Author: Neil Schoenherr

The Office of Human Resources has released the Fall 2006 edition of It’s Your Benefit, highlighting benefits information for all WUSTL employees.

Rhythms for Rebuilding is an a cappella benefit concert for Gulf Coast rebuilding, sponsored by Project SOS, the Office of Community Service and the WUSTL a cappella community. The concert will be held at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 12 in Graham Chapel. All proceeds will benefit Common Ground, a New Orleans organization working to rebuild minority and disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The Board of Trustees of Washington University in St. Louis met Oct. 6 to discuss strategic planning, according to Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. Three topics were considered: 1.) societal challenges that the University should address in the future, 2.) University constituencies and how well they are being served, and 3.) undergraduate enrollment issues.

With a competition to design a Career Center video advertisement available on the popular Web site YouTube.com, the center’s staff members discovered they could draw students into the process of connecting with good career advice.

The Office of Government and Community Relations wants to remind members of the Washington University community that the voter registration deadline is approaching. To be eligible to vote in Missouri’s upcoming November election, you must be registered by Wednesday, Oct.11, 2006. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006.

The Cuilles and the Torreses are the eighth and ninth families, respectively, to accept the University’s invitation to live among students rent-free on campus.

Photo by David Kilper

At its annual meeting this summer in Chiang Mai, Thailand, the Society for Economic Botany honored Memory Elvin-Lewis, Ph.D., adjunct professor of Microbiology and Ethnobotany at the School of Medicine; and Walter H. Lewis, Ph.D., professor emeritus of biology in Arts & Sciences “in recognition of outstanding achievement, research, and service to the field of economic botany.”

Modern Humans may have been the divergent branch.Could it be that in the great evolutionary “family tree,” it is we Modern Humans, not the brow-ridged, large-nosed Neandertals, who are the odd uncle out? New research published in the August, 2006 journal Current Anthropology by Neandertal and early modern human expert, Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, suggests that rather than the standard straight line from chimps to early humans to us with Neandertals off on a side graph, it’s equally valid, perhaps more valid based on the fossil record, that the line should extend from the common ancestor to the Neandertals, and Modern Humans should be the branch off that. More…

In light of two recent cases at Wheaton College in Illinois, Student Health Services is recommending that students review their mumps immunization history to make certain that they have received two doses of MMR vaccine or have had a blood test that indicates mumps immunity.