Campus & Community

Arts & Sciences honored seven alumni for their achievements, service and commitment to the liberal arts.

Penny Pennington, managing partner of Edward Jones, a St. Louis-based finanical services company, has been elected to serve as chair of the WashU Board of Trustees effective July 1. Pennington will be the first woman to hold the position.

Three physician-scientists at WashU Medicine — neurologists Suzanne Schindler and Christopher Smyser and otolaryngologist Sidharth Puram — have been recognized by one of the nation’s oldest and most respected medical honor societies.

After an EF3 tornado ripped a milewide path through St. Louis and St. Louis County, Amanda Kesler, a master of landscape architecture candidate in the WashU Sam Fox School, combined aerial data and firsthand observation to map tree canopy damage.

Goldwater Scholar and biology major Noah Kabbaj is on the front lines of research aimed at helping people overcome treatment-resistant mental health conditions, including severe depression. After graduating from WashU, Kabbaj plans to earn his PhD in neuroscience.

Ruiqi Wang is set to graduate from WashU McKelvey Engineering and next will work for Google the improve machine learning.

In celebration of Commencement, WashU Class Acts spotlights 2026 graduates who have engaged in meaningful research at WashU. They have created knowledge and mastered research skills — especially important at a time of funding cuts and public skepticism.

Nico Dosenbach, MD, PhD, is internationally recognized for his research in precision brain mapping and discovery of the network within the brain that links cognition with movement.

WashU and Sodexo teamed up to make it easy for students to donate extra meal points to help feed children in the St. Louis area.

In May, Ariel Hernandez-Leyva is set to achieve his goal of becoming a physician-scientist by earning a medical degree and a PhD in computational and systems biology from WashU Medicine. He is first author on a study — published in the prestigious journal Cell Metabolism — revealing that breath can carry clues to gut microbiome health, particularly among children.