, which is what they’re seeing on the surface of Mercury,” Korotev, who attended Irving’s talk, says. “But it’s got more plagioclase (an aluminum containing mineral) than they’re seeing on the surface of Mercury and it plots funny in ‘oxygen isotope space.’ It’s plotting in a region of oxygen isotope space where we’ve never had meteorite data points before — except for a few ureilites, which also have oddball chemistry."

Some chemical ratios didn’t match, but Irving said that might be because the stone had been “excavated from depth,” that is blasted into space by a collision that left a deep scar in Mercury.

During the question and answer period after the talk, Tim McCoy, the curator of the meteorite collection at the Smithsonian Institution,
said that preliminary data suggested the meteorite had crystallized from the melt 4.5 billion years ago.

That made it implausible it was from Mercury, he said. Lunar highland rocks are 4.2 to 4.3 billion years old and Mercurian rocks should have crystallized at the same time or later than the lunar highland rocks.

That objection was persuasive to Korotev. “The moon began to crystallize 4.5 years ago,” he says, “but we don’t have any 4.5-billion-year-old meteorites from the moon, because all of those rocks would have been bashed to smithereens during the late heavy bombardment that pockmarked the moon with craters between 4 to 3.8 billion years ago.”

“The same thing would have happened on Mercury,” he said, “so the question is how did this rock survive for that long? There’s no sign of it being brecciated, or busted up. “

“But if it’s not from Mercury,” he said, “then where is it from? That’s really the question.”

“It has very odd chemistry for a meteorite,” Korotev. “If somebody had walked in with this chemical analysis and nothing else I would have told him that it wasn’t a meteorite, just based on the chemistry,” he says laughing.

After a moment, he adds, “They haven’t talked about cosmogenic radionuclides yet. That would be really interesting.”

Cosmogenic radionuclides provide a method for estimating how long a rock has been exposed to solar wind particles streaming off the sun and cosmic rays. “If this stone had exceedingly high cosmogenic nuclides,” Korotev said, “that would be an argument for it coming from Mercury, because Mercury is so close to the sun.

In the meantime the Meteoritical Society, which adjudicates all matters having to do with meteorites, has classified NWA 7325 as “achondrite ungrouped,” meaning that they believe it is a stone from a differentiated body like a planet or big asteroid but beyond that they are agnostic.

Although Korotev can’t say where the meteorite comes from, he can say why it is such a peculiar green. The green comes from a silicate mineral laced with chromium.

Randy Korotev

Korotev once analyzed a series of glass bottles to see what made them green. The answer is various combinations of chromium and iron. The mystery meteorite includes minerals with much higher chromium content than any of the bottles, which explains its intriguing chartreuse color.

“I once analyzed bottles to see what made them blue or green,” Korotev says. The greenest bottle had 660 parts per million chromium, but some of the mineral components of NWA 7325 have 7,000 parts per million chromium. That’s why it’s green.”

But the bigger mystery is as yet unsolved.

Avoid impulsive acts by imagining future benefits

Melanie Bauer — 2013-04-03 00:00:00

Why is it so hard for some people to resist the least little temptation, while others seem to possess incredible patience, passing up immediate gratification for a greater long-term good?

The answer, suggests a new brain-imaging study from Washington University in St. Louis, lies in how effective people are at feeling good right now about all the future benefits that may come from passing up a smaller immediate reward. Researchers found that activity in two regions of the brain distinguished impulsive and patient people.

“Activity in one part of the brain, the anterior prefrontal cortex , seems to show whether you’re getting pleasure from thinking about the future reward you are about to receive,” explained study co-author Todd Braver, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences. “People can relate to this idea that when you know something good is coming, just that waiting can feel pleasurable.”

WUSTL PHOTO

Study participants were observed while waiting for rewards of juice for completing experimental tasks.

The study, which was published in the first issue of the Journal of Neuroscience this year, was designed to examine what happens in the brain as people wait for a reward, especially whether people characterized as “impulsive” would show different brain responses than those considered “patient.”

The lead author of the study was Koji Jimura, then a postdoctoral researcher in Braver’s Cognitive Control and Psychopathology Laboratory, and now a research associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, in Japan.

Unlike previous research on delayed gratification that had people choose between hypothetical rewards of money over long delays (e.g, $500 now or $1,000 a year from now), this Washington University study presented their participants with real rewards of squirts of juice that they chose to receive either immediately or after a delay of up to a minute.

