Author: Gerry Everding

Washington University in St. Louis is re-establishing its sociology department after a nearly 25-year hiatus, Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, has announced.

Murray Weidenbaum, PhD, the Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences and honorary chairman of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, died Thursday, March 20, 2014, in St. Louis. He was 87.

“If these two studies are really correct, what people in general are trying to do” to get and stay thin “might be completely wrong in terms of maintaining health and even longevity,” suggests WUSTL microbiologist Shin-ichiro Imai (pictured) in a Science magazine article on new dietary research. This story and more in today’s roundup.

Daniel Giuffra, a freshman and Annika Rodriguez Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis, discussed his anti-smoking work as part of a recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration news conference announcing a new effort to curb tobacco use among at-risk youth.

Five-thousand years before it was immortalized in a British nursery rhyme, the cat that caught the rat that ate the malt was doing just fine living alongside farmers in the ancient Chinese village of Quanhucun, a forthcoming study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has confirmed.

A new study by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, University of California, Los Angeles, and Indiana University found that listeners can accurately determine the relative heights of speakers just by listening to them talk. The key clue may be contained in a particular type of sound produced in the lower airways of the lungs, known as a subglottal resonance.

For U.S. veteran Robbie Garrison, ­attending University College tuition-free was a dream come true. “One of my goals was to attend Washington University,” said Garrison, a first-generation college student. “I was not sure how I would afford it, until I learned about the Yellow Ribbon Program.”

Two decades of research by Rumi Kato Price, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine, shows reason for optimism about the future of returning soldiers. “The notion that our soldiers deployed to conflict regions come back ‘broken’ is a one-sided story in the media,” says Price, whose research has explored trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicide among American military service members and veterans.

John H. Kautsky, professor emeritus of political science in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013. He was 91.

Phillip B. Williams, a student in the Master of Fine Arts creative writing program at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of five young poets awarded a $15,000 scholarship from the Poetry Foundation and Poetry Magazine.