Month: September 2020

Photographer Jess T. Dugan will serve as the 2020-21 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. The fellowship, which is jointly sponsored by the Saint Louis Art Museum and the university’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, is designed to promote the creation and exhibition of contemporary art as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles.

Washington University’s Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab, a joint initiative of the Brown School and Olin Business School, has been awarded a $200,000 grant from the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation to begin CAP STL, a project to explore how entrepreneurship affects equity and mobility.

“Amnesia is not the right word,” said Geoff K. Ward, “because we’ve forgotten without ever really knowing.” In “Truths and Reckonings,” the show he curated for Washington University’s Kemper Art Museum, Ward confronts histories of racist violence with the aim of untangling their continuing legacies.

David H. Gutmann, MD, PhD, the Donald O. Schnuck Family Professor and vice chair for research affairs in the Department of Neurology at Washington University School of Medicine, has received the George W. Jacoby Award from the American Neurological Association for his discoveries on the role of the immune system in brain tumors.

Deprived of light, plants are unable to transform carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into sugar molecules. New research led by biologist Richard Vierstra in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis provides an in-depth look at how maize responds at a cellular level.

The vision of defunding the police tells us that public safety and racial justice go hand in hand, and both are impossible under the status quo. I find power in that vision because it attests that a better future is necessary. And possible.

John-Stephen Taylor, professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, received a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled “DNA Photoproducts as Intrinsic Probes of Non-B DNA Conformations.”

Question: The university has made a number of changes in response to COVID-19 to keep faculty, staff and students safe this year. How many study cubbies have been installed on the Danforth Campus?

Washington University has begun a process to examine public safety and policing on the Danforth Campus and in nearby neighborhoods. As an important first step, a committee comprising students, faculty, staff and alumni has been formed to lead this critical work.

The Washington University Student Health Ambassador program is a new peer-to-peer initiative designed to protect students from the spread of COVID-19. Students are dispatched daily to locations across campus to remind their peers to wear masks and to confirm students have completed their daily health screenings.