Author: Ken Duenke

The National Collegiate Scouting Association (NCSA) announced its fifth annual Collegiate Power Rankings Wednesday, Aug. 15, and Washington University finished in 12th place on the list of top academic and athletic colleges and universities in the country. The list includes all schools at the NCAA Division I, II and III levels. Washington University also finished […]

Daniel R. Mandelker, J.D., the Howard A. Stamper Professor of Law, received the American Bar Association’s prestigious Daniel J. Curtin Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Fall 2007 Assembly Series parts with some of the traditions of the 54-year-old lecture series, while maintaining its mission of presenting to the Washington University community some of the most distinctive and vibrant voices of the day.

D. Ashley Hill, assistant professor of pathology and immunology, will receive a two-year grant from The Hope Street Kids, a program that supports and promotes research into pediatric tumors. The program will provide $70,000 over the next two years to support Hill’s search for the genetic causes of pleuropulmonary blastoma (PPB), a rare childhood lung tumor originally identified by Hill’s mentor at Washington University, Louis P. “Pepper” Dehner, professor of pathology and immunology and of pathology in pediatrics.

Samuel R. Bagenstos, J.D., professor of law, has been appointed associate dean for research and faculty development at the School of Law, effective July 1, according to Kent Syverud, dean and the Ethan A.H. Shepley University Professor at the School of Law.

David K. Levine, Ph.D., has been named the inaugural holder of the John H. Biggs Distinguished Professorship in Economics in Arts & Sciences.

Patricia Gregory has been named assistant vice chancellor of medical corporate and foundation relations, and David Shearrer has been named executive director of development for clinical programs.

The School of Medicine has joined the Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium (MMRC), an organization of 13 leading U.S. academic centers designed to speed the development of new myeloma therapies. Washington University School of Medicine serves as a major center for multiple myeloma treatment and research in the St. Louis area.

Mice developed in the laboratory of Zhou-Feng Chen don’t experience relief from pain when given opiate drugs such as morphine.For the first time, pain researchers at the School of Medicine have shown that it’s possible to separate the good effects of opiate drugs such as morphine (pain relief) from the unwanted side effects of those drugs (tolerance, abuse and addiction). The investigators, led by Zhou-Feng Chen, Ph.D., associate professor of anesthesiology, psychiatry and molecular biology and pharmacology, report their results online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that opiates like morphine don’t relieve pain as well in mice genetically engineered to lack neurons that produce a neurotransmitter called serotonin in the central nervous system.

Researchers hoping to better understand the development of the infant brain have long been stymied by a formidable obstacle: babies just don’t want to sit still for brain scans. “There have been some studies that obtained brain scans of infants while they were napping or sedated, but what we’d really like to do is to scan their brains when they’re sitting on a parent’s lap, seeing new things, hearing new words and interacting with the environment,” says Joseph Culver, Ph.D., assistant professor of radiology at the School of Medicine.