Newsroom Stories

Brian Evenson — whose intensely macabre yet darkly comic and subtly philosophical novels and stories led American Book Review to praise him as “essentially our poet laureate of violence” — will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11, for The Writing Program in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences.

Before watching other champions on television Super Bowl Sunday, come celebrate our champions at 3 p.m. at the WU Athletic Complex. The 2009 NCAA Division III women’s volleyball national championship team will be honored, along with the 2009 NCAA Division III national runner-up women’s soccer team.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a protein made by the malaria parasite that is essential to its ability to take over human red blood cells. “Without this protein … the infectious process stops,” says Dan Goldberg, M.D.

Experts from the St. Louis Federal Reserve and around the country will be on the Washington University campus Friday, Feb. 5, to discuss the Federal Reserve’s role during the recent recession and future directions for policy. The free public conference, “Monetary Policy Amid Economic Turbulence,” begins at 2:30 p.m. in the Bryan Cave Moot Court Room, Anheuser-Busch Hall.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit will hold a special session from 9-11 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 9, in the School of Law’s Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom in Anheuser-Busch Hall. The public is invited to hear three appeals cases related to a class action suit regarding organic food labeling; claims of false arrest, slander and malicious prosecution; and a dispute over a fee agreement between two law firms.

Making flu shots mandatory in 2008 dramatically increased the vaccination rate among St. Louis-based BJC HealthCare’s nearly 26,000 employees to more than 98 percent, according to a study led by the School of Medicine and now online in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Don’t be fooled by a company’s recent attempt to market smokeless tobacco as “harmless,” says Douglas Luke, Ph.D., professor and director of the Center for Tobacco Policy Research at the Brown School. “Part of what we’re seeing here is the tobacco industry trying to position smokeless tobacco products so that they either do not come under the new Food and Drug Administration regulations or they come under weaker regulations,” Luke says.

Saxophonist Jason Swagler opens the spring Jazz at Holmes Series at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 4. The series, which was launched in 1996, features professional jazz musicians from around St. Louis and abroad performing in Holmes Lounge — a casual, coffeehouse-style setting — most Thursday evenings throughout the fall and spring semesters. 

Steven L. Teitelbaum, M.D., has been awarded a $1.71 million MERIT award from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

Creativity at the World Economic Forum? That may seem like a bit of stretch. But according to Keith Sawyer, PhD, associate professor of education and of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, the two go hand-in-hand. Sawyer moderated two sessions at last month’s forum in Davos, Switzerland.