Author: Susan Killenberg McGinn

Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, examines a Neandertal skull.New scientific evidence challenges a common perception that Neandertals — a close evolutionary relative to modern humans that lived 230,000 to 30,000 years ago — possessed exceptionally long faces. Instead, a report authored by Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, shows that modern humans are really the “odd man out” when it comes to facial lengths, which drop off dramatically compared with their ancestral predecessors.

Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis recognized the achievements of five of its alumni at a ceremony and reception May 16 in the Arts & Sciences Laboratory Science Building on campus.

Carl M. Bender, Ph.D., and Thomas A. Woolsey, M.D., professors at Washington University in St. Louis, have been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Bender and Woolsey are among 184 U.S. and Canadian Guggenheim fellows selected this year from more than 3,200 applicants for awards totaling $6,750,000. Guggenheim fellows, which include artists, scholars and scientists, are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

One holds a Nobel Prize; another 13 Gold Gloves. One has a performing arts center named after her; another has a star bearing his name embedded in the St. Louis Walk of Fame. From a former U.S. secretary of state to a former head of a university, the six notable people selected to receive honorary degrees from Washington University in St. Louis at its 142nd Commencement all stand out in their respective fields.

AlbrightA full transcript of Madeleine Albright’s address at Washington University’s 142nd Commencement

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Being honored May 16 will be William E. Cornelius, Dennis C. Dickerson Sr., Mark J. Ginsburg, Mark E. Mason and Susan Ekberg Stiritz.

Lewis the robotic photographerMay and June are prom, graduation and wedding months, times when the family camera gets a steaming workout. Computer scientists at Washington University in St. Louis can take that camera out of your designated photographer’s hands and perch it atop Lewis, a five-foot tall, 300-pound robot that wanders through a space taking pictures of people. Named after Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame (for his traveling ways), Lewis is the creation of William D. Smart, Ph.D., and Cindy M. Grimm, Ph.D., assistant professors of computer science at Washington University, and is considered to be the world’s first robotic photographer.

Kastor is editor of *The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation*.The challenges faced by today’s U.S. government officials in Iraq are plentiful. Having ejected the government of Saddam Hussein, U.S. representatives must now spearhead the organization of a new system led by Iraqis to meet the needs of their country’s multi-religious and multi-ethnic population. This effort comes at the bicentennial of America’s first effort to govern foreign peoples. Two hundred years ago — with the end of negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase in Paris on April 30, 1803 — a fledgling U.S. government faced similar circumstances and even greater challenges, according to Peter J. Kastor, Ph.D., assistant professor of history and American Culture Studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Valencius unearths a common theme among early settlers in *The Health of the Country*.Poring over stacks of yellowed aging letters and other documents from the 19th century while researching American western expansion, Conevery Bolton Valencius, Ph.D., an environmental historian at Washington University in St. Louis, noted a common theme. Assessments of the “sickliness” or “health” of land pervade settlers’ letters, journals, newspapers and literature from that time. Valencius says that the numerous references throughout 19th-century writings to “healthy country,” “sickly” countryside, or “salubrious” valleys reveal the importance settlers placed on the connections between their bodies and their land. One of the main criteria for choosing where to farm and where to raise a family for the early settlers was whether or not the area would be a healthy place to live.