Month: April 2019

Morgan DeBaun, AB ’12, and three other WashU alumni ­founded Blavity, a news and entertainment website featuring stories from a black point of view. Today, DeBaun is CEO, using the varied skills she learned at WashU.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton has relied on insights from alumni to help him guide the university. His partnership with the Alumni Board of Governors has provided an ­important forum for listening to and ­engaging with the university’s biggest ­champions: its graduates.

Ryan Lawson, BFA ’04, is an interior designer who as a student switched from studying architecture to art. He says that Chancellor Wrighton took a keen interest in his choice because Lawson was a student during the early planning phases of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

James McCarter, MD/PhD ’98, whose entrepreneurial spirit was nurtured while a grad student, has built his career on translational research.

Oguz Alyanak, an anthropology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences, has been selected for a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities to support his research on the social lives of working-class Muslim men in Germany, France and other European countries.

An international team led by Gary Weil, MD, of the School of Medicine is poised to help eliminate two disabling tropical diseases as public health problems. A large grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will fund clinical trials and other studies aimed at preventing new cases of elephantiasis and river blindness.

A Washington University in St. Louis finance and regulations scientist has published a paper with a theoretical model that basically proposes bridging the divide between bankers and politicians to link such capital requirements to something of a political football: credit allocation — a bank’s business of financing loans.

A book by Tim Bartley, professor of sociology in Arts & Sciences, has won the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for best book from the International Studies Association’s Environmental Studies Section.

Philanthropists Andrew and Barbara Taylor and the Crawford Taylor Foundation have committed $10 million to the School of Medicine to continue research to investigate the scientific underpinnings of psychiatric illnesses, with the goal of improving diagnosis and treatment.

Los Angeles sculptor Elana Mann and Chicago public artist Erik L. Peterson have won the 2019 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Awards, presented by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Each winner will receive $25,000 to advance their studio practice.