Author: Neil Schoenherr

Fred Ssewamala, professor at the Brown School, has received a $3.4 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to study the effectiveness of interventions in Uganda aimed at protecting adolescent girls against known HIV risk factors.

At the most basic level, prestige combat films, or PCFs, tell stories of U.S. soldiers fighting abroad in actual historical conflicts. Nearly every PCF presents the battlefield from the point of view of the individual soldier, frequently from the lowest rank: the grunt. Central characters in these films seldom rise above lieutenant. The PCF is generally not about officers and never about famous figures of military history—as were many war films made during the 1960s.

What’s the secret to unlocking artificial intelligence (AI) and making it ubiquitous in our everyday lives? The answer may lie with the most abundant animals on earth — insects. The behavioral adaptations of insects could help commercial organizations overcome a significant hurdle for AI adoption today: cost.

For the Sake of All, a Washington University in St. Louis-based initiative working to improve health equity for African-Americans in the St. Louis region, has received a $1.1 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to work within St. Louis Public Schools and the Normandy Schools Collaborative.

The School of Law at Washington University in St. Louis hosts a panel discussion Friday, Sept. 1, to address the NAACP travel advisory in Missouri. Participants include Gerald Early in Arts & Sciences; former Missouri governor Jay Nixon; and the law school’s Peggie Smith and Elizabeth Sepper.

Grand Canyon for Sale, by journalist Stephen Nash, is a wake-up call for anyone who cares about public lands, especially the U.S. national parks. In carefully reported detail, Nash describes the numerous threats faced by federally managed lands from organizations with various economic interests. Others have posed similar warnings, but Nash provides urgency to the argument by documenting how such threats are enhanced by climate change and may be aggravated by the apparent intentions of the Trump Administration.

The Brown School has been awarded a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to increase sustainability of evidence-based tobacco control programs and policies. Sarah Moreland-Russell, assistant professor of practice and senior scholar to the Clark-Fox Policy Institute, will serve as principal investigator.

In the wake of the Aug. 12 confrontations between protesters and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, some progressives are calling for legal restrictions on the display of the Nazi flag. These arguments are entirely understandable, but they often misapply existing First Amendment law, and they suppress free speech values that progressives — more than anyone else — should want to defend, says a constitutional law expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Should physicians be required to disclose their religious beliefs to patients? How should we think about institutional conscience in the health care setting? How should health care providers deal with families with religious objections to withdrawing treatment? These questions and more are tackled in a new book co-edited by an expert on health law at Washington University in St. Louis.

Constrained by post crisis regulatory limits, investment banks surviving as bank holding companies have curtailed their investment banking and other activities. At the same time, private equity firms—among them, Blackstone, KKR, Apollo and Carlyle—have grown massively and ventured into areas previously the domain of investment banks, with important effects.