Author: Kelly Wiese Niemeyer

The university will pause Friday, Sept. 11, to remember the lives lost in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The university and U.S. flags will be lowered to half-staff, and the chimes in Graham Chapel will toll at 9:28 a.m., the time the World Trade Center’s North Tower collapsed.

It’s time to get up and get moving. Washington University in St. Louis faculty, staff members, clinical fellows and postdoctoral appointees can sign up to participate in the next wellness challenge, WashU Moves. The program launches Sept. 2 and runs through Dec. 10, and each person’s goal is to take 10,000 steps, or roughly 5 miles, each day.

The Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital Pulmonary Hypertension Center, under the direction of Murali Chakinala, MD, associate professor of medicine, has received accreditation from the Pulmonary Hypertension Association as a Center for Comprehensive Care, the association’s highest level achievable.

William F. Tate, PhD, dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, received the 2015 Distinguished Contributions to Social Contexts in Education Research-Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Educational Research Association-Division G for his research on social and science policy.

Erika Pearce, PhD, associate professor of pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has received a four-year, $1.26 million grant from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, separately, a $500,000 grant for metabolism research.

Jason Purnell, PhD, assistant professor in the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named to the Peace & Justice Commission of the Archdiocese of St. Louis by Archbishop Robert J. Carlson. He also received the Good Scout Award from the Boy Scouts of America: Greater St. Louis Area Council.

Joshua Sommovilla, MD, a resident in the Department of Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has been awarded the 2015 Outstanding Resident Teaching Award by the Association for Surgical Education. He received the award at the association’s annual meeting this past spring in Seattle.

Tony Granillo, a student in the Sever Institute’s Master of Cyber Security Management program at Washington University in St. Louis, received a scholarship to attend the inaugural ISACA CSX North America Conference. 

Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, a PhD candidate in comparative literature in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction for her translation of Can Xue’s “The Last Lover” (Yale University Press, 2014) from Chinese to English.

Mary Dell Olin Pritzlaff, a trustee emerita of Washington University in St. Louis, died Saturday, July 18, 2015, surrounded by family at her home in Santa Barbara, Calif. She was 85.