Campus & Community

The Railway Exchange Building in downtown St. Louis is an icon, synonymous with Christmas lights, holiday cheer and civic pride. Yet since being vacated by Macy’s in 2013, the structure has sat largely empty. Now The Partnership for Downtown St. Louis and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts are partnering to explore adaptive reuse strategies for the 21-story high-rise.

A six-story concrete and steel structure that will be the skeleton of an energy-efficient, multidisciplinary research building under construction on the School of Medicine campus has been completed. The construction project, which began in summer 2013, has a June 2015 target date for completion.

Over the course of about 24 hours Sept. 22-23, four student athletes from Washington University in St. Louis were tabbed by national coaches’ organizations as “Athlete of the Week.” It’s an unprecedented honor in school history, one in which Athletics Director Josh Whitman calls “inspirational.” To put it into perspective, the university received only six such honors throughout the entire academic sports year in 2013-14.

High school students in the Washington University College Prep program reunited at Francis Field recently to cheer the Bears football team. The students, all high-achieving sophomores, spent two weeks living and learning on campus this summer and will return the next two two summers for three-week sessions.

Arts & Sciences faculty (from left) Jami L. Ake, PhD, John M. Doris, PhD, Mark Rollins, PhD, and Douglas L. Chalker, PhD, were recognized for their teaching and leadership during Arts & Sciences’ annual faculty reception this month. Ake and Chalker both received the Distinguished Teaching Award; Doris received the David Hadas Teaching Award; and Rollins received the Distinguished Leadership Award.

Graham Colditz, MD, DrPH, a disease-prevention expert at Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, will receive a national award for his contributions to cancer prevention research.

Sherrilyn Ifill, JD (left), president and director-general of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, shares a laugh with Kim Norwood, JD (center), professor of law at the School of Law, and Karen Tokarz, JD, the Charles Nagel Professor of Public Interest Law and Public Service and director of the Dispute Resolution Program, before Ifill’s Assembly Series talk Sept. 17 in Anheuser-Busch Hall’s Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom.

A film crew from NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corp., visited the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis last week to film for a series called “Cosmic Front HOTLINK” about the wonders of the universe. Here, they interview Ernst Zinner, PhD, research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences. He pioneered techniques to study tiny bits of matter from stars that died before the solar system was born.

Steven Fazzari, PhD, a leading scholar on the relationship between rising income inequality and macroeconomic trends in the United States, will be chair of the recently re-established Department of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, has announced.

UPDATE: Washington University in St. Louis will test its emergency communication system, WUSTLAlerts, at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 1, rather than Thursday, Sept. 25, as previously scheduled. The test will take place unless there is a potential for severe weather or an emergency is occurring. WUSTLAlerts will send emails to @wustl.edu addresses and text messages to cellphones.