Author: Talia Ogliore

Researchers from physics and chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis leveraged data from nuclear scattering experiments to make stringent constraints on how neutrons and protons arrange themselves in the nucleus. Their predictions are tightly connected to how large neutron stars grow and what elements are likely synthesized in neutron star mergers.

The Society for Economic Botany awarded Gayle J. Fritz, professor emerita of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, its 2020 Mary W. Klinger Book Award for “Feeding Cahokia.” The book emphasizes the importance of native crops that were domesticated by America’s first farmers long before corn became a staple food in what is now the U.S. Midwest.

Jonathan Barnes, assistant professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, was selected as one of 15 Young Investigators by the American Chemical Society’s Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering. The selection recognizes Barnes’ excellence in polymer research and marks him as an emerging leader in the field.

Biologist Rachel Penczykowski in Arts & Sciences conducted a series of elegant experiments that capture how pathogen strains naturally accumulate on plants over a growing season. Her findings, reported in Nature Ecology & Evolution, reveal the importance of understanding interactions among pathogens when developing strategies for maintaining healthy crop populations.

A new study finds that Earth’s water may have come from materials that were present in the inner solar system at the time the planet formed — instead of that water being delivered by far-reaching comets or asteroids. The research co-authored by physicist Lionel Vacher in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis is published Aug. 28 in Science.

Bradley Jolliff, the Scott Rudolph Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences and director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences, has been awarded the 2020 Eugene Shoemaker Distinguished Scientist Medal by NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, recognizing significant contributions to planetary science throughout his career.

It is not easy to conduct human milk research during a pandemic. Yet despite the consistent lack of quality evidence for transmission of viral RNA from breast milk, some leaders are pushing ahead by altering public health and clinical practice guidance, according to E.A. Quinn, associate professor of biological anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Richard Loomis, professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, won the American Chemical Society’s 2020 Saint Louis Section Award.

Carlos Botero, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, finds that parasitic birds living in more variable and unpredictable habitats tend to hedge their bets by laying eggs in the nests of a greater variety and number of hosts. The study is published Aug. 21 in Nature Communications.

The behavior of electrons determines the fundamental properties of any material, such as its ability to conduct electricity. Erik Henriksen, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, takes advantage of strange-but-true qualities of graphene to search for correlated motion of electrons.