“It’s kind of funny because we treated the people in our study like researchers that work with animals do, and we actually squirted juice into their mouths,” Braver said.

Results show that a brain region called the ventral striatum (VS) ramped up its activity in impulsive people as they got closer and closer to receiving their delayed reward. The VS activity of patient people, on the other hand, stayed more constant.

Braver

The researchers interpreted these different brain responses to mean that impulsive people initially did not find the prospect of waiting for a reward very appealing. However, as they approached the time they’d receive that reward, they became more excited and their VS reflected that excitement.

“This gradual increase may reflect impatience or excessive anticipation of the upcoming reward in impulsive individuals,” said Jimura. "This was unlike patient people, who were likely content with waiting for the reward from the start, as no changes in VS activity were observed for them."

The most novel finding of the study concerned the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC). This is the part of the brain that helps you think about the future. Here, researchers found that the patient people heightened activity in the aPFC when they first started waiting for the reward, which then decreased as the time to receive the reward approached. Impulsive people didn’t show this brain activity pattern.

“The aPFC appears to allow you to create a mental simulation of the future. It helps you consider what it’ll be like getting the future reward. In this way, you can get access to the utility and satisfaction in the present,” said Braver.

By thinking about the future reward, patient people were able to gain what economists call “anticipatory utility.” While their reward was far away in time, they were giddy with anticipation in the present. Conversely, impulsive people weren’t thinking beyond the present and so did not feel pleasure when they were told they had to wait. Their excitement built only as they got closer to receiving their reward.

Overall, this study suggests that people may be impulsive because they do not or cannot imagine the future, so they prefer rewards right away. This research could be useful for assessing the effects of clinical treatments for impulsivity problems, which can lead to issues such as problem gambling and substance abuse disorders. A similar brain-imaging approach as was used in the Washington University study could allow clinicians to track the effects of an intervention on changes not only in impulsive behavior but also changes in patients’ brain responses.

Jimura

“One possible treatment approach could be to enhance mental functions in aPFC, a brain region well-known to be associated with cognitive control,” said Jimura. "By increasing cognitive control, impulsive patients could learn to reject their immediate impulses."

Impulsivity occurs not only in a clinical setting but also every day in our own lives. Applying his research to his personal life, Braver said, “When I’m successful at achieving long-term goals it’s from explicitly trying to activate that goal and imagining each decision as helping me achieve it, to keep me on track.”

Perhaps adopting this strategy of focusing on the long term could help us move past present distractions and move toward our future goals.

WUSTL wins 2013 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest College Nationals

2013-04-03 00:00:00

This year, a team from Washington University in St. Louis won the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest College Nationals. A video below captures the elaborate machine in action.

Named for the late cartoonist and inventor, the annual competition challenges college students to design a machine that uses the most complex processes to complete a simple task. Goldberg’s popular cartoon series depicted complex gadgets performing easy tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.

Devices in the competition must complete the task with a minimum of 20 steps. The WUSTL students designed a contraption that hammers a nail with maximal inefficiency.

Team members are: Amy Patterson and Harison Wiesman, sophomore and junior physics majors in Arts & Sciences, and Grace Kuo amd Alexa Lichtenstein, sophomore electrical engineering and senior mechanical engineering majors in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

The competition was held March 30 at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio.

For more information, visit rubegoldberg.com.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxbyL6AkohA&feature=youtu.be

Winning Rube Goldberg contraption hammers a nail with maximal inefficiency. Not only did the contraption, constructed by a four-member team, take the top prize this year, it also won in the Best Single Step category. Two steps actually tied for the award: "Post-It Slinky" and "Pouring Coffee." For those of you who couldn't quite place it, the voice at the end is the Staple's "Easy Button."

Political scientist Cohen to speak April 9

2013-04-03 00:00:00

Cohen

Author and political scientist Cathy Cohen studies American politics and particularly how they affect African-Americans, women and the LGBTQ community – never ignoring the intersections between these identity categories.

She will be on campus Tuesday, April 9, to give a provocatively titled lecture, “Race, Sex and Neoliberalism in the Age of Obama.”

Cohen, PhD, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, is also principal investigator for The Black Youth Project, a website focused on black youth and civic engagement, and the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project, which investigates if and how the heightened political environment surrounding the 2008 presidential election will affect the political attitudes and behaviors of individuals in the United States.

