Author: Talia Ogliore

Carl Bender, the Konneker Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Physics in Arts & Sciences, has received a Humboldt Research Award. The award is given to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.

Federico Ardila, professor of mathematics at San Francisco State University, will deliver the Loeb Undergraduate Lecture in Mathematics, “Using geometry to move robots quickly,” at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 17, in Brown Hall, Room 100, on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis.

Washington University in St. Louis announced that its SuperTIGER (Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder) instrument, which studies the origin of cosmic rays, successfully launched today from Williams Field at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

Brett Wick, professor of mathematics, and three other mathematicians from the U.S., France and Australia, received a Discovery Project award for their collaborative international project “Harmonic analysis: function spaces and partial differential equations.”

Jeffrey G. Catalano, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, has been appointed the next executive editor of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, the official journal of Geochemical Society and the Meteoritical Society. His term will begin Jan. 1. 

Brian E. Blank, associate professor of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, died of heart failure Sunday, Dec. 9, 2018, at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. He was 65.

Ten students are among representatives from nearly 200 countries gathered in Poland for COP24, the U.N. conference on climate change. This year’s meeting will focus on how to achieve climate goals set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

John E. McCarthy, chair and professor of mathematics and statistics at Washington University, was elected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. The society recognized McCarthy for his contributions to operator theory and functions of several complex variables.

Autophagy has a remarkable influence on a plant’s metabolism even under healthy growing conditions, according to new research led by Richard Vierstra in Arts & Sciences.

Even the youngest students are ready to learn about climate science, according to Michael Wysession, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences and executive director of the Teaching Center at Washington University in St. Louis.