Author: Talia Ogliore

Meredith Jackrel, in Arts & Sciences, studies protein misfolding and how it leads to disease. She is collaborating with Jai Rudra at the McKelvey School of Engineering to develop amyloid-inspired vaccine technologies specifically tailored for seniors. The approach could be relevant to COVID-19 as the elderly are particularly susceptible to its severe complications.

Jeff Catalano, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, was elected a fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America. The honor recognizes Catalano’s outstanding contributions to the advancement of the fields of mineralogy, crystallography, geochemistry and petrology.

A new study from the northern Rockies explores the role of fire in the finely tuned dance between plants and their pollinators. The research from biologists including Jonathan Myers in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis is published Nov. 25 in the Journal of Ecology.

Roger Jay Phillips, professor emeritus of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences and former director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Nov. 19 in Longmont, Colo., after suffering from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 80.

Research from Washington University in St. Louis helps flesh out the origin story for the so-called “lost crops” of the Midwest and Northeast. These plants that may have fed as many Indigenous people as maize, but until the 1930s had been lost to history. Natalie Mueller, assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, shares evidence that bison were “co-creators” — along with Indigenous peoples — of landscapes of disturbance that gave rise to greater diversity and more agricultural opportunities.

Saori Pastore, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, helps explain what happens in nuclei when they decay, scatter among each other or come into contact with subatomic particles. Her recent paper, “Weak Transitions in Light Nuclei,” published in Frontiers in Physics, contributes to a body of increasingly accurate, descriptive calculations of nuclear structure and reactions.

A fossil discovery in South Africa suggests that P. robustus evolved rapidly during a turbulent period of local climate change about 2 million years ago, resulting in anatomical changes that previously were attributed to sex. An international research team including anthropologists at Washington University in St. Louis reported their discovery in Nature Ecology & Evolution on Nov. 9.

Cereal grains — including wheat, rice, barley and millet — are the most important food sources in the world today. Focusing on the ancient history of staple cereals in China, archaeologist Xinyi Liu in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis shows how the timing of the translocation of novel food crops reflects a range of choices that communities made — sometimes driven by ecological pressure and sometimes by social conditions or ‘culinary conservatism.’

Li Yang, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, conducted research with black phosphorus — a material with a thickness of just a few atomic layers — in a study that is hailed as a milestone of the past 50 years by the Physical Review B, an academic journal of the American Physical Society.

Scaled survivors of the coldest night in south Florida’s recent history all converged on the same new, lower limit of thermal tolerance, regardless of their species’ previous ability to withstand cold. Biologist James Stroud in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis led the team that reported the findings in the journal Biology Letters.