Her lecture inaugurates the “Post-Race? Interrogations, Provocations & Disruptions Lecture Series.” A Diversity and Inclusion Grant from the Office of the Provost provides partial funding. Co-sponsors are the Department of Political Science in Arts & Sciences and the Law, Identity & Culture Initiative, an interdisciplinary project co-directed by Adrienne Davis, JD, vice provost and the William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law, and Rebecca Wanzo, PhD, associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies.

For more information on Cohen’s speech, visit here. To learn more about the LIC Initiative, visit the law.wustl.edu site.

Two environmental activists to give sustainability lecture April 10

Julie Kennedy — 2013-04-08 00:00:00

Two prominent environmental thinkers and activists will address climate change, biodiversity and pollution during an upcoming lecture at Washington University in St. Louis.

The lecture, titled “To Hell in a Handbasket? The Global Environment and Sustainability,” is free and open to the public. It will begin at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 10, in Whitaker Hall Auditorium. The primary sponsors are University College — the adult, evening and continuing education division in Arts & Sciences — and the International Affairs program in University College.

Adjunct instructor Anukriti Hittle, the driving force behind the lecture, suggested Robert Repetto and Daniel Tunstall as speakers because of their long history of environmentalism.

Tunstall

“These two speakers have a long-term and deep understanding of the issues that plague our world today,” said Hittle, who teaches in the International Affairs and Environmental Studies programs and advises students on environmental and sustainability careers through The Career Center.

“Not only are they scholars, they are activists. I suggested Bob Repetto because he is a pioneer in environmental economics and Dan Tunstall because he has worked with indicators of sustainability since the Nixon administration.

Repetto

“When our students hear about these complex and intractable issues, they want to know what they can do. I know that these two speakers can help answer this question, as well as inspire by example.”

Repetto, author of America’s Climate Problem: The Way Forward, has combined an academic career as an economist at Harvard, Yale and the University of Colorado with a leadership role in environmental policy as vice president of the World Resources Institute.

Tunstall worked on statistical policy in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and he directed the information program at the World Resources Institute until his retirement in 2011.

The lecture is part of a larger daylong symposium on sustainability issues. The other events include a lunch and discussion with guests and selected students and faculty, and short presentations for students about sustainability careers.

Other sponsors include the School of Engineering and Applied Science; the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability; the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies; the International and Area Studies program; the Environmental Studies program; the Office of Sustainability; and the College of Architecture.

The event grew out of Hittle’s professional association with the two speakers and University College’s interest and programs in international affairs, sustainability, global leadership and management. The symposium also reflects a universitywide commitment to sustainability and global issues.

For more information, call (314) 935-6700.

WUSTL School of Arts and Sciences News

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Three doctoral candidates named Bouchet Fellows

Weidenbaum legacy honored with May 20 forum

Law professor Martin installed as Nagel Chair

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Three faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences

Early responses coming in on Next Generation Science Standards

Elson elected fellow of arts and sciences academy

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Michel Lauzière, the master of unusual comedy

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2013 Spector Prize goes to two students

Hatchery course helps fuel student start-up companies

WUSTL Opera Workshop April 30 and May 2

Graduate students recognize faculty mentors

​​Book idea gets boost from awards, faculty fellowship​

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Newly established McLeod Writing Prize awarded to first freshmen

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Symposium: Finding humanity in advanced dementia, April 27

​Summer Writers Institute now even more convenient for working professionals

Gerald Early gets star on St. Louis Walk of Fame

Jacoby wins Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to experimental psychology

Gerald Early's St. Louis Walk of Fame induction ceremony talk

Prestigious recognition from French government

Moore installed as John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics

Next Generation Science Standards released

Media Advisory: St. Louis Walk of Fame induction ceremony for Gerald Early today

Music and friendship with the Eliot Trio

In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)

Obituary: Marilyn Krukowski, professor emerita of biology, 80

Katims to receive 2013 Stalker Award

Stardust in the laboratory the topic of 2013 McDonnell Distinguished Lecture

Mapping lava tubes in the Galàpagos

The real gladiators: Kathleen Coleman discusses Christians in the Roman arena for Assembly Series

A meteorite mystery

Avoid impulsive acts by imagining future benefits

WUSTL wins 2013 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest College Nationals

Political scientist Cohen to speak April 9​

​Two environmental activists to give sustainability lecture April 10

Book idea gets boost from awards, faculty fellowship

Summer Writers Institute now even more convenient for working professionals

Political scientist Cohen to speak April 9

Two environmental activists to give sustainability lecture April 10