Month: November 2016

Last month, a new parking and transportation management strategy that will be implemented following May 2017 Commencement was announced. The new plan – which will address key weaknesses in the current program, enhance alternative transportation options and improve resource utilization to better serve the campus community – has been in development over the past year.

Throughout our lives, our brains are always changing. To capture that transformation, scientists will scan the brains of people from kindergarten through their later years to build maps of the brain as it develops and changes over the decades. The endeavor, led by researchers at Washington University, is funded by two grants totaling $34 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The discarded bone of a chicken leg, still etched with teeth marks from a dinner thousands of years ago, provides some of the oldest known physical evidence for the introduction of domesticated chickens to the continent of Africa, research from Washington University in St. Louis has confirmed.

Inflammation is one of the main reasons why people with diabetes experience heart attacks, strokes, kidney problems and other, related complications. Now, in a surprise finding, researchers at the School of Medicine have identified a possible trigger of chronic inflammation.

Researchers at the School of Medicine have developed a chemical compound, named Fluselenamyl, that detects amyloid clumps in Alzheimer’s patients better than current FDA-approved compounds.

Ramakrishna Rao, an associate professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, recently received the 2016 Anne Maurer-Cecchini Award, an honor that recognizes outstanding epidemiological or clinical research on neglected tropical diseases.

The Office of Sustainability is encouraging offices around campus to take part in the Green Office Program, making improvements such as reducing energy use and office waste. An awards event is planned in January.

Washington University in St. Louis has launched a new venture-capital seed fund aimed at helping to propel early-stage business ventures by students, faculty and recent alumni. The new William Greenleaf Eliot Seed Fund is managed by the university’s Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Forest fires have enormous effects on both climate change and human health. A team of engineering scientists at Washington University in St. Louis are working through the fall recreating scaled-down forest fires in a lab to get a better understanding of what’s emitted during these natural disasters.

Question: Which former first lady visited Washington University to give an Assembly Series address?