Author: Jessica Daues

The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research has announced the six winning teams of the 2011 University Research Strategic Alliance (URSA) grants. URSA grants offer a one-year, $25,000 award to full-time faculty members at WUSTL who begin a new collaboration with investigators from different disciplines. Researchers who receive the grant work together in a new area of research, or plan to approach a problem in a different way.

Take a walk on the second floor of North Brookings Hall past the Bridge Conference Room, and you’ll see a different take on a familiar face. A painting of Robert S. Brookings, president of WUSTL’s Board of Trustees from 1895-1928, arrived in September and now hangs on the west-facing wall. The new portrait was painted in 1905 by noted American Impressionist artist Richard E. Miller and replaced another painting of Brookings in the Bridge Conference Room.

Kent Theiling Jr., grounds and landscape design manager for the Danforth Campus, will lead a Fall Arbor Tour Wednesday, Oct. 19. The guided tour will start at 11 a.m. at the Danforth Garden in front of Brookings Hall and is expected to last approximately an hour. The tour will take participants on a walk throughout the Danforth Campus to learn more about the different kind of trees located on campus.

Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton cuts the ribbon during a ceremony Sept. 28 to celebrate the Campus Store’s recent reopening after an extensive renovation. The renovation, which was completed this past summer, expanded the store; updated the interior space with new carpeting, lighting, fixtures and more; created a more open floor plan; and added a new glass entrance off of Forsyth Boulevard.

Washington University will test its emergency notification system, WUSTLAlerts, at approximately 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13. The WUSTLAlerts test will take place unless there is the potential for severe weather that day or some other emergency is occurring at that time. For the test, WUSTLAlerts will send emails to @wustl.edu addresses, text messages to cell phones and voice messages to cell phones.

Halfway through the WUSTL 2011 United Way campaign, the university community has raised approximately $450,000 toward its goal of $650,000 to support more than 170 United Way of Greater St. Louis agencies. These agencies — which offer an array of services to the St. Louis community — serve a large, diverse population of more than 1 million people each year in 16 counties in Missouri and Illinois, approximately one of every three in the St. Louis area.

It’s not easy being a Chicago Cubs fan. Just ask Chakravarthi Narasimhan, PhD, the Philip L. Siteman Professor of Marketing at Olin Business School. Though Narasimhan’s sports life may have more downs than ups, his professional life has been a grand slam. “Chak is a key member of the school’s senior faculty and has built an outstanding marketing group here at Olin,” says colleague Todd Milbourn, PhD.

Washington University Libraries present a book talk by Michael Sherberg, PhD, associate professor of Italian in Arts & Sciences, at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 5, in Olin Library, Ginkgo Reading Room, Level 1. Sherberg’s lecture — titled “Boethius in the Renaissance: What Recent Acquisitions Teach Us” — will discuss three 16th-century translations of Boethius’s influential 6th-century work, Consolation of Philosophy, and what the translations tell modern scholars about the politics and poetics of translation in the Renaissance.

Washington University Libraries and the St. Louis Poetry Center will present a program featuring the works of renowned American poet Elizabeth Bishop at 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 23, in Wilson Hall, Room 214, on Washington University’s Danforth Campus. A reception will follow in the Ginkgo Reading Room in the nearby Olin Library. The event is free and open to the public.

Gloria Lubowitz, president of the Woman’s Club of Washington University, talks to club members and other members of the WUSTL community during the club’s Fall Welcome Lunch at Harbison House Sept. 16. Woman’s Club members Risa Zwerling Wrighton hosted the luncheon to introduce women new to the university to the Woman’s Club. The club offers members opportunities to form friendships and grow intellectually through luncheons, lectures, tours and programs.