Science & Technology

Washington University in St. Louis achieved a gold accreditation from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

Rita Parai, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, won a $450,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

For the second time this year, Chenyang Lu, an internationally recognized leader in cyber-physical systems, has received recognition for a trailblazing paper. The award recognizes his 2010 paper on using wireless sensor networks in a hospital environment.

Erik Herzog, a professor of biology, was installed as the Viktor Hamburger Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences. His talk was titled “For Whom the Bells Toll: Networked Circadian Clocks and Clock Watchers.”

Alexander Hatoum, a research assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences, won a five-year $897,120 award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Over the last year, a team of architects, medical professionals and engineers from Washington University in St. Louis and Chicago-based architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill have explored questions about building design and people’s health through interdisciplinary design studios and seminars. Now that research is bearing fruit. On Nov. 11, a new Smart Home for Occupational Therapy Healing — aka SMOOTH House — will break ground in St. Louis’ Delmar Maker District.

In Nature Communications, researchers in the laboratory of Robert Kranz, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, shared a new cryo-EM structure and proposed some common mechanisms of heme trafficking in the cell.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded researchers Ellen Fitzsimmons-Craft and Denise Wilfley a grant to help improve outcomes for eating disorders in adolescent girls.

A new multidisciplinary center focused on biomolecular condensates — distinct molecular communities that make up the building blocks of life — has launched at the McKelvey School of Engineering.

New measurements from Cygnus X-1, reported Nov. 3 in the journal Science, represent the first observations of a mass-accreting black hole from the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission, an international collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency. The lead author of the new study is physicist Henric Krawczynski in Arts & Sciences.